Prince Poscharsky (ship, 1916)

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The Prince Poscharski ( Russian Князь Пожа́рский ) was a Russian deep-sea icebreaker who served under the Soviet flag after the First World War and was lost in the Black Sea in 1941 with all its crew . He drove in 1920/21 under the name of Lieutenant Schmidt ( Russian Лейтенант Шмидт ), then until his demise as Stepan Makarov ( Russian Степан Макаров ).

Construction and technical data

The ship was built on behalf of the Imperial Russian Navy at the Neptune shipyard by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson in Walker ( Newcastle-on-Tyne ), with mostly Russian shipyard workers. It went there with the hull number 1021 on 28 September 1916 from the pile and was delivered in December 1916th It was 75.6 m ( Lüa ) or 74.6 m ( LzdL ) long and 17.4 m wide and had a draft of 6.4 m empty or 8.4 m fully equipped. It was measured with 2432 GRT and 891 NRT and displaced 3150 t (standard). Two alternating triple expansion steam engines from Swan Hunter, fed by six steam boilers , developed a total of 4400 hp and enabled a top speed of 14.5 knots with two screws . A third, somewhat smaller triple expansion steam engine of 2000 hp drove the bow thruster located under the bow, as it had proven itself when the ice was breaking in the Baltic Sea . 686 tons of coal were bunkered be what a range of 4,500 nautical miles allowed at 10 knots cruising speed.

Russian Navy

The Prince Pozharsky was the Polarmeerflottille with home port of Arkhangelsk assigned, where she arrived late December 1916th Her sister ship Kosma Minin ( Russian Козьма Минин ), built at the same shipyard, had arrived there a month earlier. The ship suffered from considerable structural defects, in particular from poor riveting of the hull; this caused permanent leakage and made repeated visits to the shipyard necessary.

On April 15, 1917, it was requisitioned by the Imperial Russian Navy, armed with a 4.5 cm cannon and two machine guns, and assigned to the White Sea Flotilla. During the Russian Civil War , the ship was placed under British control in August 1918, when Archangelsk was occupied by Entente troops , on the pretext that it should not fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks . It was only when the last foreign intervention troops left northern Russia in July 1919 that it was handed over to the troops of the White Army in Murmansk . There it was stuck inactive for several months due to a lack of coal.

Soviet Navy

In the spring of 1920 - the whites had given up their resistance against the Bolsheviks in February and their commander-in-chief in the northern region, Lieutenant General Miller , had fled on the Kosma Minin - the Prince Poscharsky moved to Arkhangelsk. There she was armed again and on April 15 integrated into the new Soviet Navy as an auxiliary cruiser . On May 7th she was renamed Lieutenant Schmidt . After the end of the civil war, the ship was disarmed in June 1921 and used as an icebreaker again from June 15 by the civil shipping administration in the North Sea. On July 12, 1921 it was renamed Stepan Makarow .

In 1924, the Central Maritime Transport Administration decided to implement the pre-war plan of stationing two deep-sea icebreakers in the Black Sea and Sea of ​​Azov in order to keep the ports of Odessa , Kherson , Mykolaiv and Mariupol open in winter. For this purpose the Stepan Makarow and the Fyodor Litke ( Russian Фёдор Литке ) were determined. On April 24, 1924 the Stepan Makarow left the North Sea and moved to Leningrad in the Baltic Sea . After a major overhaul carried out there at the shipyard of the Baltic plant , she went to Odessa in November / December 1924 and began her service in the Black Sea, then from 1926 in Mariupol for the Azov State Maritime Company (Азовского ГМП).

After the start of the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the ship was armed as an auxiliary cruiser with five 13 cm cannons and two 12.7 mm DSchK machine guns and used as a tugboat and transporter. For example, on August 13, 1941, during the evacuation of Mykolaiv, the unfinished cruiser Kuibyshev of the Chapayev class was towed across the Dnepr-Bug-Liman and via Ochakiv to Poti . When the German 11th Army began the siege of Sevastopol at the beginning of November , most of the ships of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet moved to ports on the Caucasian coast, the Stepan Makarow to Tuapse .

From there she ran on November 17, 1941 with supplies for the Soviet defenders of Sevastopol, but did not arrive there. The search for the missing ship was fruitless, and its disappearance later gave rise to various and sometimes daring speculations, all of which could be refuted. In fact, on November 18, 1941, it hit a mine in thick fog near Cape Fiolent south of Sevastopol and sank. His entire crew was killed. An SOS call sent by the Stepan Makarow by radio under the code name Kerch given to the ship for this voyage was perceived as a trick by the Germans in Sevastopol, as the code name had not been notified there.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Wladimir Grigoriewitsch Andrienko: Icebreaking Fleet of Russia, 1860s - 1918; P. 423-425: § 5.3: Sea icebreakers "Kozma Minin" and "Prince Pozharsky"
  2. ↑ The ship was named after the Russian national hero Dmitri Michailowitsch Poscharski ( Russian Дми́трий Миха́йлович Пожа́рский ), one of the leaders of the Russian popular uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian occupation at the beginning of the 17th century.
  3. ↑ Kniaz Pojarski, at tynebuiltships
  4. ↑ Wladimir Grigoriewitsch Andrienko: Icebreaking fleet of Russia, 1860s - 1918 ; P. 423-425: § 5.3: Sea icebreakers "Kozma Minin" and "Prince Pozharsky"
  5. ↑ Named after the Soviet politician, mathematician , geophysicist and Arctic researcher Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt (1891-1956).
  6. ↑ Н.А.Залесский: ФЛОТ РУССКОГО СЕВЕРА В ГОДЫ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ И ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙН (NA Zalessky: Fleet of the Russian North and during the First World War )
  7. ↑ Named after the Russian admiral, oceanographer and polar explorer Stepan Ossipowitsch Makarow (1849-1904).
  8. ↑ Ukrainian Миколаїв ; Russian Николаев Nikolajew
  9. ↑ http://ivb.com.ua/publikatsii/26-ledokol
  10. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20071026033158/http://fleet.sebastopol.ua/index.php?article_to_view=13

Web links

literature

  • Vladimir Grigorievich Andrienko: Ледокольный флот России 1860-е - 1918 гг. ( Russian icebreaker fleet, 1860s - 1918 ), Paulsen, Moscow, 2009, ISBN 9785-98797-037-9 , pp. 423-425 (Russian)