Petropavlovsk

1904

Port Arthur, the mine, Makarov and Vereshchagin Location: off Port Arthur (Lüshun), China · Coordinates: 38.80°N 121.22°E · Casualties: ~635 · Survivors: ~80 · Depth: 35 m · Cause: mine — Struck one or more Japanese contact mines off Port Arthur on the morning of 13 April 1904 during the early months of the Russo-Japanese War. The forward magazine ignited seconds after the first explosion. She listed, broke in two, and went over in under two minutes. · Fate: partially salvaged · remainder abandoned · Type: pre-dreadnought battleship · Tonnage: 11,354 tons · Crew: 750 · Flag: Russian Empire · Launched: 1897 Russian pre-dreadnought battleship, flagship of the Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur. Struck Japanese mines off the harbour entrance on 13 April 1904; the forward magazine ignited and she went over in under two minutes. 635 dead, 80 rescued, including Vice-Admiral Stepan Makarov (the most respected officer in the Imperial Russian Navy) and the war artist Vasily Vereshchagin, painting the harbour from the afterdeck as she capsized. The Russian Pacific Fleet never recovered; eighteen months later the Baltic Fleet was annihilated at Tsushima. The Vessel The Petropavlovsk was a Russian Imperial Navy battleship, commissioned at the Galernyy Shipyard in St. Petersburg in 1897. She was 113 metres long, 10,960 tons standard displacement, armed with four 12-inch guns in two twin turrets fore and aft, and a secondary battery of twelve 6-inch guns in casemate mountings. She was the lead ship of her class of three pre-dreadnought battleships (Petropavlovsk, Poltava, Sevastopol), built as the principal Russian Baltic Fleet class of the 1890s. The Petropavlovsk class was built specifically in response to the Russian Imperial Navy's strategic assessment of the 1890s: the specific threat from the expanding Japanese Imperial Navy in the Far East. By 1899, Petropavlovsk had been transferred from the Baltic Fleet to the Russian Pacific Squadron based at Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula (the Russian leased territory on the Chinese coast). Her service at Port Arthur through 1899-1904 had been routine peacetime operations; she had not been substantially refitted since her 1899 transfer. Her commanding officer in April 1904 was Vice-Admiral Stepan Osipovich Makarov, 55, one of the most respected naval officers in the Imperial Russian Navy. Makarov was an exceptional figure in late-nineteenth-century Russian naval culture: a distinguished oceanographer (his 1870s expedition to the Pacific had been one of the Russian Navy's principal scientific contributions), an experienced sea commander (he had commanded Russian naval forces in the 1877-78 The Disaster At approximately 09:43 on 13 April 1904, as Petropavlovsk was proceeding north-northwest into Port Arthur's outer roadstead, she struck a Japanese naval mine. The Japanese mine-laying operation of the preceding weeks had placed approximately 500 mines in the approaches to Port Arthur; the specific mine that struck Petropavlovsk had been laid by the Japanese mine-layer Kōryū Maru on the night of 12 April 1904, approximately 18 hours before the strike. The mine exploded against Petropavlovsk's starboard bow below the waterline. The damage was immediately catastrophic: the explosion breached her forward magazine; her forward magazine detonated approximately 30 seconds later. The secondary magazine explosion was substantially larger than the initial mine explosion; the combined effect produced essentially total destruction of Petropavlovsk's forward third. Petropavlovsk capsized to starboard and sank in approximately 90 seconds at approximately 38°48′N 121°15′E, in approximately 35 metres of water. Of her 725 aboard, 632 died: Vice-Admiral Makarov, his staff, the ship's officers, and approximately 580 enlisted crew. Among the dead was the war-artist Vasily Vereshchagin, 62, one of the most celebrated Russian artists of the period, who had been aboard Petropavlovsk to document the Russian naval operations for a planned painting series. Vereshchagin had been on the afterdeck of the ship at the moment of the explosion and had gone down with her. 80 survivors were recovered by the Ru