Steamboats On The Danube - River Gunboats On The Danube

River Gunboats On The Danube

The Austrian navy built powerful river monitors to patrol the Danube River from 1870-1918. The first were the Maros and Leitha It had 3 generations of patrol boats. The siege of Belgrade in 1917 was conducted with gunboats. After the loss of the empire in the First World War, some of the vessels were tranfered to Yugoslav ownership. The Roumanians also had river patrol boats. The Roumanian Danube Flotilla was more modern, and consisted of four river monitors (Lascăr Catargiu, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Ion C. Brătianu and Alexandru Lahovari) and eight British-built torpedo boats. The four river monitors were built in Italy during 1907-1907 and assembled at Galați. They were armed with three 12-cm cannons each. The British torpedo boats from the Căpitan Nicolae Lascăr Bogdan class were built during 1906-1907 and weighed 50tons each. There were also approximately six older gunboats used for border patrol, minelayers and other auxiliary ships used for transport or supply.] The Romanian Navy had a secondary role during World War I and only had light losses. The river monitors participated in the defense of Tutrakan and later secured the flank of the Romanian and Russian defenders in Dobrudja. The main success of the war was the mining of an Austro-Hungarian river monitor.

See SMS Leitha (1871)