The Ersatz Monarch class (also informally known as the Improved Tegetthoff class) was a class of four dreadnought battleships which were intended to be built between 1914 and 1919 for the Austro-Hungarian Navy (). Design work on a class of battleships to succeed the and replace the aging began in 1911. After going through several different design proposals, Anton Haus, Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, secured passage of a naval expansion program through the Austro-Hungarian government to fund the construction of the battleships in April 1914.
Work on the first battleship was scheduled to begin a few months later, with the final ship was expected to be launched in mid-1919. However, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June halted work just days before the keel of the first ship in the class was scheduled to be laid down. With the start of World War I a month later, construction on the ships was postponed until September, when the war with Serbia was expected to be over. The Hungarian government attempted to cancel the ships in October, but it was agreed in February 1915 that any work on the battleships would be indefinitely suspended until the end of the war. The ships were eventually canceled in 1917 as the war entered its third year, although some of the guns ordered for them were completed and saw service.
Background
On 22 February 1913, Rudolf Montecuccoli retired as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy () and Chief of the Naval Section of the War Ministry (). His successor was Admiral Anton Haus, who inherited an Austro-Hungarian Navy which had grown to be the sixth-largest navy in Europe and the eighth-largest navy in the world. At the time of Haus' promotion, it was approaching its goal of 16 battleships, which Montecuccoli had outlined in a memorandum to Emperor Franz Joseph I in January 1909. However, this number included three obsolete 20-year-old "battleships" of the , which had been long since relegated to the role of coastal defense ships. By 1913, Austria-Hungary's latest class of battleships, the , were nearing completion and each ship was almost four times the size of the Monarch class.
The need to replace the aging Monarch-class ships had presented itself prior to Haus' promotion of a new class. In October 1912, Montecuccoli had petitioned for two dreadnought battleships to succeed the Monarch class. In March 1913, Carl von Bardolff, Chief-of-Staff to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, suggested to Haus that he explore the option of constructing a "second dreadnought division". Bardolff was acting on Franz Ferdinand's orders, who had a keen interest in expanding the navy since being named an admiral in 1902. Ferdinand's plan was for this new class of dreadnoughts to replace the Monarch class, and he wished to have the new class laid down as soon as possible in order to keep Austria-Hungary's shipyards busy with new construction contracts. Like the Tegetthoff class before, several major shipbuilding enterprises in Austria-Hungary such as the Witkowitz Ironworks, the Škoda Works, Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino, and the Creditanstalt Bank, all offered to begin construction on a new class dreadnoughts at their own financial risk before any budget from the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments passed the additional funds necessary to pay for the new ships. By the spring of 1913, Ferdinand and Bardolff had also obtained bank loans to fund the project on behalf of the navy until a formal budget could be passed.
Proposals The construction of the Tegetthoff-class battleships had already begun in 1910 when Škoda made the first of many attempts to obtain approval for a new generation of superdreadnoughts to replace the aging Monarch-class ships. The original proposal, laid forth on 18 April 1911, consisted of a class of ships which would contain guns with three guns each in two superimposed turrets.
The Austro-Hungarian Naval Technical Committee ( (MTK)) later submitted three proposals by naval architect Franz Pitzinger, Constructor General () of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, on the general characteristics of the new class in December 1911. The first of the three proposals called for a battleship with guns. A later proposal had the new class displacing and equipped with guns. The last proposal had the battleship weighing as much as . The final decision on the size and number of the main guns was to be a modified and slightly larger version of the original proposal by Škoda, with the main turrets to be equipped with 35-centimeter guns. The final decision for the main turrets' caliber was influenced by the Imperial German Navy, which had adopted this caliber on its new s.
By January 1913, the MTK delivered its first official proposal for the new Ersatz Monarch-class battleships. The committee decided to choose the largest of the three initial proposals, with each ship displacing roughly . The battleships were to be armed with a total of ten 35-centimeter, eighteen and twenty-two guns. It took another year and a half for Haus to secure the necessary funding and for this final design to be formally approved in July 1914.
Funding
Haus, not wishing to begin his tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy by circumventing the Austro-Hungarian government for funding, refused to begin construction on any new class of dreadnoughts before a budget was passed by the Austrian Reichsrat and Hungarian Diet. Haus' proposal for a naval expansion met immediate opposition in Hungary. The suggestion that construction begin before the Austro-Hungarian government had an opportunity to approve any new budget led to Hungarian Prime Minister László Lukács threatening to resign. The lack of a Hungarian government to approve any budget had delayed construction on the Tegetthoff class in 1909 when Sándor Wekerle's government in Budapest collapsed. Not wishing to repeat the same sort of budget crisis which had left those ships without any formal governmental approval for a year, Haus chose not to include plans for a new class of battleships in his 1914 budget proposal to the Austrian and Hungarian parliaments. In October 1913 however, Haus did obtain support from the Austro-Hungarian Ministerial Council to construct four dreadnoughts to replace the three Monarch-class ships, as well as , Austria-Hungary's oldest pre-dreadnought battleship. Haus' entire naval construction program was estimated cost over 420 million Kronen, and it included the construction of six destroyers, three cruisers, and four dreadnought battleships.
Securing the necessary funding for the battleships was made easier as Lukács's government had fallen in June 1913. Lukács was succeeded as prime minister by István Tisza, who had previously secured passage of the 1910 and 1911 naval budgets to authorize construction of the Tegetthoff class. Tisza had done this after being promised that the contract to construct one ship from the class would be awarded to the Ganz-Danubius shipyard in Hungarian Fiume. Since the negotiations over funding for the Tegetthoffs, Tisza had become even more committed to the cause of Austro-Hungarian naval expansion. When the Austrian and Hungarian delegations to the Ministerial Council met in Vienna at the end of 1913 to pass a budget for the first six months of 1914, proponents of the project used the occasion to rally support for the battleships. Albert von Mühlwerth, a German member of the Reichsrat from Bohemia, made the justification that expanding and modernizing the Austro-Hungarian Navy was necessary in order to replace the obsolete Monarch class; stating, "If my coat is old and threadbare, I buy myself a new one...it is the same with warships." These efforts were made even though Haus had no plans to submit any proposal to obtain funding for the proposed ships until the next year.
Passage of the 1915–1919 naval program
When the reconvened session opened in the Hungarian capital in early 1914, Haus made his formal proposal for funding the 1915–1919 naval program. His project was to cost between 426.8 and 427.8 million Kronen, and was to be spaced out over a period of five years. The Hungarians, led by Tisza, supported the proposal after Haus had promised that six destroyers, two river monitors, and two of the four dreadnoughts in the expansion program would be constructed in Fiume, much like the battleship Szent István. As with past budgets approving large increases in naval funds, Austria's Social Democratic Party opposed the budget. Karl Leuthner, a Social Democrat from Lower Austria and editor of the party's newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, criticized the budget as fiscally irresponsible and stated that the ships of the Ersatz Monarch class would be launched "into the ocean of the Austrian state debt." The Social Democrats were joined in opposition by the Young Czech Party, which had been supportive of constructing the previous Tegetthoff-class battleships. Karel Kramář, leader of the party, stated that while he had "a certain partiality for the navy", his party was opposed to many of the pro-German arguments being presented to justify the ships. Many German nationalists from Austria had voiced their support for the battleships' construction on the grounds that their existence made Austria-Hungary's alliance with Germany more powerful. Heinrich von Lützow, a member of the Austrian House of Lords and former Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Italy, went so far as to argue that "every supporter of the Triple Alliance...must vote for the strengthening of our navy." Unlike previous battleships, the Ersatz Monarch class were ordered at a time when relations between Austria-Hungary and Italy appeared to be improving. Austria-Hungary and Italy had both signed a renewed naval agreement in the summer of 1913 to coordinate their efforts in the event of a hypothetical war between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. Thus when the time came for the Austro-Hungarian government to debate the funding and approval for a new class of battleships, the role Italy played in these discussions was not one of being a potential enemy, but rather it was expected that Italy would remain an ally of Austria-Hungary in any naval operations in the Mediterranean Sea against France and Russia, and that a new class of battleships was necessary to help maintain Austria-Hungary's relationship with its Italian allies. Russia now took the place of Austria-Hungary's main naval opponent in the event of a war, and the Ersatz Monarch class were thus intended to counter any potential Russian fleets operating south of the Dardanelles.