Dumbfounded Austrians
There was a mist on the sea. It was after midnight when they crawled in toward the coast. It was in December, and they could just about make out the white city of Trieste. The two boats stole toward the harbor. One of the chief problems of Rizzo was that of the huge steel cables attached to the nets; but these he managed to cut apart, thus making his way through the nets.
They came nearer the harbor. It is an affair of three piers, making two channels. These channels were closed by booms and nets. Mines were linked to the piers by great steel hawsers.
The boats crept up to one pier. Rizzo climbed up and took in the situation. There was nobody on that pier. On the middle pier, however, was a guardroom. There could be heard the sound of voices in that room, and the barking of dogs, and the monotonous rhythms of the sentry patrolling the middle pier.
“Lieutenant Rizzo,” Percival Gibbon wrote to the New York Times, “crawled back and gave the order, and up came his men, crawling on hands and knees over the concrete, passing the big cutting tools from hand to hand, groping their way to the cables. Some set to work to cut them, while two men scanned the shore lest some sentry should arrive.
“The cutting instruments worked well. It needed only a strong jar to set the mines exploding, but the cutters bit their way through strand after strand of twisted steel wire. Three cables above water were severed without trouble; the five more below; water were grappled and hauled to the surface and cut in their turn.
“At last the weight of the net and its attachments tore the last steel strands asunder, the whole great cobweb of metal and explosives sank, and the harbor lay open. Rizzo and his men crawled back to their boats. Those boats moved like shadows toward the Wien and the Monarch. Rizzo backed off till he had his enemy at 150 yards. His second boat, commanded by the old petty officer, shifted out upon his beam to get a line which cleared the Wien’s bow and commanded the Monarch’s great steel flank. Rizzo raised his arm in that gloom and saw the answering gesture of the petty officer. It was the moment to let her go. In a second four long steel devils were sliding through the water for the enemy.
“A roar, a blast of flame, a waterspout raining on them, and a second roar as the Monarch, too, got her dose.
“A searchlight flashed out from the Wien and sawed at the darkness. A scream sounded over the water: Wer da? (Who’s there?) There were shoutings and stampings along the deck of the wounded ship, searchlights waking along the shore and on the breakwaters, and anti-aircraft guns arousing everywhere. No one in Trieste knew whence the attack had come, whether from air or sea. The sky was festooned with bursting shell, while the ships in the harbor opened with their guns toward the harbor mouth, shelling the mist of the Adriatic at random. By the light of that furious illumination the Italian sailors saw the great bulk of the Wien listing toward them.
“By this time they were making for the harbor mouth. Shells spouted all around them, but not one hit them, and both boats saw before they left that last subsidence, that wriggle and resignation with which a great ship goes under.”