Baltic Naval War 1919 - Fire & Ice (but mostly ice, lots of ice)

[Music] [Music] the great war was over all over the planet nations drew breath mourned their dead and tried to move on for the remaining great powers to various degrees exhausted by the conflict there was another naval arms race gearing up and they warily and wearily began to put together new designs to hopefully deter from a fresh war breaking out but for some countries and the war hadn't quite ended and for others another war was only just beginning in this particular case we're referring to the ongoing process otherwise known as the Russian Revolution specifically the conflict between the white and red Russian forces and the people and nations caught in between very specifically we're talking about the naval environment of the Baltic Sea it's a little-known but fairly intense conflict which pitted elements of the Royal Navy against disparate proto Soviet forces with the various Baltic states throwing in varying degrees of efforts where they could the previous year 1918 had been quite busy with the Swedish fleet conducting operations led by their brand new coastal battleship this very air evacuating and protecting Swedish citizens in the affected area and the high seas fleet in its last year operations attempting to capture the Russian Baltic Fleet although this particular operation didn't go anywhere near as well as planned managing to acquire handful of old obsolete and broken-down ships in exchange for the loss of an icebreaker and the practical loss of the dreadnought battleship Rhineland what was left of the Russian forces gradually began to deploy and engage in various actions including the so-called ice crews where elements of the nascent Soviet Baltic Fleet managed to extricate their largest units as well as men in equipment from the port of revell which was under threat from German troops although more older and smaller vessels were captured by the Germans this was more annoyance than critical but the Finns managing to steal two of the fleet's three largest icebreakers in quick succession was something of a larger problem but eventually most of the heavier units of the now red Baltic Fleet and made their way to Kronstadt INRI INRI lays from the temporary stopover of Helsing Falls and then on to Petrograd which was formerly st. Petersburg in the course of these operations of the Royal Navy surprisingly had also lost some vessels for eClass and 3c class submarines and they're tender was scuttled as they were now surrounded by hostile forces with the collapse of Imperial Russia and the advances of the Germans and Finn's this operation concluding in May 1918 changed the balance of power significantly as although some ships captured import would end up being returned to the Russians some the Finns especially kept a number of the ships that they captured and practically every remaining vessel there had been forced to make a run through the ice with or without an icebreaker as escort had suffered hull and propeller damage to varying degrees thus immobilizing large portions of the remaining Russian fleet for the immediate future interestingly one of the ships that took part in this operation the Volkov is still in service today as the submarine recovery ship communi with the end of the first world war towards the end of 1918 the balance of naval power shifted again as of course all German ships were withdrawn from operations in the Baltic area and this coupled with the escalating conflict between white and red Russian forces meant that the various former Imperial Russian provinces Finland has already mentioned along with Latvia Estonia and Lithuania were both in the process of declaring their independence and then having to fight for it as well Finland had all go ahead of the curve already by declaring independence the previous year but was also having its own civil war developing internally against its own communist groups rebel was renamed to Tallinn Illin and the newly formed Estonian government sent representatives over to Helsinki the new name for helsing Falls and they asked for British and French help in case the Red Russian forces won their battle with the white Russians and tried to take their country back over again they wanted a small fleet led by at least one modern battleship to escort several thousand troops aboard transports into the area to train Finnish and Estonian forces which were largely a combination of various volunteer militias at this point the French were not in any real position to help right off the bat but for the British a number of additional factors weighed in the red forces had stated outright they would not honor any debts the Imperial Russian government had incurred and the Tsar had owed the British a lot of money additionally with the withdrawal of German forces from the area the damaged red Baltic Fleet was still by far the strongest fleet in the area the Swedish fleet contenting itself with staying mostly close to home knowing that the Russian ships were damaged and their crew numbers were badly down the British decided that an intervention was both possible and needed but not on the scale that the Estonians had been asking for since the Royal Navy was drastically drawing down its forces and sorting out what needed to be scrapped and what they wanted to keep the force eventually sent was a skort Rijn of the new c-class light cruisers along with an escort of destroyers and minesweepers the Danes were asked if they might host a battleship squadron as a nearby reserve just in case some of the Ganga class turned out to be a little bit more operational than the British aden immediately thought but the politics of that situation proved a bit too complicated and so the cruisers and their escorts went in alone for some it was a somewhat frustrating experience hms cardiff had led the high seas fleet into internment on the 21st of november but instead of getting some long-awaited leave the crew had been turned right around and sent out to the baltic the following day although smaller ships they were all new and fairly powerful for their types albeit that operations got off to a less than auspicious start with HMS Calypso hitting the wreck of a block ship and HMS Cassandra hitting a mine and eventually sinking with the destroyers HMS Westminster and HMS over Elam colliding shortly thereafter the three damaged ships were therefore sent home along with the crew of the cassandra leaving HMS Cardiff Kara Duke and series along with the Destroyers Valkyrie vendetta wakeful Wessex Windsor Wolfhound and Woolston unsurprisingly of a V and W class to finally arrive in Tallinn in December 1918 setting the stage of operations in 1919 and leaving the British officer in charge trying to politely refused an Estonian offer to become a British protectorate whilst also coordinating several incoming shipments of small arms artillery and tanks for the Estonian ground forces just as a Soviet offensive started heading their way uncharacteristic refusal of expanding the British Empire aside a whilst the nests and estonian navy and elements of the soviet navy clashed through the end of november and the whole of december the soviet offensive on land was generally turned back and British destroyers joined the Estonian efforts prompting the Russians to try and lure the British into the arms of a cruiser and a battleship that they'd managed to get working these didn't go as well as planned with the isolated destroyer Spartak being set upon by HMS Kara dock HMS Calypso who - rejoined the fleet after repairs and the destroyer wakeful for a while it looked like the Soviet destroyer might escape but then it turned its forward gun right off to join in firing at its pursuers and the blast shattered the bridge the wheelhouse fixtures and the fittings injured the navigator and destroyed all the charts and navigational instruments which promptly resulted in the ship running headlong aground onto a reef and thus been forced to surrender a suspecting that the destroyer could not have been operating alone the British ships pressed on and they were right the cruiser Oleg which some of you might remember from the Battle of Tsushima was supposed to be around but instead they ran into the destroyer aft well and along with HMS vendetta and water gun they promptly captured this ship as well when it ran out of fuel during the high-speed pursuit and so on the 2nd of January 1919 the estonian navy gained two new ships renamed van bola and lenok along with a valuable prisoner the commissar of the Baltic Fleet one F F Raskolnikov who was found hiding under sacks of potatoes in this hold of the spartak between this and growing levels of sea ice the activities of the Soviet Navy took something of a downturn as a 1919 began in earnest instead the Estonian and British ships ran supplies and troops to and from the front line and conducted small amphibious attacks and Shore bombardments on Soviet troops in an attempt to help turn the tide of the Soviet offensive which had begun to reinvigorate itself and push back the British task force gradually began to rotate back to the UK with the original cruisers returning and the Caledon and Royalists taking over for the moment with the Gulf of Finland rapidly icing up most of these ships would also return home before January was out instead the focus of operations would drift to Latvia just down the coast where the Estonian Navy managed to rescue the provisional Latvian government as the country drifted into a three-way war between its own troops the Soviets and force of 20,000 German volunteers hoots shown up to fight well somebody and as it turned out almost anybody as the British had declined to loan or sell any of their newer ships the Estonians instead instead began to Hoover up the ex Russian vessels they found in Latvian ports and with British help also managed to secure a new icebreaker which would be quite useful given the cold month that lay ahead the Soviets took the break in the Gulf of Finland that was enforced by the ice to reorganize with it being decided that small matters like qualified sailors and an actual plan and provisions were compatible with communist thinking going forward part of having a plan included making repairs to the ships that were damaged during the voyage through the ice the previous year managing to get to dreadnoughts and one pre-dreadnought somewhat ready for action along with a number of submarines and destroyers although as coal was far more easily available compared to oil the pre-dreadnought Andrey / Vaz van II was initially the most useful of the battleships since its engines were coal-fired and an idea to redistribute the means of propulsion was scuppered in part by the lack of anybody with the necessary expertise to actually swap capital ship power plants around as the ice began to melt the three Russian capital ships and the cruiser Oleg were supported by two destroyer squadrons of four ships each and two submarine squadrons with three boats apiece with one more submarine about to come out of overhaul although the operational abilities of most of these ships were somewhat questionable against this the British forces needed rapid reinforcement since they didn't know exactly which Russian ships were actually working and not least because HMS Curacao also hit a mine and was sent home this left HMS Cleopatra HMS Galatia and HMS dragon along with three destroyers as the only Royal Navy force is available to aid the two Estonian destroyers recognizing this the first destroyer flotilla and part of the third destroyer flotilla was sent over all made up of the newest destroyer types and would later be followed by the second destroyer flotilla 7th submarine flotilla and as a number of small attack boats which left the Allied forces considerably more powerful in all aspects of naval forces with the exception of capital ships where the Russians held a decisive advantage by dint of being the only ones actually operating any battleships in the area over time other of the small Aerith user class cruisers would be rotated into the theater as well most of the Estonian Navy it's two destroyers and a number of smaller support ships would then be put to sea in May 1919 to once again conduct amphibious assaults and Shore bombardment support with Royal Navy units held in reserve against any sorties by Soviet vessels whilst the naval aspects of the operation were a success the land side of things went somewhat less successfully with all the activity causing the Russians to send out the one actually operational destroy they had at the time the garv rail along with a number of small craft to see just exactly what was going on this force ran into the cruiser HMS Cleopatra and three destroyers and decided that withdrawal was a better idea than continuing to face the incoming British fire by the end of May whilst Gavriel was still under repair the Soviets sortied with a much stronger force the dreadnought battleship Petropavlovsk the destroyer Hazard which had been made operational and a force of smaller ships this force would then be attacked by a number of times by British aircraft who managed to damage a minesweeper would be engaged in a fast running action by the three British cruisers along with seven destroyers the need to stay moving fast and constantly evading to avoid being hit by battleship shells meant that the engagement was somewhat inconclusive as was a separate and relatively lengthy encounter between Ozzie and Gavriel now repaired a few days later and the destroyers HMS vivacious and Voyager at the start of June however the two operational Soviet destroyers with Petropavlovsk in support ran into three British destroyers who in turn tried to draw them into a British laid minefield this didn't quite go to plan as an attempt to ambush the Soviet ships at the edge of the minefield with the submarine l55 went horribly wrong as the submarine accidentally surfaced after firing torpedoes turned and ran into a mine in the very minefield the Soviets were supposed to be running into which caused l55 to sink it would later be recovered and enter Soviet service another inconclusive destroyer skirmish followed and the Soviets managed to get another two destroyers operational by mid-june for a total of four but they were forced to put another hold on active operations when a couple of heavily armed forts in Kronstadt mutiny as the mutinies guns covered the entire anchorage this was something of a problem especially as the mutiny began to spread to other faults in the Petropavlovsk oleg and the other soviet ships that either remained loyal to the soviets or were sufficiently threatened into staying loyal and then ended up in a gunfight with their own coastal defences until troops could be called in to retake the now somewhat broken fortifications never one to miss an opportunity the commander of the British torpedo motor boats saw that the Soviet ships were now temporarily forced to anchor in the approaches to the harbour rather than the harbor itself and headed over to join the fun with CMD 4 and CM b7 albeit that sea mp7 had to drop out half way due to mechanical issues a CMD for the CMP standing for coastal motorboat approached only to find that it's one available torpedo was broken but with the Russians still eyeing the fort suspiciously they didn't notice the small craft frantically working on the torpedo almost right next to them with the weapon fixed it was then launched at the near Point Blank distance of 400 meters at the cruiser Oleg it's called a hit and the Oleg promptly began to roll over as the hit had flooded its primary boiler room whilst CMB for motor Donna way out to safety over the next few weeks both sides made efforts to reinforce their defenses and lay minefields with the British losing to mine sweepers ironically enough two enemy mines walls of Harris - Shore bombardments were also carried out July saw the carrier HMS of indicative arrive and promptly run aground which sparked a four-day effort by HMS Cleopatra and HMS Delhi to refloat it the ship brought a somewhat eccentric collection of floatplanes bombers fighters at recon aircraft with it which would variously operate from the carrier and on land in the forthcoming months while both sides sawed out the rest of July ineffectually shooting torpedoes at each other in various failed submarine attacks with the mutiny in Kronstadt suppressed and the Soviet forces regrouping for another offensive the British and Estonian forces were faced with a stark choice massively reinforced the naval presence in the theatre or try and reduce the Soviet fleet down once again since more and more Soviet vessels were evidently coming back online this resulted in a plan for a combined arms operations against the anchored Soviet fleet using the cover of an air attack as a distraction 9 motor torpedo boats would aim to capitalise on the success of CMB for with their targets being the bases God destroyer and then rather ambitiously the battleships Petropavlovsk and andrei / hassan ii a submarine tender and armored Cruiser and two regular cruisers plus at the gate to the main dock and so in the early morning hours of the 18th of August 8 1919 a pair of short 1/8 for float planes appeared in the sky and started dropping bombs and flares the Russian ships activated the searchlights to try and help what anti-aircraft guns they had target the intruders which rather usefully helped to illuminate their own positions of the nine motor torpedo boats present seven were operational on the night with one still undergoing repairs in Harbor and CMB 86 having developed mechanical issues on the way to the attack a c mb 86 had been assigned to target the armored Cruiser Rorick which was therefore now theoretically safe c mb 24 began her attack run on the guard destroyer this night it was the Gavriel and launched its torpedo which promptly nose dived into the seabed and exploded taking cmp 24 with it cmp 72 tasked with taking out the dock gate was also fired on by the destroyer which was still very much alive and c mb 72 was hit forcing it to turn back this left CMBS 31 79 and 88 on primary approach with 62 and for following up cunningly the first three swung past the neuro ver which was a fully stocked Soviet mine layer which somewhat understandably forced the Gavriel to cease fire for fear of leveling half the base with a missed shot all three leading boats then launched their torpedoes with CM b 31 scoring one hit out of two torpedoes launched on the under a purpose on e the cmp 79 scoring one hit for one launched against the old Cruiser pammi at as over which had been turned into a submarine tender and c mb 88 got a pair of torpedoes off at Petropavlovsk despite taking 75 percent casualties under fire once other guns in the harbor opened up but unfortunately both shots just missed taking chunks out of the wharf next to the battleship and hitting so close that it was initially thought that hits had actually been scored the CMB 88 meanwhile was rapidly filling with water and sank shortly thereafter on the way out c mb 79 collided with the inn CMB 62 and sank CMB 62 managed to rescue the crew only to then be hit in the fuel tank and explode making the fourth loss out of seven boats last to arrive was CMB for which fired at some more destroyers and missed and then tried to rescue the survivors of CMB 24 79 and 62 but was driven off by defensive fire from the Soviet ships all told the operation cost the Royal Navy form of their motor torpedo boats outright with 8 men killed and nine wounded and captured with CM b7 the boat that hadn't participated remaining unserviceable thus after repairs the force was down to four operational craft on the Soviet side the submarine tender slowly sank but this was a relatively little effective combat value the Andropov Hassan II did not sink but was taken in for repairs with a significant list but the damage combined with shortages of equipment parts and workers saw the ship out of action for pretty much the rest of this conflict the raid would mark the end of capital ship operations in the Gulf of Finland for a while however as although Petropavlovsk was undamaged the demands of war elsewhere would see its crew stripped for service in other theatres and the aforementioned shortages meant that the other dreadnought present whilst briefly theoretically operational would never actually put to sea during the course of this particular conflict with Soviet surface operations are thus curtailed they turned instead to their submarines and two weeks later the Pantera managed torpedo the destroyer HMS Victoria and evade counter-attack from the accompanying HMS AB deal the vitória would slowly sink with all surviving crew rescued by the Abdiel with eight men having been killed in the torpedo hit Victoria thus becoming the first major enemy warship sunk by the Soviet Navy a few days later the destroyer HMS a veralyn was also lost this time - friendly minds with September seeing the land war swinging back in the Estonians favored a number of large Russian forts came under attack and without clearance to deploy battleships the Royal Navy instead brought in the monitor HMS Erebus which had been on her way home following White Russian defeat at Murmansk and both sides laid down even more minefields three Russian destroyers sailing out at the end of October loaded with mines ran into the same minefield that claimed HMS varlam with the long-suffering agario being the first to hit a mine and sink followed in short order by the constant in and thus for border six days later the Erebus arrived and set up shop with five escorts off the Russian fortifications and promptly set about dismantling them with 15-inch gunfire a few days in the ship's fire was being corrected by Sopwith Camel acting as a spotter when the aircraft was apparently shot down by a pistol wielding Russian in an observation balloon who had been trying to do the same job for the fort and apparently didn't welcome the competition Erebus kept up the bombardment until she ran out of shells whereupon she we withdrew to resupply and then expended this new set of shells on the German division coming up from Latvia and then she headed home for good in December and during this period over 90 air raids were also launched against Kronstadt but the limited effectiveness of early bombs meant that although four Soviet ships were hit none of them were sunk or indeed heavily damaged whilst various ships still in harbour provided defensive fire support against the advancing Allied troops with the offensive power of Soviet naval forces in the area reduced to two operational destroyers and with winter closing in again the British forces moved south to Riga or Riga to help the Latvians again along with some French naval units that had shown up during the year the red navy was basically out of the game and available active units could be matched by the estonian navy's two destroyers and support craft and so despite having all four Ganga cloths in the baltic only Petropavlovsk had actually managed to accomplish anything with Sevastopol making occasional pretensions at operational status and the remaining two Ganga and Poltava spending the entire conflict in reserve with skeleton crews more dim Petrograd at the end of November Poltava caught fire waltz moored alongside the Admiralty shipyard and was badly damaged enough that it would never see operational service again and thus as the ice encroached the naval operations in the Baltic began to draw to a close with a ceasefire signed on the 2nd of January 1920 exactly one year after the Estonians had received their first two destroyers courtesy of the Soviet Navy and the ceasefire between the Russians and Estonians would bring the conflict to a close at least for now men the Baltic Sea area was anything but boring in 1919 oh hi Jesse yeah it was totally crazy and I'm just covering what happened on the water here we just released our second episode covering the events in Estonia and Latvia on the great war Channel and I can tell you it was just as crazy on land I'll definitely check that out and I'm sure some of my viewers will be interested as well all right thanks Drac and by the way hms coração sounds like some kind of Carnival cruise ship and it also makes me kind of thirsty actually good point it pretty much does anyway see you around Jesse that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 283,789

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Baltic Sea, Naval War 1919, Royal Navy, Red Navy, Estonian Navy, Kronstadt, CMB, C-class cruiser, HMS Erebus, HMS Vindictive, Oleg, Petropavlosk, Garavil, Pantera

Id: BhFlYw6lUsA

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019