 Malinska photographed in 1939 | |
| Class overview | |
|---|---|
| Builders | Jadranska Brodogradilišta, Kraljevica, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Kingdom of Yugoslavia |
| Operators | |
| Built | 1920–1931 |
| In commission | 1920–1963 |
| Planned | 14 |
| Completed | 8 |
| Cancelled | 6 |
| Lost | 5 |
| Retired | 3 |
| General characteristics | |
| Displacement | 128–145 t (126–143 long tons) (full load) |
| Length | 31.8 m (104 ft) (oa) |
| Beam | 6.52 m (21.4 ft) |
| Draught | 1.4–1.7 m (4 ft 7 in – 5 ft 7 in) |
| Installed power |
|
| Propulsion | 2 shafts; 2 × triple-expansion steam engines |
| Speed | 9–11 kn (17–20 km/h; 10–13 mph) |
| Complement | 29 |
| Armament |
|
The Albona class were mine warfare ships used by the Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy) and Royal Yugoslav Navy (Serbo-Croatian Latin: Kraljevska mornarica; KM). Fourteen ships were originally laid down between 1917 and 1918 for the Austro-Hungarian Navy as the MT.130 class. However, the end of World War I and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary left them incomplete until 1920, when three ships were finished for the Regia Marina. These ships were armed with two 76 mm (3 in) guns. An additional five ships were completed for the KM in 1931 as the Malinska or Marjan class, and were armed with a single 66 mm (2.6 in). All of the completed ships could carry 24 to 39 naval mines. The remaining ships were never completed.
The five ships in KM service were captured by Italian forces during the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and commissioned in the Regia Marina as the Arbe class, and were re-armed with two 76 mm guns. They were involved in some operations against the Yugoslav Partisans along the Dalmatian coast. Following the Italian surrender in September 1943, the three Albona-class ships were captured by German forces with all three being lost or scuttled later in the war. Of the five former KM ships, one was seized and operated by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) until it was lost. Another was captured but transferred to the navy of the German fascist puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, and scuttled by the Germans towards the end of the war. The remaining three were returned to the KM-in-exile at Malta in late 1943 and swept for mines around Malta until transferred to the new Yugoslav Navy (Serbo-Croatian Latin: Jugoslavenska ratna mornarica; JRM) in August 1945.
After the war, the three ships were commissioned into the JRM and their designations were changed several times. In October 1946, two of them were involved in the Corfu Channel incident, an early clash in the developing Cold War, when they laid mines in the Straits of Corfu at the request of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. The undeclared minefield damaged two British destroyers, killing 44 men and injuring another 42. The incident resulted in a case before the International Court of Justice and a fifty-year diplomatic freeze between Albania and the UK, and Yugoslavia never conceded that its ships had laid the mines. The three remaining ships were stricken in 1962 and 1963.