110 years ago, a war broke out between two empires - Russia and Japan. It was believed - for control over Manchuria and Korea. Although events on land and at sea have long been described in detail, “blank spots” have remained in its history. These include an incident that took place far from the theater of operations.
OPEN FIRE
On the evening of October 8, 1904, fog hung over the North Sea. On the horizon, at the Dogger Shallows, the lights of English fishing vessels flickered, as detachments of the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron, sent to the aid of Port Arthur besieged by the Japanese, passed one after another. The last to go were the four Borodino-class battleships, and the Kamchatka floating workshop, which had lagged behind due to an accident in the car, kept 30 miles behind them. The ships were in international waters far from the war, but …
At about 20:00 the radio station of the flagship battleship "Prince Suvorov" received an unexpected message from the floating workshop: "Destroyers are chasing. Attack from all directions. There are about eight destroyers. We came closer to the cable road”(185 m). "Kamchatka" tried to break away from them, firing back and changing course. "Did you launch mines?" - asked "Suvorov". Recall that self-propelled mines were then called torpedoes, hence the name of the class of ships - destroyers. “At least it wasn’t visible,” replied “Kamchatka” and fell silent. Squadron Chief Vice Admiral Z. P. Rozhestvensky ordered to tell the ships: "Expect the attack of the destroyers from behind." The Kamchatka station started working again, asking to indicate the coordinates of the battleships. Sensing something was wrong, the admiral ordered to answer vaguely: “You should first move away from danger, change the course, then show your latitude and longitude,and you will be shown the course. " The radiograms stopped arriving, but at 23 o'clock the flagship's radio operators received: "Suvorov, show your course." “Stay close to the (Dogger Bank) bank,” the admiral replied succinctly, and was again asked for coordinates. “It looked like the Japanese were talking to us,” Lieutenant Vyrubov, a mine officer of “Suvorov,” later wrote to his relatives.
By midnight, the battleships approached Dogger Bank. The tension caused by the incident with the "Kamchatka" subsided, and those who were not on duty went to the cabins and cockpits. At 0 hours 55 minutes the captain of the 2nd rank V. I. Semyonov was awakened by the roar of shots. He jumped out onto the aft bridge: “What happened? Who are they shooting at? " - and heard: "Torpedo boats, mine attack!"
“From the front bridge I saw the following picture,” Semyonov recalled. - To the right and in front, at a distance of several miles, a row of lights could be seen, between which at times flashes of signals flashed (this was a detachment of battleships of Rear Admiral D. G. Felkerzam). Then I saw in the beams of the searchlights to the right and in front, but much closer, in the distance of several cables, a small one-tube and one-masted steamer, apparently, crossed the course of the squadron. Another, similar to him, walked with the first almost countercourse and seemed to be going to ram into the right cheekbone of "Emperor Alexander III". “The beams of our searchlights randomly darted in all directions, they were crossed by the yellow-fiery bursts of shots,” testified the engineer of the battleship “Eagle” V. P. Kostenko.
“No further than 5 cables from us in the beams of searchlights, a ship with a red pipe, with a broken mast, with a destroyed bridge floated, having fallen on board,” - A. S. narrated in the novel Tsushima. Novikov Priboi, who served as a battalion on the Orel in 1904.
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And then the searchlights on the left flashed and illuminated the battleships, the new enemy was fired upon, but he turned out to be the cruisers Aurora and Dmitry Donskoy. After 10 minutes, a vertical searchlight rose over the Suvorov, signaling to cease fire. The squadron moved on and on October 13 assembled in the Spanish port of Vigo. There, seamen from different ships shared their impressions of the Gull incident - this is how they dubbed the incident in the North Sea at the place of registration of fishing vessels. And from the newspapers they learned that English trawlers had suffered from the fire of Russian battleships: the Crane sank, Molmein, Mino, Snipe, Hull and Majestic were damaged, one fisherman was killed, six were wounded. An anti-Russian campaign immediately flared up in England.
Igor Boechin