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2024-09-24 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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On the sinking of the Black Sea Fleet ships on September 11, 1854
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
Text taken from the Live Journal account of chief_a79.
[ColonelCassad] So, on September 2, 1854, the allied army landed in the Crimea in the area of Evpatoria. Having put itself in order after the landing, the enemy moved towards Sevastopol. The Russian army tried to prevent this, and as a result, on September 8, a major field battle took place near the Alma River, which, unfortunately, was lost by our troops.
In Sevastopol, they learned about the beginning of the battle at about 14.00, from the message of the Lukulsky telegraph - "The army entered the battle".
Having received this news, the Chief of Staff of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice-Admiral V. A. Kornilov, accompanied by engineer-lieutenant colonel E. I. Totleben, left for Alma. But they did not get there, since the battle by this time had already ended and they met the Russian units already retreating after the defeat.
Having found the commander-in-chief of the troops in Crimea, Prince A. S. Menshikov, they accompanied him to the Kacha River, and then returned to Sevastopol. It was on Kacha that the order was given to build a barrier at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay. The order itself was probably oral (the army headquarters had not yet been deployed after the battle and communication with Menshikov took place simply in the field). And its content can only be judged from indirect sources and subsequent actions of the Russian command.
The essence of the prince's decision was that by blocking the entrance to Sevastopol Bay, the possibility of an attack on the city from the sea was completely excluded, as a result of which it became possible to turn all available forces of the port, ships, and also partially coastal defense to defend the fortress from an attack from land.
Moreover, to build the barrier, it was necessary to sink the battleships and frigates. The reason why it was necessary to sink them was the great depths at the entrance to the bay - from 16 to 20 m in the place chosen for the barrier. Accordingly, the barrier required ships with a very high side. Therefore, neither the merchant ships available in the city, nor the small-rank warships were completely suitable, only battleships and frigates.
Already in the morning of September 9, Kornilov convened a council of the commanders of warships and other senior officers of the Black Sea Fleet who were in Sevastopol at the time. At the council, the admiral gave a speech in which he described the situation that had developed at that time. The main thing in his message was that the advancing enemy would soon be able to quite easily occupy the northern side of Sevastopol, as a result of which the fleet in the bay would inevitably be destroyed.
As an alternative to sinking, which Kornilov absolutely did not want to accept, he very persistently proposed going out to sea and attacking the enemy fleet. In his opinion, after the defeat of the fleet, having lost hope of supplies and support from the sea, the allied army would not dare to attack the fortress, and the Russian army, hiding in the fortress, would calmly wait for the relief troops. Quite unexpectedly for himself, Kornilov did not find support from those gathered. The absolute majority of the officers present spoke out sharply against his proposal. As a result, the admiral dissolved the meeting that did not support him and gave the officers present the following order: "Prepare to leave; a signal will be given: what to do."
Here, I think, it is necessary to interrupt the chronology of the narrative and say a few words about the meeting of flag officers. Unfortunately, I have never come across a direct indication of why Kornilov convened the council. After all, there was an unambiguous order from the commander-in-chief to sink the ships and no council naturally had the authority to cancel it. It seems to me that Kornilov did not want to sink the ships so much that he tried to somehow legitimize his decision not to carry out Menshikov's order.
There is an interesting mention of this episode in the memoirs of A. A. Panayev, adjutant of Prince Menshikov. He reports that Kornilov asked the prince for permission to bring up the issue of sinking at a military council and apparently even received permission from him to do so, but since the prince was sure that the admiral would not find any support at the council, he did not take part in it. As we can see, Menshikov was right and almost none of the Black Sea Fleet officers dared to follow the will of the commander-in-chief.
After leaving the council, Kornilov went to the prince's headquarters, where he directly announced to him that he would not sink anything and announced his intention to go to sea. Naturally, this caused indignation in Menshikov, but he still repeated his order. Having received a second refusal, the angry prince immediately ordered Kornilov to leave for Nikolaev, and also to summon Vice-Admiral M.N. Stanyukovich (at that time the commander of the Sevastopol port and the military governor of Sevastopol) to him in order to assign him the responsibility for constructing an obstacle. Only now, under the threat of removal, Kornilov was forced to accept the inevitable and accept the decision of the senior commander.
Immediately after this, the admiral began quite a flurry of activity, solving the issues of defending the port and the city under the new conditions. True, at the same time, he still quietly continued to sabotage the order to sink the ships. In particular, he drew up a new plan for the disposition of the fleet in the roadstead, which was approved by the commander-in-chief that same day. After which an order was given with the following content (only the points concerning the upcoming scuttling of the ships are quoted):
“1) Due to the enemy’s expectation here, who, taking advantage of his numerical superiority, has pushed back our troops and is threatening to attack the northern shore of Sevastopol Bay, the consequence of which will be the impossibility of the fleet holding on to the position currently occupied; and going out to sea to fight with twice the number of enemy ships, without promising success, will only uselessly deprive the city of its main defenders - I, with the permission of His Lordship, announce the following orders, which I ask to be immediately executed.
2) The ships are to be placed according to the disposition designated in the plan; of these, the old ones: Tri Svyatelitsa, Uriel, Selaphail, Varna and Silistria, the frigates: Flora and Sizopol – are to be sunk in the fairway. …
10) Rear Admiral Vukotich 1 is to carry out the scuttling of the ships when necessary…”
This document mentions for the first time the ships chosen to go to the bottom. All of them were indeed quite old, having served for 11-19 years:
Tri Svyatelya was launched in 1838, Uriel in 1840, Selafail in 1840, Varna in 1842, Silistria in 1835, Sizopol in 1841 and Flora in 1839.
Moreover, not all of them were from the combat fleet - the ship Silistria by this time had already been listed as a port blockship and was used as a training and artillery vessel.
Ship Sultan Mahmud, the lead ship of the series of which were the battleships Varna, Selafail and Uriel, sunk on September 11. A little later, in the same line of obstacles, the same type of "Gavriil" will be sunk:
By 23.30 on September 9, the steamships had finished placing the ships in the places assigned to them by the disposition. The ships selected for sinking were placed across the fairway between the Konstantinovskaya and Aleksandrovskaya coastal batteries. At the same time, according to Kornilov's adjutant, the admiral was not going to sink the ships immediately, as the commander-in-chief demanded, but in the event "if the enemy takes possession of the northern shore of the roadstead."
On September 10, 1854, there are sketches of Russian ships placed in position for sinking, including from eyewitnesses on the enemy side. In the evening from the 9th to the 10th, and also in the morning of September 10, the English steam frigates "Sampson" and "Terrible", as well as the French screw corvette "Roland" approached the city. It is interesting that at night, the English were even able to approach the Russian ships unnoticed in a boat:
On the morning of September 10, Prince Menshikov again ordered to finally block the fairway and send the ships' crews to reinforce the troops on the shore. In executing this decision, Kornilov allocated the steamships Turok and Danube with a detachment of rowboats to bring various valuables from the ships destined for sinking to the shore. But, still having a vain hope of saving the ships, he ordered that the artillery not be removed from them yet!
But the external pressure of circumstances was inexorable. By this time, the Russian commander-in-chief had already finally decided that the field army would leave Sevastopol (the prince was going to begin his famous flanking maneuver) and the defense of the city would entirely fall on the shoulders of the fleet. Under these conditions, it was no longer possible to delay the creation of a barrier.
Kornilov made the final decision at 6 p.m. on September 10. By his order, the national flag was raised over the building of the Naval Library (then the highest building in the city, on its roof there was an observation platform and a signal mast), a previously agreed upon symbol that the ships must be sunk. Having gathered the commanders of the ships assigned to sink the ships on board the battleship Rostislav, he ordered that everything that could be brought ashore during the night and that they be sunk at dawn.
But in fact, there was no night for the bringing down. Rear Admiral Vukotich, who was in charge of the sinking, ordered that it be started at 19.00 and by 06.00 on September 11, all the ships except the Three Saints were already at the bottom. The mighty 120-gun giant, a participant in the Battle of Sinop, stubbornly refused to sink, demonstrating its excellent survivability.
At 19.00 on September 10, upon receiving the order to sink, the taps were opened and the sinking began. An hour later, to speed up the process, a hole was made in the bottom of the ship with a shot from a specially installed carronade. However, at 09.00 the next day, the ship stubbornly showed no signs that it would soon sink. Therefore, on the orders of Admiral Vukotich, the steam frigate Gromonosets fired 27 shots at the underwater part of the battleship, which did not want to sink. But even after that, Tri Svyatelya stayed afloat for more than three hours! Only at 13.00 did the waters close over the long-suffering ship. The barrier at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay, so desired by Prince Menshikov, was finally created.
What did this give for the defense of the fortress? Of course, the mobilization of all naval resources for the defense of Sevastopol from land, as the Russian commander-in-chief wanted. This mainly resulted in a sharp increase in the number of personnel allocated for combat on the land front. The number of naval battalions in one day increased from 8 to 17! This became possible only because not only the crews of the sunken ships were sent to staff the battalions, but also people from other ships of the fleet, whose crews were reduced as much as possible.
Moreover, it was not so much the number of people under arms that was important here (although of course this is very important), but the opportunity that appeared to send large masses of people to urgent fortification work. The absence of the threat of an enemy breakthrough into Sevastopol Bay, and accordingly the need to counteract this, also made it possible to remove some people from the internal coastal raid batteries, as well as to use all the remaining battleships and steamships to provide fire support to the troops on the Northern side.
The ships were deployed to new positions on September 10. In short, when the enemy approached the city, he saw a fairly strong defensive position, which continued to improve continuously, with a large garrison. At the same time, without the ability to receive full support for an attack on the city from the sea, and having the Crimean Army in their rear and on the flank (the result of that same flank movement), stretched communications (the nearest base in Yevpatoria was 80 km away), which could be cut off by the Russians at any moment, the allies did not dare to attack Sevastopol from the north.
Prince Menshikov brilliantly managed to neutralize the consequences of the defeat at Alma, the allies' "blitzkrieg" failed. Instead of a quick operation, they were forced to switch to a long siege. Without blocking the fairway, this most likely would not have happened.
But, naturally, the flooding also had its negative sides. The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, the loss of warships, especially battleships. At one point, the Black Sea Fleet lost 28% of its combat-ready battleships. Of the 14 (plus one more was undergoing repairs in Nikolaev), only ten remained.
The blow to the fleet's combat capability was very strong. The only thing that can be said here is that over the next two months, the balance of power in the Black Sea was nevertheless restored. This was due to both the unsuccessful attack of the allied fleets on the coastal front of the Sevastopol fortress and the storm of November 2, 1854. Two battleships perished in Yevpatoria (Turkish and French), and several more required dock repairs and left the theater of military operations.
One of the most negative consequences of the sinking of the ships for the defense of Sevastopol was Kornilov's decision to delay the removal of the guns from the ships to the shore, which resulted in them having to be sunk with all their artillery armament. Of course, the decision to delay the removal was dictated by the admiral's hope of preventing the sinking itself and not losing the combat capability of the ships, if he had managed to achieve his goal. However, as we know, Menshikov's order was not cancelled, and the time that could have been used to disarm the ships was irretrievably lost. The result was that more than five hundred large-caliber guns sank to the bottom of the Great Sevastopol Bay! In total, excluding boat artillery, there were 474 large guns on the sunken ships and frigates:
36-pounder cannons - 236 pcs.
24-pounder cannons - 250 pcs. cannons - 56 pcs.
18-pounder cannons - 8 pcs.
1-pounder unicorns - 16 pcs.
36-pounder cannon-carronades - 34 pcs.
24-pounder cannon-carronades - 104 pcs.
36-pounder carronades - 20 pcs .
Plus another 29 guns (I don’t know what kind of cannons they were) were on board the training artillery block ship “Silistriya”.
In addition, which is important, thousands of shells and tons of gunpowder went to the bottom along with the cannons. But the shell and gunpowder crises of the defenders began already in 1854 and they continued until the fall of the city. And in the summer of 1855, the seemingly bottomless reserves of artillery in the Sevastopol port and on ships came to an end, which in turn led to a severe shortage of heavy artillery. In a word, the sunken property would have been very, very useful during the siege, especially the heavy guns themselves, the delivery of which to Sevastopol by land was associated with significant difficulties.
Of course, I am far from thinking that the material property that perished as a result of the actions of Admiral Kornilov (who, of course, did not act maliciously, but with the best of intentions) could have saved Sevastopol from falling, but still, it could undoubtedly have influenced the course of the siege for the better for Russia.
Speaking about the consequences of the sinking, one cannot help but touch on the topic of the corvette Orest (1836, 18 8-pounder cannons), which, in fact, also became a victim of the fairway obstruction on September 11, 1854. The ship served as a floating battery to protect Quarantine Bay and it so happened that after the sinking of the ships, it remained outside the obstacle that appeared. Frankly speaking, it seems that in the chaos that reigned in Sevastopol, the field of the Alma battle, the corvette, standing in a separate bay outside the city, was simply forgotten. And since the western shore of the Quarantine Bay was soon occupied by the French, the ship had to be sunk there and then.
At the same time, of course, the question arises as to why they did not try to bring the Orestes into Sevastopol, since the barrier was not solid and had passages that allowed Russian ships to leave the bay (many, by the way, do not know about this). It is quite possible that at the time of the corvette's sinking, the appropriate measurements had not yet been made and the existence of an accessible passage was simply unknown. In short, this question is still waiting for its researcher.
As for the passages through the line of the sunken, such exits were rare, I would even say very rare. Our fleet in the Crimean War did not dare to take active offensive actions even near its bases, where it would have been possible to rely on strong coastal defense. Here are actually all the exits:
On September 29, 1854, an Austrian transport ship in calm weather drifted into the zone of action of the fortress's coastal batteries and was abandoned by the crew after shelling. The steamship Danube was sent to capture the abandoned ship. However, after two English steamships arrived at the scene of the battle, ours was recalled back to Sevastopol.
On the night of October 12-13, 1854, the steamship Danube and the fire ship Bug (former transport) set out to attack the enemy fleet. The attack failed, and the ships returned to Sevastopol.
On November 24, 1855, the steam frigates Vladimir and Khersones attacked enemy ships standing at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay.
As you can see, the list is regrettably short.
And now I will deviate somewhat into alternative history and ask myself the question - was it possible not to sink the ships? Personally, I have long since decided and believe that in that situation, Prince Menshikov's decision to block the entrance to Sevastopol Bay was completely justified and timely. However, it seems to me that even having created a barrier, a significant part of the ships sacrificed to save Sevastopol could have been saved.
The fact is that Sevastopol had battleships and frigates that were not a pity to lose. Naturally, we are talking about blockships - ships decommissioned and used for various auxiliary purposes. In our case, as housing. Two former battleships (blockships No. 1 and No. 2) and two frigates (blockships No. 3 and No. 5) were located in the upper reaches of the Southern Bay near the Arrestant settlement. Accordingly, it would have been possible to use these blockships in the barrier, and not the combat ships. But for some reason this was not done.
Let us return from the alternative to real history and, in conclusion of this long narrative, I will write a few words about the fate of the first line of the barrier and the ships that made it up.
The barrier, created on September 10, 1854, although it lasted the entire war, by the spring of 1855, due to the autumn and winter storms, it had become unusable. The first to suffer was the blockship Silistria, which was badly damaged by the storm of October 29, 1854. Measurements showed that above the ship “there was a passage in places up to 36 feet (11 m) deep”. To eliminate this hole in the barrier, on November 5, the 84-gun battleship Gavriil was laid to the bottom near the place where Silistria sank. A little later, in the shallow area between the frigate Sizopol and the Konstantinovskaya battery, the corvette Pilad and one merchant ship were sunk. After this, the first line was no longer reinforced.
On December 15, 1854, Prince Menshikov received a report from Admiral Nakhimov with the following content:
“Strong westerly winds and large waves destroyed the barrier of their sunken ships at the entrance to the Sevastopol roadstead; a careful sounding, made on my orders, shows that the depth along the entire line exceeds 28 feet (8.5 m). The importance of this circumstance obliges me, without observing the form, to hasten to report directly to Your Highness.”
Apparently, after three months, the line of sunken ships, as a barrier designed to prevent enemy battleships from breaking through to the Sevastopol roadstead, no longer existed. But the need to protect the roadstead did not go away, therefore, in early February 1855, a second line of barriers from sunken ships was built in the depths of the roadstead.
After the Crimean War, extensive work was carried out in Sevastopol to clear the bays of ships sunk there during military operations. The first line of barriers was reached only in 1859. Here is an excerpt from an interesting article in the "Naval Collection", which describes the condition of the ships from this line after almost 5 years of being underwater:
"The frigate "Flora" is sunk at a depth of 8 fathoms; its bow is facing the Konstantinovsky Fort; the above-water part of the frigate with decks is torn off and carried to the east of the place; and the underwater part that remains in place is sunk into the ground to a depth of about 14 feet, filled with guns, tanks, rigging and other ship's property, and all this is littered with the wreckage of the frigate. On the sea side there is a large drift of sand….
The ship "Silistria" is sunk to a depth of 9½ fathoms; the bow is facing the Konstantinovsky fort; the stern is completely destroyed; only one stern post with steering loops remains; the poop and waist decks of the decks with the above-water parts are dumped to the east, so that the upper edge of the remaining side in this place is no more than 8 feet from the ground; this part is covered with sand on both sides and littered with ship's property. The bow of the ship remains with the wreckage of the side decks.
The ship "Gavriil" is sunk at a depth of 9½ fathoms, not in line with the others, but about 10 fathoms to the W of the last ship "Silistriya", so that the middle of its waist is opposite the cheekbone of the ship "Silistriya"; the stern part is turned to the Alexander Fort; the poop with parts of the decks for about 8 fathoms and part of the waist for no more than 5 fathoms are in place; the bow part with the decks is completely destroyed and carried away from the place of the ship; the underwater part is submerged in the ground for about 10 feet and littered with debris.
The ship "Varna" is sunk at a depth of 10 fathoms, with its bow to the Constantine Fort; the left side is destroyed and carried 5 fathoms to the West; the right side with parts of the decks fell inside the ship; the fore and aft stems are in their places.
The ship "Tri Svyatitelya" was sunk in the direction of the leading lighthouse, at a depth of 10½ fathoms. The stern part along the mizzen mast is destroyed and separated from its place; along the length from the mizzen to the mainmast, the keel is broken; the bow part with the decks is preserved; the interior is littered with debris from decks and beams; there is less sand drift than on other ships.
The ship "Uriel" was sunk at a depth of 10 fathoms in an inclined position, with the deck to the seaward side; the bow is facing the Constantine Fort; the bow and stern parts with decks are completely destroyed and separated from their places; the middle of the ship between the main and foremasts is preserved with parts of the decks.
The frigate "Sizopol" was sunk at a depth of 9½ fathoms, with the bow facing the Constantine Fort. In the direction of the keel, it is broken into two parts, so that the right side deviates to the east, and the left to the west; it is littered with debris from the decks and in places covered with sand.
The least depth above the first line is 42 feet".
Naturally, there was nothing left to raise there in its entirety. The ships were raised in parts and disposed of. This is where the history of the barrier line of sunken ships created on September 11, 1854, at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay, ended.
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Posted by badanov 2024-09-24 00:00||
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