Sinking of the battleship Peresvet

On the afternoon of 4 January 1917 (22 December 1916 by the Julian calendar, which Russia used) the Russian warship Peresvet left Port Said for the Mediterranean. At about 5.30 p.m., roughly ten nautical miles north-east of the port, she struck two mines at once, at the bow and at the stern. After a quarter of an hour or so she capsized and sank. The British chronology of the war calls her a battleship, although since the spring of 1916 the Russians had carried her in the fleet lists as an armoured cruiser.

The ship had an extraordinary history behind her. Built in St Petersburg at the end of the 19th century, during the Russo-Japanese War she fought in the Battle of the Yellow Sea and was scuttled by her own crew at Port Arthur just before the fortress surrendered. The Japanese raised her in 1905, repaired her and took her into their fleet under the name Sagami. During the world war Japan was already Russia’s ally, and the Russians were looking for ships for a new flotilla in northern waters that was to cover the routes to Archangel and the newly founded Murmansk. In March 1916 the Japanese sold Sagami back to them together with two other ships captured in the war of 1904–1905, the former battleship Poltava and the cruiser Varyag. At Vladivostok the ship regained her old name.

The start of her new service was ill-starred. In May 1916, on her first trial run, Peresvet ran onto rocks off Vladivostok in fog and was refloated only after several weeks, with the help of Japanese specialists. After repairs at Maizuru in Japan she set off in October on a long voyage to European Russia, via Hong Kong, Singapore, Aden and the Suez Canal. She was still in poor condition and, according to Russian researchers, was to undergo a thorough refit in Britain before going to the White Sea. At Port Said, where she had lain since the second half of December, her engines were being repaired.

The mines had been laid in December by the German submarine minelayer U-73 of Kapitänleutnant Gustav Sieß, the same boat whose mines had sunk the battleship Russell off Malta in April 1916 and the hospital ship Britannic in the Aegean in November. At the end of December U-73 was operating off the coast of Egypt. Peresvet was steaming a zigzag course escorted by the British warship Nigella, because submarines were feared. After the explosions the crews of the anti-torpedo guns opened fire on the water, convinced that it was a torpedo attack. The blast tore the roof off the forward turret, and according to Russian researchers the forward magazine also exploded. The ship was taking on water fast, and her commander, Captain Konstantin Ivanov (known in the Russian navy as Ivanov the Thirteenth, to distinguish him from the many officers of the same name), ordered her abandoned. Only one cutter could be lowered in time. At 5.47 p.m. Peresvet capsized and went to the bottom at a depth of about 45 metres.

For several hours survivors were picked out of the cold water by the escort and by French trawlers from Port Said. The figures for losses vary widely. The Russian historians Krestyaninov and Molodtsov give in a more recent work 91 killed and more than 700 saved, of whom nine died of wounds and exposure, and in an older one 252 killed. British and American accounts speak of 116 or 167 dead. Those who died in hospital and the bodies washed ashore were buried in the cemetery at Port Said. For the Russian navy it was a painful loss: the ship, bought at a high price and expensively repaired, never reached her destination. Peresvet was also one of several old capital ships sunk in the Mediterranean in those weeks. Eight days earlier the French Gaulois had gone to the bottom, and five days later the Germans sank the British battleship Cornwallis there.