Sava-class river monitor

The Sava-class river monitors were built for the Austro-Hungarian Navy during the mid-1910s. The two ships of the class were assigned to the Danube Flotilla and participated in World War I. The ships survived the war and were transferred to Romania and the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) as reparations.

Description and construction
The ships had an overall length of 62 m, a beam of 10.3 m, and a normal draught of 1.3 m. They displaced 580 t, and their crew consisted of 91 officers and enlisted men. The Sava-class ships were powered by two triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one shaft, using steam generated by two Yarrow boilers driving. The engines were rated at 1750 ihp and were designed to reach a top speed of 13.5 kn. They carried 75 LT of fuel oil.

The main armament of the Sava-class river monitors was a pair of 120 mm L/45 guns in a single turret forward of the conning tower and a pair of 120 mm L/10 howitzers in the rear turret. They also mounted a pair of 66 mm L/26 anti-aircraft guns, two 47 mm L/44 guns, and seven machine guns. The maximum range of her Škoda 120 mm L/45 guns was 15 km. Her armour consisted of belt and bulkheads 40 mm thick, deck armour 25 mm thick, and her conning tower, gun turrets and cupolas were 50 mm thick.

Careers
In Romanian service, Bucovina (ex-Sava) was fitted for service at sea as an anti-submarine escort, having one of her seven machine guns replaced by one 610 mm depth charge thrower. Otherwise her armament remained unchanged. In Romanian service, she also had a range of 750 nautical miles, more than enough to travel across the greatest East-West extent of the Black Sea, which was 635 nautical miles (the Black Sea was the area of operations of the World War II Romanian Navy).