RUSSIA, Slavic Languages, Orthodox Calendar, Russian Battleships

8/10/2019 RUSSIA, Slavic Languages, Orthodox Calendar, Russian Battleships

1/39


2/39


3/39


4/39


5/39


6/39


7/39


8/39


9/39


10/39


11/39


12/39


13/39


14/39


15/39


16/39


17/39


18/39


19/39


20/39


21/39


22/39


23/39


24/39


25/39


26/39


27/39


28/39


29/39


30/39


31/39


32/39


33/39


34/39


35/39

Baltic Fleet

Dreadnoughts, 4 ships

Gangut Soviet Oktyabrskaya Revolutsia

Poltava Soviet Mikhail Frunze

Sevastopol Soviet Parizhskaya Kommuna

Petropavlovsk Soviet Marat

Pre-Dreadnoughts,

13 ships before Russo-Japanese War(1 lost previously, operational accident),11 ships lost at Tsushima;

3 more completed subsequently

Imperator Pavelnot completed until 1910

Andrei Pervoswanni

Borodino sunk at Tsushima

Imperator Alexander III sunk at Tsushima

Orel surrendered at Tsushima,IJN Iwami

Kniaz Suvarov Rozhestvensky's flagship,sunk at Tsushima

Slava not finished for Tsushima,scuttled, 1917

Osliabia sunk at Tsushima

Sissoi Veliki sunk at Tsushima

Navarin sunk at Tsushima

meaning that, of the 28 battleships of the Russian Navy in 1904, no less than 17 were lost in the War.Of the 11 remaining, 8 were in the Black Sea, 2 were obsolete Baltic ships undergoing reconstruction,and 1 from the Far East squadron was returned to the Baltic Fleet after being interned in China (theTsessarevitch ). In 1905, 1 new Baltic ship, sister to three that were lost at Tsushima, was added (theSlava ), but 4 more ships building (2 each Baltic and Black Sea) were not finished until 1910. This waslittle less than a catastrophe for the Russian Navy, which at the beginning of the War might have beenthought to have overwhelming superiority to the Japanese, whose Navy only had 6 of its own

battleships, plus a couple of obsolescent ex-Chinese ships.

The table lists every battleship built for the Russian Navy, starting with the Petr Veliki , which waslaid down in 1869 and completed in 1872 -- but with the newer ships at the top of the list for eachfleet. The Petr Veliki was a typical ship of its era, a Monitor with two turrets and a smallsuperstructure, and was quite obsolete by 1904. Like many such ships, even in the Royal Navy ,however, it was still kept on the list, and was in fact being reconstructed at the time of the War. No

other Russian battleshipswere laid down until1883, when the Black Sea Sinope class was

begun, and 1885, whenthe Baltic Imperator Alexander II class was begun. These wereregarded as little better than "coastal defenseships" by 1904, but the

Imperator Nikolai I actually flew the flag of Admiral Nebogatov atTsushima.

The table is color coded by fleet. The Baltic shipsare shown on yellow, theBlack Sea ships on red,and the Far East ships ongreen. The fate of shipslost or surrendered toJapan is shown onorange. The annihilation

of the Baltic and Far Eastfleets is conspicuous.The fate of one ship fromPort Arthur, however, isshown in white. SinceJapan and Russia wereactually Allies in WorldWar I, Japan sold acouple Russian ships

back to her. One was

then used in the WhiteSea, near Archangel.Hence the color.

The very tops of the
http://www.friesian.com/dreadnot.htm#predread


36/39

Admiral Ushakov sunk at Tsushima

Admiral Seniavin surrendered at Tsushima,IJN Minoshima

General Admiral Graf Apraksin surrendered at Tsushima,IJN Okinoshima

Gangut foundered, 1897

Imperator Alexander II being reconstructed during Tsushima

Imperator Nikolai I Nebogatov's flagship, surrenderedat Tsushima, IJN Iki

Petr Veliki being reconstructed during Tsushima

Black Sea Fleet

Dreadnoughts, 3 ships

Imperatrica Maria sunk, explosion, 1916

Imperatrica Ekatarin II sunk, 1918

Imperator Alexander III scrapped, 1926-36

Imperator Nikolai I scapped incomplete

Pre-Dreadnoughts, 10 shipsIoann Zlatoust

not completed until 1910Evsafi

Kniaz Potemkin Tavritcheski renamed Pantelimonafter 1905 mutiny

Rostislav run aground, 1920

Tri Sviettelia scrapped, 1922

Dvienadsat Apostolov stricken, 1911

Sinope scrapped, 1922

Ekaterina II

Tchesma

Georgi Pobiedonosets

Far East Fleet

Pre-Dreadnoughts, 7 ships before Russo-Japanese War;all but 1 lost at Port Arthur

Baltic and Black Seafleets are occupied by theRussian Dreadnoughts,none of which were laiddown until 1909. TheBritish Dreadnought ,completed in one year,1905-1906, perhapsconveniently rendered allthe battleships atTsushima obsolete. They

became "Pre-Dreadnoughts."

Although the Russian Navy eventually finished7 Dreadnoughts, War with Germany and

Turkey in 1914 meantthat they were never ableto operate with their Allied British or Frenchfleets. The Bosporus wasstill closed by Turkey,and the proximity of Germany made transit or operations in the BalticSea impractical for boththe Russians and theBritish. This turned thegeographicalinconveniencies of theRusso-Japan War into agrave strategic disabilityfor the Russians in WorldWar I. Germany mayhave been fighting a twofront War, but the

position of the CentralPowers largely cut off Russia from help fromand cooperation with her allies.

The fate of the RussianDreadnoughts waslargely to be fought over in the Russian Civil War and then for the

surviving ones to be of minimal use in later years. The lastappearance of any Pre-Dreadnoughts in a real
http://www.friesian.com/dreadnot.htm


37/39

Retvisan sunk in Port Arthur, IJN Hizen

Tsessarevitch interned in China after Battle of theYellow Sea, returned to Baltic Fleet

Peresvietsunk in Port Arthur, IJN Sagami ;returned to Russia, 1916,

sunk by mine off Port Said, 1917Pobieda sunk in Port Arthur, IJN Suwo

Poltavasunk in Port Arthur, IJN Tango ;returned to Russia, 1916,as Tchesma in White Sea

Petropavlovsk sunk by mine outside Port Arthur

Sevastopol scuttled outside Port Arthur

fleet action was at theBattle of Jutland, wherethe Germans included asquadron of such ships tomake up for their deficiency inDreadnoughts. One of them, the Pommern , wasthen sunk -- the onlyGerman battleship, as ithappened, actually sunk

by the British that day.

Tsushima was the end of the Russian Navy as asea power until theSoviet Union began

building up a blue water

navy in the 1970's. TheBlack Sea ships were no longer trapped, since Turkey opened the Straits by international treaty to theinnocent passage of all ships. With the fall of Communism, Russia was no longer able to affordkeeping up much of the new Navy, and many ships would lie rusting, a fate no less ignominious, if less catastrophic, than in 1905.

How the Russian Navy, even with its strategic liabilities, could have done so poorly in 1904-1905 isstill a good question. The Port Arthur squadron alone, rather than being sunk at anchor, should have

been able to at least badly damage the Japanese fleet, if not defeat it. An attempt might have beenmade, when an aggressive Admiral Stepan Makarov assumed command; but as he sailed outsidePort Arthur on 13 April 1904 in the Petropavlovsk , the ship hit a newly laid Japanese mine, sinkingand taking him down with it. Subsequently, Rear Admiral V.K. Witgeft simply held up, hoping for reinforcements from Europe. He gave up on that and attempted to flee to Vladivostok on 10 August.The pursuit by the Japanese led to the Battle of the Yellow Sea . The results were indecisive, exceptthat Witgeft himself was killed, that his ship, the Tsessarevitch , made for a neutral Chinese port, andthat the rest of the squadron returned to Port Arthur, where most of the ships were sunk by JapaneseArmy siege guns. There the fleet remained until the city surrendered to the Japanese on 2 January1905. The four ships sunk in the harbor were all raised and rebuilt for the Japanese Navy.

There is no telling what might have happened had Admiral Witgeft left harbor intending to fightrather than run. The Russians certainly could not have done any worse and might well have inflicted

some losses on the Japanese that would have been felt at Tsushima. As it was, the Japanese simplyhad time to recondition all their ships before the weary Baltic Fleet arrived the next May. ThenAdmiral Tg laid in a parallel course to the Russians and concentrated fire on the van. This seemedto do the trick, especially because, contrary to orthodox doctrine, the Japanese were using many highexplosive shells designed to detonate on impact, not armor piercing shells intended to penetrate andexplode within. The upper works and superstructures of the Russian ships were thus demolished, andthey caught on fire. The very paint on the steel began to burn. It didn't help that the Russians had a lotof extra gear, even extra coal for their long voyage, packed on the decks. Since all battleships had

been built with armored conning towers, but almost nobody ever actually used them because visibilityfrom them was so poor, Russian officers, including Admiral Rozhestvensky, were wounded or killed

from standing on open bridges as the Japanese shells hit.The Japanese had forgotten their tactic at a vital moment years later. On the first night of the NavalBattle of Guadalcanal , when the Japanese force, with the battleships Hiei and Kirishima , stumbledinto a thrown together American force of cruisers and destroyers, precious minutes were lost while
http://www.friesian.com/history/guadal.htm


38/39

armor piercing shells were substituted for the high explosive shells that were intended for bombardingHenderson Field. However, destroyers don't have armor (hence, "tin cans"), and many of the Japaneseshells seem to have passed entirely through American ships without detonating. This rendered the

battleships' 14 inch shells relatively harmless.

The Russians could not have said the same. All the Russian battleships at Tsushima were either sunk or surrendered. Theodore Roosevelt said, "neither Trafalgar nor the defeat of the Spanish Armada wasas complete -- and overwhelming." No navy would be so thoroughly annihilated and swept from theseas until the Japanese Navy itself suffered a similar fate in World War II. But the Japanese Navy inthat case, although falling behind in quality, was mainly overwhelmed by numbers. The numericalsuperiority that the Russians initially had in 1904 was rendered useless by the geographic division of their forces; and then the numerical parity of the Far Eastern fleet was rendered useless by avoidanceof battle. At Tsushima itself, the Japanese had a tactical and material edge (their British built shipsactually were better, and many Russian shells were duds), not the least because the Russians had justsailed around the world, but also because of unexpected Japanese tactics. Before the War had evenstarted, the Russians certainly should have sent substantial reinforcements to the Far East, not waituntil much of the damage had already been done. This violated a fundamental rule of war, toconcentrate one's forces. But the Russians probably, and the Tsar certainly, just did not believe that

Japan was, or could be, a threat to a European power.

In the extraordinary photograph above, we see elements of the American Great White Fleet , whichhas nearly finished sailing around the world, riding at anchor in Gibraltar Harbor. Alongside them areseveral Russian ships, including the battleships Tsessarevitch and Slava , and a cruiser that has beennamed after Admiral Makarov. This is 1909, and Britain, which would not have given the time of dayto the Russians in 1905, is now becoming an ally, with France, against the threat of Germany . In

peacetime, the Russians could sail from the Baltic into the Mediterranean, as they would not be ableto do in World War I. The United States , of course, was at this time nothing like an ally of either Britain or Russia. Yet one reason the Great White Fleet is here, as the first expression of Americannaval power on a global scale, was to adapt lessons that had been learned from the melancholy voyageof the Russian Baltic Fleet to its historic defeat. The United States, with new possessions in thePhilippines and elsewhere, wanted to be able to send a fleet to any necessary distance and have itarrive as an effective fighting force. As it happened, of course, the battleships that were designed to besent to the rescue of the Philippines were sunk by Japanese aircraft in Pearl Harbor in 1941. Thus,curiously, Japan was the common factor in the epic sea battle against the Russians at Tsushima and inone of the first massive and most decisive uses of naval air power against the Americans at PearlHarbor.

Russia Index

Dreadnoughts in Other Navies

Japanese Battleships
http://www.friesian.com/kongo.htm#navyhttp://-/?-http://www.friesian.com/pearl.htmhttp://www.friesian.com/dreadnot.htm#whitehttp://www.friesian.com/newspain.htm#herculeshttp://www.friesian.com/dreadnot.htm#othernavieshttp://www.friesian.com/dreadnot.htm#whitehttp://www.friesian.com/presiden.htmhttp://www.friesian.com/francia.htm#second


39/39

Bibliography

Philosophy of History, Military History

Philosophy of History

Home Page

Copyright (c) 1999, 2012 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
http://www.friesian.com/#rosshttp://www.friesian.com/philhist.htmhttp://www.friesian.com/philhist.htm#militaryhttp://www.friesian.com/ross/http://www.friesian.com/kongo.htm#bibliohttp://www.friesian.com/#contents

RUSSIA, Slavic Languages, Orthodox Calendar, Russian Battleships

Documents

Transcript of RUSSIA, Slavic Languages, Orthodox Calendar, Russian Battleships