Today in 1864 battle raged around the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea. Denmark was at war with Austria and Prussia, and not doing well. One area that they did have success with was to dispatch ships into the North Sea and English channel to harass their opponent's merchant shipping. A naval blockade is a powerful tactic. When used by the British against Germany in the First World War it is arguably the main reason that they were forced to surrender even though they were (slowly) gaining territory all the way up until the armistice was signed. The Austrians and Prussians obviously wanted to break the blockade and in March the Danes got intelligence that they were massing a fleet to do so.
The Danes and combined Prussian and Austrian fleets clashed off the small island of Heligoland on May the 9th 1864. The Prussian gun boats where not aggressive enough, always hanging back at long range which meant that their fire was not effective. This lent the Danes concentrate on the Austrian 51-gun screw frigate Schwarzenberg setting her on fire twice. Strangely for a small island off the coast of Germany and populated by German speakers Heligoland did not belong to either Germany or Denmark, but was part of the British Empire a fact that was used by the Austrian commander, Kommodor Wilhelm von Tegetthoff. He fled to the neutral waters around the island. The Danes could have followed and finished him off but for the fact that the British Frigate Aurora was observing the battle. Attacking the Schwarzenberg within British Territorial waters could well have caused a diplomatic spat with the world's most powerful nation. Under the cover of darkness the mangled Austro-Prussian squadron succeeded in returning to Cuxhafen. The Austro-Prussians had been pasted and did not manage to break the Danish blockade the honours, but that did not stop both sides from claiming victory!
After the battle Von Tegetthoff was promoted to Rear Admiral and conferred the Order of the Iron Crown. He next turns up in the historical record in 1866 as commander of the Austrian fleet against the Italians. He attacked the Italians in the Adriatic Sea near the island of Vis. His fleet was completely outclassed: he had fewer ships, which had less armour, and worse guns. He made up for this through a level of aggression that bordered on the insane. His plan was to get as close as possible to the enemy to make up for his inferior guns, and ram them if possible. One of his unarmoured ships, the Kaiser, engaged four Italian ironclads at the same time. He used his own ship to ram and sink the Italian Iron-Clads Re d'Italia and Palestro sinking both. This spectacular use of ramming lead to 50 years of naval designers fitting rams to their battleships, and ramming did sink many ships. Unfortunately they tended to be ships from the same fleet when the ships accidentally collided. Again both sides claimed victory, but as far as winning the war was concerned this engagement was completely irrelevant.
While Heligoland might no longer be British there is another British island off the coast of another country that has an important historical event today. For the Channel Islands today is Liberation Day. The Germans had expected the Channel Islands to be attacked, they were after all British. However the logic that had left them abandoned was still very much in force, they were still strategically irrelevant to the war. After the Normandy landings the allies needed to capture the Cotentin Peninsula to protect their flank, but the little islands just off its coast? They were no threat. The rocky coast and high cliffs make any invasion of the channel islands difficult. When you add in the way that they had been fortified the number of men that would have been lost to retake them was simply too high for the minimal strategic gain, especially since the redirection of resources would have slowed down the advance on the main front. So the German garrison on the Channel Islands was simply left to sit it out behind the meter thick concrete walls of their fortifications.
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