Sinking of the cruiser Pallada

On 11 October 1914 (28 September by the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) the German submarine U-26 torpedoed the Russian armoured cruiser Pallada at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. The torpedo detonated the ship’s ammunition, and the cruiser blew up and sank within moments. None of the crew survived.

Patrol at the entrance to the gulf

Pallada was a Bayan-class ship, launched in 1906 and commissioned in 1911. She served in the Baltic Fleet, commanded by Admiral Nikolai von Essen. The Russians feared that the stronger German fleet would break into the Gulf of Finland and threaten the capital, Petrograd. The cruisers therefore kept up constant patrols at the entrance to the gulf, between the coast of Estonia and the Hanko peninsula in Finland. In August Pallada had taken part in the action against the German cruiser Magdeburg, which had run onto the rocks off Odensholm.

In the autumn of 1914 the Germans sent their first submarines into the eastern Baltic. One of them was U-26, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Egewolf von Berckheim. According to Russian accounts, U-26 had earlier attacked the cruiser Admiral Makarov without success. The Russians did not, however, change their method of patrolling. The cruisers steamed on a straight course without zigzagging, although only three weeks earlier U-9 had sunk three British cruisers in the North Sea.

The explosion

On 11 October Pallada was returning from patrol together with her sister ship Bayan. According to Russian sources, at about noon U-26 fired a torpedo from a range of a few hundred metres. The hit caused the magazines to explode. Witnesses aboard Bayan saw a huge column of smoke. When it cleared, there was no trace of the cruiser, only wreckage floating on the water.

The entire crew was killed: according to the most commonly cited figures 597 officers and men, and according to some Russian sources 598. Among them was the ship’s commander, Captain 1st Rank Magnus. According to Russian accounts, the sea later washed up on the Finnish shore the body of only one officer.

The first victim in the Baltic

Pallada was the first Russian ship sunk by a submarine and one of the first vessels in history to go down with all hands after a submarine attack. Her sinking showed that the German U-boats were dangerous in the Baltic Sea as well. From then on the Russian fleet had to take this threat into account, and in time it adopted precautions already familiar to the British, such as zigzagging.

The wreck of Pallada was found by Finnish divers in 2000, at a depth of several dozen metres not far from Hanko. The discovery was announced only in 2012. The ship lies broken into pieces. U-26 did not survive the war. In August 1915 she failed to return from patrol and probably struck a mine off the coast of Finland.