Lipovž Anton

Anton Lipovž (Batuje 1892 – Ljubljana 1970)

Anton Lipovž was born at Batuje near Ajdovščina in 1892. After finishing primary school, he moved to Trieste, where he found himself a job. In 1912, he voluntarily entered the Navy. He attended a recruiting course and eventually the artillery school in Pula, Croatia.

However, due to the Balkan Wars he was compelled to board, even before completing his schooling, the ship Aspern, on board of which he travelled to Constantinople and to the mouth of the Bojana River. Upon returning to Pula in August 1913, he was transferred to the torpedo cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth with a crew of 425 men. The ship set sail for East Asia in no more than few days. For a year, she cruised between Chinese and Japanese ports as a floating station ship. As soon as Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, she joined German forces in Qingdao in China in the war against Japan and Great Britain. Lipovž was commissioned a commander of one of the two boats with a crew of 5, with which links between the vessel and the land were maintained. Owing to the lack of ammunition, the commander ordered the vessel to be blown up in early November, and Anton joined the ground forces together with the rest of the crew. After the defeat (13 November 1914), the Japanese took the majority of the crew and  their German fellow combatants as prisoners of war to Japan, where mariners of the Yugoslav nationality remained until 1919. Lipovž was imprisoned in the Himeji Camp and eventually transferred to Aonogahara Camp. He returned home with a group of Slovenian and Croatian sailors as late as 1920. He joined the Royal Navy of the SHS, specializing in naval aviation, and became a hydro pilot. After retiring, he moved to Ljubljana.