‘Head Straight for the Enemy and Sink Him’

In the century between the fall of Napoleon and the opening guns of World War I, an alluring force was reconfiguring the European map: cultural nationalism—the idea that people of shared language and traditions, though divided by political borders, in reality form their own cohesive national identity.

This concept of nationhood took root on the Italian Peninsula, and through a series of revolutions, a unified Italy began to coalesce from the disparate city-states, kingdoms, and foreign-controlled chunks of territory that had long carved up the land. By the 1860s, the Italy we know today was almost recognizable. But an important jigsaw-puzzle piece was still missing: Venice and its surrounding territory, held in the firm grip of Austria.

To wrest it from its powerful overlord was a tall order for the fledgling Kingdom of Italy. But Austria happened to be at war with Prussia, so Italy seized the moment, opportunistically joining the fight on the Prussian side—not for any Prussian cause, but for the winning of coveted Venezia.

Unfortunately, just four days after the declaration of war, Italian forces were soundly thrashed by the Austrians and sent packing at the Battle of Custoza on 24 June 1866. Italy urgently needed a victory to make up for that terrible start—and a naval victory would fill the bill quite handsomely. Indeed, Italian naval forces did enjoy numerical superiority over the Austrian fleet assembled on the opposite shore of the Adriatic Sea.

And it was there, four and a half years after the world’s first clash between ironclad ships at the Battle of Hampton Roads, that the first clash between ironclad fleets in history would ensue, at the 20 July 1866 Battle of Lissa.

The Italian Adriatic fleet boasted 12 ironclads; the Austrians had seven. The Italians also outnumbered the Austrians in wooden-hulled vessels. In every salient factor, the Italians had the advantage—except, perhaps, the most important one: the quality of their commanders.

The Italian commander-in-chief, the dithering, risk-averse Admiral Count Carlo Pellion di Persano, had a respectable service record, but “the advance of years had weakened all the springs of action in him,” as historian H. W. Wilson put it. “Napoleon has said that, in war, nothing is worse than indecision, and this was Persano’s dominant characteristic.”

Conversely, the Austrian commander-in-chief, Rear Admiral Baron Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, was a man of action for whom material advantages were not the make-or-break factor. He was not cowed by the fact he had an inferior fleet in both ship numbers and firepower; his tactical intentions came down to one word: attack.

He got his chance when Admiral Persano—who’d been nudged, cajoled, then threatened with removal if he didn’t take the fight to the enemy—grudgingly led his fleet across the Adriatic to attack the Austrian garrison on the island of Lissa. Persano’s forces ineffectually launched their assault and got bogged down in a snarled attempt to land troops. Telegraphs out of Lissa alerted Austrian fleet headquarters up the coast at Pola about the naval attack going on. Rear Admiral Tegetthoff made his move.

As his flagship, the ironclad Erzherzog Ferdinand Max, joined his assembling fleet, Tegetthoff was met by sounds of the Austrian national anthem being played and the roaring cheers of all the crews up in the rigging of their ships. He had been putting them through rigorous training drills in gunnery and maneuver, and they were raring to go. After a rough overnight passage headlong into the teeth of a raw sou’easter blowing nasty weather straight up the Adriatic, Tegetthoff and co. arrived at the approaches to Lissa, already in formation as they came through drizzle and the thick morning mist.

Their formation looked like three arrows lined up one behind the other. The front wedge was made up of the seven Austrian ironclads, with the Ferdinand Max at the point of the arrow. The second wedge consisted of the wooden-hulled warships—the ship-of-the-line Kaiser at the arrow point plus five frigates. Coming up in the third “V” were gunboats and armed merchantmen. An Italian scouting vessel spied the enemy at daybreak and steamed off flying the urgent signal flag: “Suspicious ships in sight.”

Persano, mired in the operations around Lissa, shrugged off the news; maybe they were just fishermen. As the morning rose and the clouds cleared, he realized his mistake and scrambled to prepare his ironclads for battle. They steamed out in a line drawn before the enemy formation.

Then, bizarrely, Persano suddenly decided to switch flagships—transporting himself from the Re d’Italia to the just-arrived Affondatore—a London-built twin-turreted ironclad ram for which the admiral had been impatiently waiting. Switching flagships was one thing; not informing his captains of the switch was inexplicable. Throughout the battle, his commanders would continue to look to the Re d’Italia for orders, with predictably anarchic results.

Compounding the misstep was the fact that the switch had taken precious time and had created a gap in the Italian line—a gap that Tegetthoff was happy to exploit. He ordered his ironclads: “Head straight for the enemy and sink him.”

Fierce firing greeted them as they plowed through the gap, and one of the Austrian captains was decapitated—but they had broken the Italian line. And as they spilled through, some of the Austrian ironclads turned to port to attack the cut-off Italian ships, and others turned to starboard to attack the rest.

Tegetthoff had set out to ram the enemy, and this he proceeded to do, all the while pummeling relentlessly with close-range gunfire. Twice the Ferdinand Max rammed the Re d’Italia, busting her open below the waterline and sinking her. Next, the Ferdinand Max rammed the Palestro, sidelining her, blazing and soon exploding.

Austria’s wooden-hulled warships in the second line were holding their own as well. At one point the Kaiser fended off four ironclads at once and even managed to ram one of them, crippling herself in the process but staying afloat. After about 90 minutes, the clash had ended—a remarkable victory enabled by aggressive fighting spirit on the one side and debilitating indecisiveness on the other.

Ultimately, the outcome of the battle was eclipsed by the outcome of the war: Prussian forces were victorious on land, and Venezia eventually became part of Italy. But the fight at Lissa would exert great influence on naval strategy, tactics, and ship design for years to come.

“The tactical and strategical lessons to be drawn from the Battle of Lissa caused many arguments between advocates of ramming and those of gunfire,” observed the French naval historian Jacques Mordal. “But the truth of the matter was that, once again, victory had gone to the bravest and most daring.”