Russian Battleship Navarin - Construction and Career

Construction and Career

Navarin, named after the Battle of Navarino, was ordered on 24 April 1889 from the Franco-Russian Works and construction began on 13 July 1889 at their Saint Petersburg shipyard. The ship was laid down on 31 May 1890 and launched on 20 October 1891. She was transferred to Kronstadt in 1893 for fitting out, but did not enter service until June 1896 at a cost of over nine million rubles. Construction was seriously delayed by problems with the boilers and late deliveries of armor plates, the gun mountings, and other components, compounded by inefficiencies in building. One example of such was that the Russian armor plate company lacked the capacity to make gun port armor for the gun turrets of the required thickness, but the builder somehow lost track of this fact and had to place a rush order with the French company of St. Chamond.

Navarin was assigned to the Baltic fleet and began a cruise to the Mediterranean Sea in August 1896. She visited the Greek port of Piraeus on 1 October. Together with the battleship Sissoi Veliky, the ship was ordered to the Far East in early 1898 and arrived at Port Arthur on 28 March. She took part in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion two years later. Navarin and Sissoi Veliky, together with a number of cruisers, sailed for the Baltic on 25 December 1901 and arrived at the port of Libau in early May 1902. She began a refit the following September that was interrupted by the start of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904. During this refit, Navarin received 4.5-foot (1.4 m) Barr & Stroud rangefinders, telescopic gun sights and Telefunken radio equipment. Her light armament was increased by four 75-millimeter (3.0 in) guns that displaced an equal number of 47-millimeter guns on top of the superstructure; one of the displaced guns was mounted on each of the turret roofs.

On 15 October 1904, she set sail for Port Arthur from Libau along with the other vessels of the Second Pacific Squadron, under the command of Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. When his ships reached the port of Tangier, Morocco, on 28 October, Rozhestvensky split his forces and ordered his older ships, including Navarin and Sissoi Veliky, to proceed through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to rendezvous with him in Madagascar as previously planned. Under the command of Rear Admiral Dmitry von Fölkersam, they departed that night and reached Souda Bay, Crete, a week later and Port Said, Egypt two weeks after that. The two forces reunited at the island of Nosy Be on 9 January 1905 where they remained for two months while Rozhestvensky finalized his coaling arrangements. The squadron sailed for Camranh Bay, French Indochina, on 16 March and reached it almost a month later to await the obsolete ships of the 3rd Pacific Squadron, commanded by Rear Admiral Nikolai Nebogatov. The latter ships reached Camranh Bay on 9 May and the combined force sailed for Vladivostok on 14 May.

Rozhestvensky reorganized his ships into three divisions; the first consisted of the four new Borodino-class battleships commanded by himself, von Fölkersam commanded the second division of the battleships Oslyabya, Navarin, Sissoi Veliky and the armored cruiser Admiral Nakhimov, and Nebogatov retained his ships as the third division. Von Fölkersam, ill with cancer, died on 26 May and Rozhestvensky decided not to inform the fleet in order to keep morale up. The captain of Oslyabya became the commander of the 2nd Division while Nebogatov had no idea that he was now the squadron's defacto second-in-command.

Very little is known of Navarin's actions during the Battle of Tsushima on 27–28 May as there were very few survivors from the ship and visibility was poor for most of the battle. The ship was apparently not heavily engaged during the early part of the battle, but was badly damaged later in the day when she was third from last in the Russian line of battle. She was hit four times by large-caliber shells on the waterline that caused major flooding aft. Her quarterdeck was awash up to her rear 12-inch turret by 2100 and the ship was forced to stop for repairs. Around that time she was attacked by Japanese torpedo boats that may have made one or two torpedo hits. Navarin managed to get underway again and damaged one torpedo boat badly enough that she sank later that night. Around 0200 on 28 May, the ship was attacked again by the Fourth Destroyer Division which dropped six strings of mines ahead of her. These consisted of four mines linked together with cables so that hitting any part of the string would draw the mines onto the ship. Two of these mines struck Navarin, which quickly capsized and sank. Some 70 men were able to abandon ship before she sank, but only three were alive when they were found 16 hours later. One man was rescued by a Japanese torpedo boat while the other two were rescued by a British merchant ship. The rest of her crew of 674 officers and enlisted men were lost. The rescued men had said that when they called out for help, they were fired on by Japanese torpedo boats.