Russian armored ship Pallada sunk more than 98 years ago in Finnish waters. Finnish dive team found the Pallada in 2000.
The armored cruiser Pallada
World War One, or as it was called until 1939 "The Great War", began on the first day of August in 1914.
On the one side were the "Central Powers" of Germany and Austro-Hungary, and ranged against them were the "Allies" of the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia.
The Imperial Russian leadership feared Germany would attack St. Petersburg, the then capital, either by sea or with an invasionary force through Finland.
As our history books tell us, Finland was at that time a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire.
Fearing an attack through Finnish territory, the Russian Army moved some 30,000 soldiers into Finland at the outbreak of hostilities.
In order to ward off the prospect of an invasion by sea in the north-east corner of the Baltic, long strings of naval mines were laid across the Gulf of Finland, just as occurred in the Second World War..
The most extensive of them spanned the entire gulf between the Porkkala peninsula in the north and the island of Naissaar (Nargen in German), to the north-west of Tallinn, on the southern shore.
Narrow fairways were left close to the coasts of Finland and Estonia, along which Allied vessels were able to pass unhindered by the dangers of mines, but these routes were policed against enemy incursions by the threat of hefty coastal artillery batteries.
Even with these defensive measures in place, the greatest responsibility for the safeguarding of St. Petersburg remained with the Russian Baltic Fleet, which enjoyed the special protection of
Nicolas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.
It was in essence the Emperor's own navy.
In 1914, before the arrival of four new Gangut-class dreadnoughts, the armoured cruiser Pallada was the pride of the Baltic Fleet.
She was a modern warship, 137 metres stem to stern, with a displacement of just under 8,000 tonnes, carrying two 8" guns mounted fore and aft and a further eight 6" guns in casemates port and starboard, and she had been completed and commissioned only three years earlier, in 1911.
The construction of the Pallada was begun in 1906 and it had taken all of five years to bring her into service, as she was built more or less simultaneously with two other Bayan-class cruisers, the Bayan (or Bayan II) and the Admiral Makarov, which was initially laid down in France.
Pallada - Bajan-class cruiser was the first warship of the Russian Imperial Fleet lost in World War I.
Length: 137m, Width: 17.5 m, Displacement: 7 860tn, Engine Power: 16500hp (12 500kW), Speed: 21 knots (39 km / h) Crew: 597 Armament: 2x203mm guns, 8x152mm guns, 20x75mm guns, 4x47mm guns , 2x381mm torpedo tubes
In the early months of the war, Russian warships held sway over almost the entire Gulf of Finland. In addition to St. Petersburg, they used Tallinn, Helsinki, and Hanko as their home ports.
Russia received help in the marine defence of the Baltic from their British allies, who sent submarines into the Gulf of Finland. These were able to deploy from bases in Helsinki and Hanko.
The German Navy, by contrast, was obliged to remain further down the Baltic, as there were no bases under the German flag along the coast of the Gulf.
Any German raiders heading into the Gulf of Finland had to do so from the southern shores of the Baltic Sea.
Nevertheless, the Kaiserliche Marine wished to flex its muscles and show its strength, and at the end of August 1914 it penetrated into the Gulf.
This proved to be a rather inauspicious beginning - in fact it was excruciatingly embarrassing for them.
The German light cruiser Magdeburg, herself the pride of the Kaiser's navy and only commissioned in late 1912, managed to run aground in fog close to Odensholm, off the Estonian coast.
The Magdeburg was so tightly stuck on the reef that getting her refloated was impossible, and with the arrival on the scene of the Russian Pallada and another cruiser, the Bogatyr, both with very obvious hostile intentions, it was decided that the only course of action was to evacuate the stricken Magdeburg, blow her up, and scuttle her, rather than risk the ship being captured as a juicy prize.
Even this went badly.
Before the ship was properly detonated, the Germans desperately tossed overboard all the Magdeburg's documents, including top secret naval code books and signal logs.
The Pallada and the other Russian warships swept in, however, and succeeded in salvaging several of the code books and - much more damaging - an encryption key.
Copies were given to the British allies, and as a result of the lucky windfall the Russian and British Navies were able to decipher intercepted German wireless traffic and to know the location and intentions of many German warships. The great naval battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland in 1915 and 1916 were directly influenced by the signals intercepts that the British admirals were able to enjoy.
The loss of the Magdeburg was such a huge humiliation for the Germans, so early in the game, that there was a very powerful desire to get even.
The law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth demanded swift revenge.
Later in the autumn, the Germans began a deliberate policy of goading the Russian Navy, with a view to pushing them into intemperate action.
The intention was to coax the Russian warships into the sort of exposed location where they could become prey to German submarines.
The cruiser Magdeburg 1911
On Sunday October 11th, 1914, the sky in Hanko was cloudless.
There was only a light breeze blowing, and the Gulf of Finland was fairly smooth as the Pallada and her sister-ship Bayan left Hanko Harbour on patrol, accompanied by a flotilla of motor torpedo boats.
Visibility was good. This was important, for the ships' crews had to keep a sharp eye out at all times.
There was no radar in those days, and enemy vessels had to be seen with the naked eye or through binoculars.
The Pallada was a very impressive craft. She had two vertical triple-expansion steam engines producing 16,500 horse power, and could make 21 knots at full speed.
The cruiser was armoured throughout, with reinforcement 19 centimetres (7.5 inches) thick over her machinery spaces at the waterline, and she was fitted with ten deck-mounted naval guns of 8 and 6 inches and 24 smaller-calibre cannon of 3" and 1.9", and she also carried two submerged 15" torpedo tubes.
The crew was also right out of the top drawer.
The Pallada's commanding officer was Captain 1st Class
Sergei Romanovic Magnus, an experienced and decorated naval officer in his early 40s.
He had graduated from the cadet school in 1890 and had served honourably in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
Magnus was assisted by a score of commissioned officers, all experienced men, and by a large and carefully-picked crew, since work on the new vessel required technical smarts and the ability to learn fast.
They had been conscripted from European Russia, and particularly from the St. Petersburg region.
Most were quite young, in their early 20s.
Nearly all were able to read and write, and many had been at work in factories or the docks prior to their call-up.
The great majority of the ship's complement were Russians, but there were also some Estonians and other Balts in the crew.
As far as is known, there was only one Finn aboard the Pallada, and he was one of the officers - the ship's surgeon
George Silfversvan, a 40-year-old Helsinki nobleman whose family had produced numerous naval officers.
The Pallada's lookouts swept the horizon, but on that Sunday morning they did not see any German vessels in the vicinity.
The lookouts had, however, made a fatal error.
They had failed to spot the presence of the German submarine U-26 shadowing the convoy.
It followed the movements of the Russian vessels just below the surface, using its periscope.
The German Navy had invested massively in developing its submarine fleet, as it wished to challenge British hegemony on the high seas.
The first fully-functioning diesel-electric-powered German submarine had been built only a decade before the war broke out, and submersibles were still rather clumsy and difficult to manoeuvre.
They could remain submerged for only a few hours at a time, and were very slow-moving vessels.
Navigating a submarine, let alone turning it into a weapon of war, made great demands on the officers and crew.
Submarines often sank: not for nothing were they described as "iron coffins" or "sisters of sorrow".
The commander of the U-26 was Kapitänleutnant
Egewolf von Berckheim.
He was just 33 years of age and had been given command of the vessel and its crew of thirty only a matter of months earlier.
Egewolf von Berckheim
Now the U-26 was far from its base in Gdansk and sailing in dangerous waters.
If the speedy Russian torpedo boats or a destroyer escort were to spot the submarine, the encounter would likely be a fatal one.
The lookout on the German U-boat had already observed the Russian convoy early that morning.
The submarine shadowed the Russian warships all morning, and dived to slip closer to the convoy unnoticed.
It was 11:10 when Kapitänleutnant von Berckheim issued the order to the torpedoman manning the third tube:
"Rohr drei - Achtung - Los!"
The torpedo was so large that the firing of it rocked the 700-tonne submarine.
The missile carried a payload of 200 kg of explosives.
Capt. von Berckheim was able to watch through the periscope as the bubbling wake of the torpedo approached the cruiser across the surface.
The distance to the target at the point of firing was a bare 500 metres.
It is quite certain that those on the deck of the Pallada would have seen that same wake from the incoming torpedo, but by then it was all theatre: there was no way the large armoured cruiser could take evasive action.
The Pallada took a direct hit amidships, in the most vulnerable place imaginable, for the ship's magazine was located here.
A monumental explosion followed.
The cruiser broke her back and split into two parts, sinking in a matter of minutes.
The entire crew went down with her. Depending on the books and research documents one examines, there are some discrepancies about the actual number of casualties.
The largest figure is 611 officers and men, and the smallest 584.
It is also a little unclear as to whether anyone did manage to survive.
Some sources suggest that a handful of men were rescued from the waves, while others insist everyone on board perished.
What IS certain, however, is that five sailors who for one reason or another were not on board that day lived to tell the tale.
Whether on shore leave, sick leave, or spending some time sobering up in the cells, these crew-members were fortunate enough to be on dry land in Hanko at the time.
The crews of the other Russian vessels could only look on helplessly as the Pallada vanished under the surface in a trice.
According to eye-witness accounts, all that was left floating where the ship went down were sailors' hats and a few timber spars that had been blown off in the blast.
A few days later an Orthodox icon of the Redeemer was recovered from the water. It belonged to the Pallada.
The icon was to have protected and blessed the vessel.
It did not protect her against the German torpedo.
Immediately after the sinking of the Pallada, the commander of her sister-ship the Bayan had to telegraph Fleet HQ in Kronstadt with the awful news.
At this juncture, Russia was under a rigid wartime censor.
The newspapers were permitted to write only sparingly about the events of the war, and particularly if they involved defeats or casualties.
The effects of the blanket censorship were also felt in reporting of the loss of the Pallada.
The papers in St. Petersburg carried little about the sinking.
For example the illustrated weekly magazine Ogonyok published pictures of the drowned officers, but nothing was said about the ratings who died along with them.
News of the shipwreck did spread by word of mouth, when the Navy had to inform hundreds of families that there was no hope their nearest and dearest might have been saved.
The relatives of the drowned tried desperately to get more information. There was not much to be had.
At this time, in 1914, Helsingin Sanomat was Finland's most important media outlet, the country's largest daily newspaper.
Two days after the disaster, on Tuesday October 13th, there was a small one-column piece in the paper under the headline "Pallada sunk with all hands".
The number of victims was not given.
A couple of days later, there was a follow-up article that described the course of events at sea.
At the end of the piece - most certainly on the orders of the authorities - was tagged a curious sentence: "It is a terrible shame to have lost a cruiser and her drowned crew, but the loss of one ageing cruiser will have no adverse effect on the outcome of our military actions in the Baltic Sea."
This same frighteningly blunt approach was maintained in later reports.
The newspaper handled the fate of the Pallada briefly and on only five occasions.
Six months on, on March 31st 1915, the subject was finally dropped - for nearly a century.
In the very last article, the Helsingin Sanomat journalist even had the nerve to claim that despite the loss of the Pallada and her crew of 600, the Russian Baltic Fleet had "as a whole" become stronger rather than weaker.
This was a complete travesty of the truth.
The sinking of the Pallada, a brand-new vessel that had recently earned its spurs in the Magdeburg incident and was anything but obsolete or "ageing", was the first major naval defeat for the Russians in the entire war, and a huge blow to navy morale.
The Times of London, on the other hand, was able to put the defeat into a proper context a few days after the sinking: it was a turning point in the naval war.
The Times journalist took the view that the destruction of the Pallada by a direct hit from a torpedo indicated that the German submarines were capable of operating effectively in larger sea-areas.
The British were particularly concerned about the enormous fire-power of the torpedoes, because in this instance a single strike had been able to rip apart something as large as an 8,000-tonne armoured cruiser.
In the German capital Berlin, the news of the sinking of the Pallada was met with much jubilation.
Taking out Russia's largest cruiser in this spectacular fashion was a major triumph of the new military technology.
Kapitänleutnant Egewolf von Berckheim, the commander of the U-26, became an instant war-hero.
When the submarine returned to its pen in Gdansk after the victory, there was a congratulatory telegram waiting from none other than Kaiser
Wilhelm II himself.
Capt. von Berckheim - and his entire crew - received the Iron Cross, 2nd Class.
This was an exceptional gesture, and the first Iron Cross of the conflict awarded to the German Baltic Fleet.
But the war was only just getting started.
After landing the big fish of the Pallada, submarine U-26 continued its forays in the Baltic.
Under her young commander, the sub managed to wreak destruction on a large scale: in the course of a year she sank five Russian ships - the large armoured cruiser Pallada, one large minelayer, and three merchant vessels.
At the end of August 1915, the U-26 was again on patrol in the Gulf of Finland when she suddenly vanished.
The Germans tried to find out what had happened to their submarine, but without any notable success.
The craft simply disappeared, possibly after a close encounter with a Russian naval mine, and nobody has been able to determine where she went down.
The crew of the submarine U26 and their iron crosses
The fate of the cruiser Pallada was forgotten in the fog of war, in spite of the fact that she carried some 600 men to the bottom with her.
She was not alone, of course: in WWI the Russians lost a total of 37 vessels to enemy action in the waters off Finland.
All the same, the loss of life in these other incidents came to fewer than 300 men all told.
For eight decades, the sinking of the Pallada was the worst maritime disaster to occur in Finnish waters.
Only when the cruise ferry MS Estonia went down in an autumn storm in 1994 were more lives lost at sea.
A total of 859 passengers and crew drowned that night.
In terms of size, the Estonia was a rather larger ship than the Pallada, at 155 metres and 15,600 GRT.
Several monuments have been erected to the victims of the Estonia disaster, and the dead are remembered each year on September 28th, the anniversary of the sinking.
Nothing has been built to the memory of those who drowned on the Pallada, and they have not been remembered in any shape or form - not in Finland, nor in the Soviet Union back in the day, or in Russia, or in Estonia.
Over the decades, even the place of her sinking was forgotten.
The Pallada acquired a semi-legendary reputation amongst a small coterie of naval history buffs and wreck-divers. The wreck was somewhere far out in the open sea, and buried so deep that it was impossible to get at.
Rediscovery
Another large propellers of the Pallada
In the mid-1980s, a bunch of diving enthusiasts came together in Espoo's Otaniemi and gradually gelled into a group specialising in dives to the wrecks of sunken warships.
The members of the group, known as Badewanne, were drawn from former students at the University of Technology in Otaniemi and a few other diving devotees.
At the end of the 1990s, the group started to take in interest in the Pallada.
The then leader begun to delve into naval archives, which gave conflicting details of the location where the cruiser was presumed to have gone down.
For many decades, nobody had really known for certain where the torpedoing and sinking had taken place.
The team leader went to a great deal of trouble to come up with a probable spot to begin the search.
At the end of the archives work, lines were drawn on the chart, inside which the wreck ought to be.
This was nevertheless still all pretty much educated guesswork.
There was nothing else for it but to make an exhaustive side-scan sonar search of the sea-bed over the entire marked area.
This was likely to be slow and tedious work.
The search used an echo-sounder fixed to the back of a motorboat.
The preliminary work had been done carefully, but there was still an element of luck involved in the fact that they got a hit back from the bottom after just 12 hours of trying.
There were some interesting reflections showing up on the display unit, and the men believed that they might well have found the resting place of the Pallada.
Naturally this could not be confirmed without having seen and identified the ship.
In August 2000, a scuba diving team made its first attempt at the site.
There was open sea as far as the eye could see all around the divers' boat. The weather conditions were good.
An anchor buoy was tossed overboard, and the first two divers - Jorma Manninen and Jouni Polkko - went over the side into the dark waters, following the orange buoy-line down to the bottom.
Everyone was tense and excited.
Those left on board wondered whether the dive would be a success, and Manninen and Polkko were pondering whether they would find the shattered hulk of the Pallada down there, or something else altogether.
Both the men were experienced divers, with the very best equipment. All the preparations had been made as well as humanly possible.
Just a few years earlier, a dive of this nature and at this depth would not have been possible.
However, in the latter half of the 1990s scuba diving technology took a quantum leap forward through the spread of enriched-air breathing gas mixtures such as Trimix or Heliox, which permit observations at depths below 40 metres.
Manninen and Polkko headed down towards the sea bed, and the trip down of around 60 metres took several minutes.
Minutes are very long when you are underwater.
The first divers saw something pale reflected in their lamps. It was pale and smooth - and a familiar sight for experienced divers from earlier wreck-diving trips.
This is what the underside of the hull of a ship looks like, when the vessel has been inverted on the way to the bottom. The divers moved closer. They did not have a lot of time to play with, as they could remain on station for only 20 minutes before resurfacing.
The pair were very fortunate. They had chanced upon the bow of a ship, and it was in one piece. And they were doubly lucky that the sea water was exceptionally clear in the summer of 2000.
The two divers progressed along the hull of the vessel and saw that it had broken in two amidships.
On the bottom they saw huge anchors, and a gun turret lying next to the hull.
However, the biggest impression was made by the discovery of a small wooden sculpture. It was the fan-shaped headpiece belonging to the Pallada's bow figurehead, a statuette of the goddess Pallas Athene [after whom the vessel was named].
The fan-shaped headpiece of the goddess Pallas Athene
The divers took their first quick pictures and headed back to the surface.
When they reached the boat, the delight was unbounded. The Pallada had been found after all these years.
Following that first dive, the team continued their work.
In 2000 and 2001 the group made a total of sixty dives down to the wreck. This does not mean they went out sixty times, but that an individual diver explored the site on that many occasions.
The water remained remarkably clear, permitting extensive photographing and mapping of the site.
Not far from the bow, they also found the aft section of the broken vessel, and this, too, was lying upside down on the sea-bed.
The stern of the cruiser was decorated with a double-headed eagle, the insignia of Imperial Russia.
The insignia of Imperial Russia - a double-headed eagle
As if to underline what was now transparently obvious, they eventually discovered the name of the ship, written in Cyrillic script on the side of the hull.
There were other relics on the bottom: shells from the Pallada's 6" and 8" guns, a lifeboat, and plates and dishes from the mess.
The diving team photographed and videoed their finds.
The wreck itself and the objects spread around it were not touched. No anchor was attached to the wreck, and its location was marked only with temporary buoys that were removed after each dive visit.
Summer after summer, they went back and continued their research.
The details began to firm up. One of the divers, Juha Flinkman, made accurate drawings of the wreck and its layout on the sea floor.
The team then arranged a secret meeting with the relevant authorities, held at the Military Museum of Finland, to present their findings on the wreck of the Pallada.
It is quite possible that the authorities themselves have discovered the wreck in their own investigations, but if they have, then no information on this has ever been made public.
The team of divers had determined from the very outset of the project that nothing of their discovery would be breathed to anyone save the authorities directly concerned, namely the Military Museum and the National Board of Antiquities.
The location remained a closely-guarded secret within the Badewanne group for 12 years. Amazingly, word did not even get out within the diving community.
The wreckage of the Russian armoured cruiser Pallada lies in the Gulf of Finland south of Hanko.
No more precise description of where she is buried will be forthcoming.
One of the guns
One mildly amusing twist of fate in the story is that at much the same time on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, the search was under way for the vessel that had put the Pallada where she is - namely the wreck of the German submarine U-26, which vanished without trace in 1915.
An Estonian diving team was convinced in the summer of 2010 that they had found the long-lost U-26.
The Estonian Maritime Museum's research vessel Mare observed the wreck of a submarine between the islands of Naissaar and Osmussaar, west from Tallinn, that was resting in 100 metres of water.
The Estonians got good pictures of the wreck and decided it had to be the U-26.
However, when it was examined more closely using a robot, it turned out that it was in fact a Soviet sub that had sunk in October 1941.
This summer, the finders of the Pallada decided that the time had come to tell the public about their discovery.
The group passed over to HS Kuukausiliite some of the images of the wreck they had collected over the years, for publication with this article.
At the same time, they sent the readers of the magazine the following message:
"We hope that all divers will exercise a sense of responsibility in this matter and will respect the inviolability of the Pallada and the peace of those who are buried down there. We wish that wreck-sites will remain for future generations exactly as they are. They are fragile memorials of the historical events, the technology, and the life of their times."
EPILOGUE: A grieving mother's request
On November 22nd, 1914, a small announcement was published in the day's edition of Helsingin Sanomat, under the heading: "Reward Offered for Information".
The text was as follows:
"Among those who drowned on the cruiser Pallada was Midshipman Nikolai Alexandrovich Baulin (distinguishing features: aged 22, fair complexion, medium height, slim build, blue eyes, barely perceptible blond moustache) and Midshipman Sergei Sergeyevich Poltanoff (distinguishing features: aged 21, fair complexion, delicate features, grey eyes, barely visible moustache).
To all who may be able to provide any information on the above before the 14th day of December of this year, the undersigned will give a reward of 100 roubles or 250 Finnish markka. To any who have found the mortal remains of the above, a reward of 1,000 roubles or 2,500 Finnish markka will be given, and to any who can provide precise details of where the two person may be found alive, 2,000 roubles or 5,000 Finnish markka.
Information should be directed to: Russia, Petrograd, Hotel Astoria, Mrs. Baulin."
Now at least we are in a position to give Mrs. Baulin, who was apparently the wife of a Russian general, something like an answer.
We could tell her, at least roughly, where the grave of the two young Russian midshipmen is located.
The stern of the vessel - "a balcony"
(Story: Helsingin
Sanomat / First published in print in the October 2012 issue of the monthly
supplement Kuukausiliite by
Unto Hämäläinen; Pictures: :internet)
