"Sava" was raised and repaired by the navy of the Axis puppet state the Independent State of Croatia, and served alongside her fellow monitor "Morava", which was raised, repaired, and renamed "Bosna". Along with six captured motorboats and ten auxiliary vessels, they made up the riverine police force of the Croatian state. "Sava" was part of the 1st Patrol Group of the River Flotilla Command, headquartered at Zemun. Her crew scuttled her near Slavonski Brod on the night of 8 September 1944 and defected to the Yugoslav Partisans. "Sava" was again raised and refurbished after World War II. Armed with two single gun turrets, three single gun mounts and six weapons, she served in the Yugoslav Navy from 1952 to 1962. Afterwards, she was placed into the hands of a state-owned company, which was privatised after the breakup of Yugoslavia. In 2005, the government of Serbia granted her limited heritage protection after citizens demanded that she be preserved as a floating museum, though little else had been done to restore her as of 2014, by which time she was serving as a gravel barge. In December 2015, "Sava" was acquired by the Serbian Ministry of Defence and Belgrade's Military Museum, which planned on restoring her. The ship is one of only two surviving Austro-Hungarian river monitors that served during World War I. The other is SMS "Leitha", a much older monitor, which has been a museum ship anchored alongside the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest since 2014. "Sava" was restored by early 2019 and is slated to become a floating museum.