Comments by "" (@VersusARCH) on "RHS Hydra - Guide 244" video.

  1. During the 1st Balkan War, after the Serbian army took what is now North Macedonia from the Ottomans it decided to take its allotted (per prewar allied agreements) Ottoman north of Albania. Due to poor roads and railroad network there it decided to do so with a shipborne invasion, chartering the necesary ships from the Greek government with a rate of 1000 dinars per ship per day to take its troops from the as of recently Greek port of Salonika (which was close to where its troops that took North Macedonia were) to Albanian ports and supply them thereafter. The profit-minded Greeks, naturally picked the ships on the small side for the task and it went on. Meanwhile the Ottoman navy, bottled down in the Dardanelles by the Greek naval blockade decided to send their fast protected cruiser Hamidiye to run the blockade and raid the Greek sea lanes, hoping to lure the Giorgios Avereroff to chase her which would in turn enable the main Ottoman fleet to defeat the Hydras and the rest of the Greek fleet and to break the blockade, but the Greek naval command initially decided not to send anything after Hamidiye. However, after Hamidiye managed to catch a group of unprotected Greek ships offloading Serbian troops in the Albanian port of San Giovani di Medua and sink and damage several causing more than 150 Serbian dead (and it would have been worse had two Serbian artillery NCOs not set up their mountain guns on the deck of their Greek transport ship Trifimia and fired back, prompting Hamidiye to open the range and lose accuracy), the Serbian high command and government complained bitterly to the Greeks about the lack of naval escort. The Greeks then detatched the Psara (which was too slow to catch Hamidiye) and 3 destroyers to escort the subsequent Serbian troop convoys which it performed successfully.
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  2. At the time these three were ordered Yamato was a small corvette rather than the 60,000+ t superbattleship.
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  3. Psara, not Zara.
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