Career
Oslyabya, named for Rodion Oslyabya, a 14th century monk of the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra and a hero of the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, was laid down on 21 November 1895 by the New Admiralty Shipyard in Saint Petersburg and launched on 8 November 1898. Problems at the New Admiralty Shipyard seriously delayed her completion until 1903 at the cost of 11,340,000 rubles. The ship sailed for Port Arthur on 7 August 1903, but Oslyabya ran aground in the Strait of Gibraltar on 21 August and was under repair until November at La Spezia, Italy. The ship was in the Red Sea when the Russo-Japanese War began in February 1904 and she was recalled to join the Baltic Fleet.
Oslyabya was fitted with 4.5-foot (1.4 m) Barr & Stroud rangefinders, telescopic gun sights and Telefunken radio equipment when she arrived back in Saint Petersburg. On 15 October 1904, she set sail for Port Arthur from Libau as von Fölkersams flagship along with the other vessels of the Second Pacific Squadron, under the overall command of Vice Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. En route to Denmark, the battleship was slightly damaged when the destroyer Buistri accidentally collided with her. When his ships reached the port of Tangier, Morocco, on 28 October, Rozhestvensky ordered his older battleships, under the command of Dmitry von Fölkersam, to go through the Mediterranean and Red Sea to rendezvous with his main force in Madagascar. Rozhestvensky led his squadron, including Oslyabya, down the Atlantic coast of Africa, rounding Cape Horn, and reached the island of Nosy Be off the north-west coast of Madagascar on 9 January 1905 where they remained for two months while Rozhestvensky finalized his coaling arrangements. The combined squadron sailed for Camranh Bay, French Indochina, on 16 March and reached it on 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 that consisted 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. Oslyabya's Captain 1st Rank Vladimir Ber became the commander of the 2nd Division while Nebogatov had no idea that he was now the squadron's defacto second-in-command.
During the Battle of Tsushima on 28 May, Oslyabya led the Second Division of the squadron and was initially the target of two battleships and a pair of armored cruisers when the Japanese opened fire at 14:10. Almost immediately, they began inflicting damage, knocking out the rangefinder, wounding the gunnery officer and severing the cables connecting the guns to the Geisler fire-control system. Other hits shot away the mainmast and knocked out the forward gun turret as well as three of her port 6-inch guns. Splinters from one of the many hits entered her conning tower, killing the quartermaster and wounding most of the men inside. This caused the ship to fall out of line to starboard and she was engaged by six Japanese cruisers at short range. More serious were a number of large-caliber shells that struck along the ship's waterline beginning about 15 minutes into the engagement that caused major flooding; they opened up enough of the ship's bow to the sea that her forward motion forced more and more water into her hull and she began listing to port. Flooding of her starboard forward magazine was ordered in an attempt to counteract the list, but it just added more weight forward and destroyed the ship's stability. Oslyabya rolled over to port until her funnels touched the water around 15:15 and Captain Ber ordered "abandon ship". The ship sank a few minutes later, with her starboard propeller still turning, taking Captain Ber and 470 of her crew with her.
Read more about this topic: Russian Battleship Oslyabya
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