PzB74
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Joined: 10/3/2000
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Now we're getting somewhere!
Read this:
The Battleship Novorossisk
The ex-Italian Battleship Guilio Cesare in Soviet Service
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The Guilio Cesare, like Italy's other First World War battleships, was extensively reconstructed in the mid 1930s. She was active in the early years of the war, suffering a 15-inch shell hit at the Battle of Punto Stilo, but escaping damage during the British carrier air raid at Taranto. She was damaged by high level bombers at Naples, and was present at the First Battle of Sirte. By January of 1942 fuel shortages and the obsolescence of the class caused the Italian Navy to leave Guilio Cesare inactive at Taranto for the rest of the year. On December 30 she sailed for Pola, where she was laid up and used as a barracks ship and stationary training vessel.
The Italian Navy was caught completely by surprise when the armistice with the Allies was announced September 9, 1943. Cesare was ordered to sail, with her greatly reduced crew, to Malta and internment. After a brief stop at Taranto, the ship was proceeding south when a mutiny broke out on September 9. Led by members of the crew who wanted to scuttle the ship rather than turn it over to the Allies, the rebellion was soon controlled by officers who convinced those on board that it was in Italy's best interest to carry out the provisions of the armistice.
While smaller units of the Italian fleet joined the Allies against the Germans, the battleships sat out the war. Cesare remained at Malta until June 1944, when she returned to Taranto and was laid up.
The Russians had demanded that one third of the Italian fleet be turned over to them in 1944, but the British and Americans placated them by lend-leasing several of their own ships to the Soviets. But the Soviets renewed their demands as soon as the fighting stopped, and despite Italy's best efforts their fleet was divided between the Russians, French, British, and Americans. According to the peace agreement signed in Paris on Feb 10, 1947, Guilio Cesare was allocated to the Soviets, and was scheduled to be delivered to the Russian Navy in seagoing condition within two years.
Cesare was given very quick and minimum repairs to electrical and mechanical systems to make her ready for sea, and then decommissioned. Given the number Z-11, she sailed with a civilian crew, under the flag of the Italian Merchant Marine, Feb 5, 1949. A few crew members made an attempt to sabotage the ship and interrupt the transfer, but they were unsuccessful. The next day she was transferred to a Soviet crew at Valone, Albania, as the Montreux Convention prohibited her passage into the Black Sea while still owned by Italy. Two weeks were spent familiarizing the new crew with the ship, and then the old battleship sailed for Sevastopol.
The Russians named their new battleship Novorossisk (sometimes spelled Novorossiysk) March 5, 1949, but perhaps did not get what they expected. The ship was in very poor material condition, having sat for nearly 5 years without maintenance. At the waterline she was caked with barnacles, the ship was rusty, and many systems simply did not work. The neglected machinery, combined with the poor crew training and the fact that all controls and manuals were in Italian, meant that the Russians could barely keep the ship running. In addition to the understandable neglect, the ship itself was not designed for the general way the Soviets operated their ships. For example, the Soviets were quite surprised to find that only the officer's mess was equipped with a full galley; the main galley was equipped only with large pasta boilers, and those did not work. The Italian Navy did not make the seamen live on the ship, housing them instead on shore in barracks with full kitchens. Italian Navy operations rarely put the battleship to sea for more than one or two days, and the day's hot meal at sea always consisted of pasta with olive oil, and red wine. The Russians set up portable Army kitchens on the ships deck to feed the crew until the ship could be refitted to Soviet standards.
Designed for the warm Mediterranean, the ship proved to be unsuited for cold weather operations also, as the crew quarters were not insulated. In the sub-freezing temperatures of the Black Sea in winter, the ship's steam heated air against the cold steel exterior caused tremendous amounts of condensation in the crew quarter of the forecastle, much like an old refrigerator. To escape the constant indoor rain, the crew often slept in the ship's internal passageways. Clearly a lot of work would need to be done if the vessel was to serve in the Soviet fleet. The value of such a ship was questionable, considering the age of the vessel, and the rapid advances in naval warfare since the ship was rebuilt in the 1930s. However, Stalin was a big fan of big ships with big guns, and the old battleship carried the largest guns in the Soviet fleet, so serve she would.
In May 1949 the ship went into the Northern drydock at Sevastopol. Russian naval experts were surprised at the condition of the underwater hull: while the waterline was completely overgrown with barnacles, the underwater hull was free of growth, thanks to an advanced anti-fouling coating used by the Italians. After a good cleaning, inspection, paint, and some repairs Novorossisk returned to service, acting as flag ship for maneuvers in July 1949.
Plans were made to refit the ship with Russian 305mm, 52 caliber guns, but in the end it was decided to keep the Italian weapons and manufacture ammo specifically for the ship. She had been delivered with only a sample of shells, due to concerns about the age and stability of the left over WWII shells, and Soviet expectations that the ship would be re-gunned. But production lines were set up, and soon new AP and HE rounds filled the ship's magazines.
Over the next six years the ship's combat, technical, and mechanical systems were slowly but surely repaired, upgraded, and converted to Soviet standards. A lot of work was done, but on eight occasions the ship had to receive repairs to her propulsion plant, which the Soviets never quite were able to master. Finally the frustrated Soviets replaced the turbines with ones their engineers were familiar with, brand new ones manufactured at the Kharkov plant. After this change, the ship made 27 knots on machinery trials, good for a ship of her age but short of her best in Italian service.
Despite Stalin's death, work on the battleship continued: carrying the largest guns then afloat for the Soviet Navy, and freshly modernized, she was more than a match for the only other large surface vessel in the Black Sea, the old Turkish battlecruiser Yavus. Her guns would also be powerful support for any amphibious operation. By May 1955 the ship was ready to begin working her crew up for front line service, commanded by Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Victor Parkhomenko.
She went to sea several times over the next five months, for training and combat exercises to train her crew, and for fleet maneuvers. On October 28, 1955, Novorossisk returned from sea for the last time and moored 1000 feet off shore in Sevastopol Bay, across from the hospital, and took on board a number of Army personnel. These soldiers had been temporarily assigned to the battleship for gunnery training, as they would be manning coast defense guns removed from old Soviet battleships. The anchorage at Sevastopol was poorly protected and not in a high state of readiness, with the outer harbor unguarded and underwater listening devices that were not functional.
At 0131 on the 29th, a large underwater explosion was heard, and the ship shook from the force of the explosion. Alarms sounded, and the ship immediately took on a list to starboard and went down by the bow, slowly settling as the list slowly increased. Panic set in among the newer recruits and Army personnel, and officers did a slow job restoring discipline, so it was some time before damage control began. But calm was restored, and damage control reports started coming in.
Damage reports were grim: a huge explosion had ruptured the ship's hull, extending back from the bow over 72 feet. The force of the explosion pierced all the decks, blowing a hole in the forecastle deck that measured 46 feet by 14 feet. Parkhomenko remained calm- too calm, refusing to abandon ship and sending everyone back to their battle stations. He assured everyone that the ship was in no danger, as he felt the ship would not sink by the bow, and the list was irrelevant: the water was only 55 feet deep, and the ship drew 34 feet and water and was 92 feet wide, so she could not roll over. He reluctantly agreed to let volunteers from other ships, experienced damage control personnel, to report on board Novorossisk to assist. Parkhomenko conceitedly reported to his superiors that he had the situation under control. He reportedly sat in a chair looking completely unconcerned, and lamenting that he wished he could "go get a cup of tea".
But Parkhomenko was wrong. While the water was shallow, the harbor bottom was exceptionally soft mud for a depth of over 50 feet before reaching a hard bottom. Novorossisk sank slowly by the head for over two hours, until her bow hit bottom. At 0415 she lurched over to starboard, rolling rapidly until her mast struck the hard bottom below the mud. Dozens of men were throw overboard as the ship capsized, many being struck by the spinning ship, or trapped and drowned between the overturned ship and the muddy bottom. Several hundred more were trapped inside the ship, still at their battle stations.
Small craft and rescue workers rushed to the scene, pulling survivors out of the cold water. Divers rescued 2 men trapped in an air pocket between the quarter deck and the mud, and 7 more were saved by cutting a hole in the bottom of the stern. But the ship continued to take on water, and by 2200 Novorossisk had slipped beneath the waves. 604 men lost their lives, the worst disaster in the history of the Soviet Navy.
The Soviets decided to hide the disaster. No mention of it was made in the domestic press, the victims were buried in a common grave at a local military cemetery, and the survivors were reassigned with warnings not to speak of the incident. Rumors of her loss leaked out to the West, but details were not uncovered until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The Soviet Navy investigated the disaster, alarmed at the loss of a powerful if aged unit. The investigation started with two possibilities: sabotage or a magazine explosion. However, the evidence soon took the investigation in another direction.
Divers examined the wreck, and engineers determined that the explosion clearly originated outside the ship, ruling out a magazine explosion. However, the damage was caused by a blast of considerable strength, roughly equivalent 2200-2650 pounds of TNT, and did not display the characteristics of damage caused by an explosive devise touching the hull. A devise this large and powerful would have been very difficult to sneak into the harbor and position under the ship in just a few hours. They were unable to rule out sabotage completely though, due to the lack of security at the anchorage.
The Navy pushed for a conclusion, and secret report was delivered in May 1956, saying that Novorossisk was lost due to an explosion of unknown origin. It could not lay blame for the explosion, but it found plenty of blame to go around. The report cited the indifference of the commanding officer as the primary cause of the loss of the ship and her crew, as even if the ship could not have been saved the entire crew could have been evacuated in the 2 hours and 45 minutes that elapsed between the explosion and the ship capsizing. Parkhomenko was criticized for not knowing the conditions of the harbor bottom, for not appreciating the danger his ship was in, and for exercising poor judgment.
The report very clearly also blamed the Navy as a whole, the initial panic and poor training were symptoms of a larger problem. Improved damage control training for officers and crew alike were instituted across the entire Soviet fleet. The man responsible for the current state of the fleet, First Deputy Minister of Defense and Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Nikolai Gerasimovich Kuznetsov, was fired from his post in November 1955. In February 1956 was demoted to the rank of vice admiral and sent to retirement without the right to return to active service in the Navy. He was, however, eventually reinstated.
As for the ship itself, the Russians sealed what they could, blasted off the superstructure to lighten the wreck, and in 1956 re-floated it with compressed air and salvage pontoons. The wreck was then grounded near shore and broken up for scrap over the next two years.
Divers then made a remarkable discovery: a WWII German magnetic mine sitting in the mud on the harbor bottom. Sevastopol Bay had been repeatedly swept for mines following the war, and Soviet ships had been using it continuously since then, yet there was the mine all the same. Divers expanded their search, turning up another mine, and then another, and then another. Within two years they had discovered 19 German mines in the mud, 8 smaller ones and 11 large ones. The larger ones had an explosive force that fell within the estimated range of the explosion that sank the ship.
The circumstantial evidence indicates that Novorossisk moored close to one of the larger mines, and somehow triggered it, perhaps with an anchor chain as she swung at her mooring. Critics claim the design life of the battery powering the magnetic trigger was only nine years, so by 1955 it should have been dead for well over a year. But the circumstantial evidence is strong, and statistically speaking a certain percentage of batteries should have retained a least a small amount of charge well past the design period. A careful examination of the other mines might have settled the issue by finding some charge in the other batteries, but such an examination would have been incredibly dangerous, and it is standard procedure to simply detonate rather than recover old mines.
Others theorize that Italian frogmen repeated their success at Pola, where they attached limpet mines to the ex-Austro-Hungarian battleship Viribus Unitis as it was surrendered to Yugoslavia, in order to deny the ship to their enemy. But there is absolutely zero evidence to support this theory, and the Italians would have absolutely nothing to gain from such an operation. Conspiracy theorists suggest that the Soviets sank the ship themselves so they could blame it on Turkey as an excuse to invade, only to cancel the invasion at the last moment. This seems far fetched, to say the least.
In the end, no one can say with 100% certainty what cause the loss of the battleship Novorossisk. But 604 men lost their lives, when many of them could have been saved if they had been properly trained and competently led. The explosion also marked the end of the big gun era in the Soviet Navy, as the remaining battleships were removed from service in this same timeframe, and the new battlecruisers then under construction were cancelled.
There is an interesting footnote to this story. In 1996 there was a ceremony in Voronezh to honor the 300th anniversary of the Russian Navy. Included in this event was the dedication of a new memorial to the men lost on Novorossisk, which culminated with the reading of a list of names of those killed 41 years before. One of the names was that of Sergeant-Major Alexandr Perelygin. Someone in the audience stood up and said the Alexandr Perelygin was actually alive and well, working as a security guard at a nearby aviation plant. An investigation proved this to be true: with the cover up of the sinking, Mr Perelygin and the Army were both apparently unaware that he was officially on the casualty list.
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Well done Monter 
 Attachment (1)
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 "The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without" - Dwight D. Eisenhower
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