Volja (ship, 1914)
|
|
|---|---|
 Emperor Aleksandr III. |
|
| Overview | |
| Type | Ship of the line |
| Shipyard |
Russian shipbuilding company Russud , Nikolajew , |
| Keel laying | October 30, 1911 |
| Launch | April 15, 1914 as Emperor Aleksander III. |
| delivery | 1917 |
| Namesake | Emperor Alexander III |
| Decommissioning | interned in Bizerte from December 1920 |
| Whereabouts | In 1936 France scrapped |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement |
22,600 t standard |
| length |
168.0 m |
| width |
27.4 m |
| Draft |
8.4 m |
| crew |
1,252 men |
| drive |
20 Yarrow boilers |
| speed |
21 kn |
| Range |
5,000 nm at 14 kn |
| Armament |
|
| Bunker quantity |
3,000 tons of coal, 720 tons of oil |
| Sister ships | |
| Armor protection | |
| Navigation bridge: |
187 - 305 mm |
| Armored deck: |
38 - 76 mm |
| Side armor: |
76-305 mm |
| Casemates: |
127 mm |
| Towers |
305 mm |
| Tower barbeds: |
203 mm |
The Wolja (Russian: Volya , Cyrillic : Воля) was a Russian large-line ship of the Imperatriza Marija class , which was briefly commissioned by the German Imperial Navy in late autumn 1918 in order to possibly use it against Allied forces or the allied Ottoman Empire as a means of pressure in the Conflict to use the Caucasus .
period of service
Although the ship in April 1914 by a stack was over, it was only after the Russian Revolution of February ready and was of the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky in Volya renamed (Russian = freedom).
The only war effort of Volya was held from 1 to about 4 November 1917. She ran together with an aircraft mother ship and a destroyer from Sevastopol to the Bulgarian - Ottoman coast to intercept the Ottoman-German ships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau , which were suspected there. A second group of ships involved in this company consisted of her sister ship Svobodnaja Rossija , three older liners and three destroyers. The company was commanded by Vice Admiral Alexander Nemits (1879-1967) on board the Svobodnaya Rossija . During the mission, the crew of the flagship began to mutiny and demanded the return to Sevastopol, noting that the war was over for them. As a result, the company had to be canceled. The Volja group crossed the Bosphorus for a few days without seeing the Breslau , which had already entered the Bosphorus on the evening of November 1, 1917.
When German troops approached Sevastopol, the Volja was relocated to Novorossiysk together with other units of the Russian fleet , but returned to Sevastopol, which had meanwhile been occupied by German troops, in June 1918 due to the agreements between the German Empire and the Soviet government in the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty .
According to Gröner, the ship, together with other Russian units, was under the German war flag from June 19, 1918 . According to the presentation by Hildebrand / Röhr / Steinmetz, the Wolja was put into operation in September 1918 with a test drive crew who had traveled from Germany under the command of the Port Captain of Sevastopol, Captain Walter Isendahl (1872-1945), without official commissioning. According to the official report of the commander of the naval commands in the former Russian Black Sea area, Vice Admiral Albert Hopman , from Sevastopol on October 15, 1918, the Volja (written by him Volja ) put into service on that day after the crew was complete had arrived. He remarked:
“The greatest difficulty will be the combat readiness of the heavy artillery, as our personnel are faced with completely unknown facilities. So far there has been a lack of the necessary mechanic staff, now the work will proceed a little faster. Just as difficult will be the development of the transmission of commands, which is also based on completely different principles than ours. "
According to Hopman's diary entries of November 4, 1918, the Volja set out at 5 a.m. that day to shoot the guns. Your first artillery officer was Lieutenant Captain Karl Elsässer (1883-1958). As early as November 11, 1918, 500 men of the crew of the liner were transported to Germany, the remaining crew followed on November 14. Apparently immediately afterwards the former Russian ships located in Sevastopol were handed over to the local Russian authorities, because when British units under sea captain Percy Royds called Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, the Andrew flag was hoisted on the Volja .
The military-political background for these measures is unclear. According to the official naval historiography, an Allied naval advance through the fortifications of the Dardanelles into the Black Sea should be prevented with Russian ships :
“This should primarily include the capital ship“ Volja ”and several of the best destroyers. In the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk , the ships' membership of the Russian state was recognized. In a supplementary agreement, the Russian government had agreed that the ships under German supervision could be used for peaceful purposes, such as the water police and the restoration of mine-proof waters, but also for military purposes. However, commissioning was made difficult by the condition of the ships and a lack of staff at home. At the Sevastopol shipyard, under the influence of the revolution, the working conditions were extremely unfavorable. After all, from the beginning of September preparations were being made for the Volja , a destroyer of the Bespokoiny class, one of the Sack class, three older torpedo boats and a few submarines. The missing crews should be sent from Germany. "
It is unclear whether this was the only reason to put the Volja into service. In Walter Zürrer's study of German policy on the Caucasus from 1918 to 1921, there is an indication that its use was intended as a demonstration of power against the Ottoman Empire, with its military leadership under Enver Pascha from summer 1918 onwards, when the Caucasus was occupied, there were serious differences over the future Influence in this area had come, especially regarding the exploitation of Baku's oil wells . General Otto von Lossow , at that time the German military plenipotentiary in Constantinople , wrote to the Foreign Office on July 18, 1918, calling for the toughest diplomatic measures against the Ottoman Empire, including the repair of some Russian ships, especially one of the large-line ships to show the allies who is the “master of the Black Sea” (Zürrer, Caucasia , p. 95). The commissioning of such a ship made sense insofar as the Goeben was badly damaged by three mine hits in January 1918, but was only repaired temporarily and was therefore only partially operational. The Dreadnought mentioned by Lossow could only refer to the Wolja , since no other ship of this type was in German possession in the Black Sea.
On November 24, 1918, the ship was handed over to a British command of the small cruiser HMS Canterbury . With a hull crew made up of crews from the British battleship Agamemnon , the Volja moved on 21/22. December 1918 in İzmit , Turkey , apparently to prevent the Red Army advancing on Sevastopol from accessing the ship. The Volja remained in Izmit until October 29, 1919, when it was relocated back to Sevastopol with a new hull crew, this time consisting of crews from the battleship HMS Iron Duke . Here she was handed over to the naval command of General Pyotr Nikolajewitsch Wrangel on November 1st and finally put back into service as General Aleksejew by the White Army .
On November 14, 1920 General Aleksejew moved together with other Russian ships first to Constantinople and then in December 1920 with the so-called Russian Squadron , the remaining naval forces of the White Army, to Bizerta / Tunisia , where she was interned on December 19, 1920.
Due to the return negotiations between France and the Soviet Union , the ship was inspected by a Russian commission in 1924, declared unusable and broken up by French companies in 1936 on behalf of Russian companies. France sold the large-caliber guns to Finland and Norway in 1939, where they were to be used as coastal batteries. Four guns were captured by German troops on the steamer Nina in Narvik in 1940 and then set up as a battery Mirus on the German-occupied island of Guernsey .
literature
- B. Weyer (Ed.): Taschenbuch der Kriegsflotten. XVII. Born 1916, Munich 1916, pp. 134f., 201, 367.
- Siegfried Breyer: Battleships and battle cruisers 1905–1970. Munich 1970. ISBN 3-88199-474-2
- Keyword: Liner Volja. In: Hans H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships. Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present. Ratingen o. J. (One-volume reprint of the seven-volume original edition, Herford 1979ff.,) Vol. VI., P. 63f.
- Hermann Lorey (arr.): The war in the Turkish waters . Volume 1: The Mediterranean Division. Berlin 1928 ( Der Krieg zur See 1914-1918. Edited by the Marine-Archiv).
- Werner Zürrer: Caucasus 1918-1921. The struggle of the great powers for the land bridge between the Black and Caspian Seas. Düsseldorf 1978, p. 95.
- Jane´s Fighting Ships of World War I. Foreword by Captain John Moore RN. London 1990 (reprint of the original 1919 edition), p. 247.
- Bernd Langensiepen , Dirk Nottelmann , Jochen Krüsmann: Half moon and imperial eagle. Breslau and Goeben on the Bosporus 1914–1918. Hamburg 1999.
- Hopman report to Admiralstab / Seekriegsleitung and Supreme Army Command, Sevastopol, October 15, 1918. In: Michael Epkenhans (Ed.): The eventful life of a "Wilhelmine". Diaries, letters, records 1901 to 1920 by Albert Hopman. Munich 2004, pp. 1130–1134.
- Winfried Baumgart : From Brest-Litowsk to the German November Revolution. From the diaries, letters and notes of Alfons Paquet, Wilhelm Groener and Albert Hopman March to November 1918. Göttingen 1971.
- Erich Gröner : The German warships 1815-1945. Vol. 1, armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats. Munich 1982, p. 54.
- Paul G. Halpern: A Naval History of World War I. Annapolis, MD 1994, p. 254.
- Stephen McLaughlin: Russian and Soviet Battleships. Annapolis, MD 2003.
