The Tsar’s Finest
It happened 110 years ago today.
Here we see the submarine Bars (Snow Leopard), the first of a class of 24 planned boats for the Imperial Russian Navy, after being launched on 2 June 1915 at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd).
Note her Romanov eagle bow crest and four port topside “drop collar” torpedo launcher positions. Designed by a Polish-Russian submarine engineer, Prof. Stefan Karlovich Dzhevetskiy, the launchers were a cost-effective and easy way of carrying torpedoes and were used by both the French and Tsarist navies. However, the design proved an issue in winter months, especially in ice, and greatly shortened the lifespan of the weapons carried.
On 25 July 1915, the boat, under the command of LT V. F. Dudkin, entered service and became part of the 1st Division of the Baltic Sea Submarine Force, and would be operational for the next 22 months.
Russia. Baltic. Submarine Bars 1915-1917. Note: torpedoes carried in the Dzhevetsky drop collars
Designed by Maj. Gen. (Russian admiralty officers in non-line billets were listed as colonels and generals, not admirals) Ivan Grigorievich Bubnov, the head of the GUK (Main Directorate of Shipbuilding), the Bars class was probably the most advanced and effective Russian submarines until the late mid-1930s when the Malyutka (type M) class boats began entering service.
Russian submarines Volk and Bars (center), iced in over a Baltic Winter. 1915-1917.
At 223-feet oal, they had a displacement of 650 tons (780 submerged) and could operate down to 300 feet. This made them almost ideal for the Baltic. Keep in mind that today’s Sweden’s Blekinge (A26)-class SSKs under construction right now run just 216 feet overall.
Bars class submarine, via Spassky
Diesel electric (with German Krupp or Russian Ludwig Nobel Kolomna plant diesels, later augmented by some American-made engines sent from New London) powering twin screws, they could make 9 knots submerged (13 on the surface) and carried enough fuel and food for 14 days of operations.
Heavily armed, they had eight 18-inch torpedos carried on the deck in Dzhevetsky drop collar trapeeze systems, and another eight fish in fore and aft torpedo rooms with two tubes in each. A small deck gun or two and a light machine gun were added. Mines could also be carried.
The Russians were able to complete 20 Bars-type boats, of which four were lost during the Great War (including Bars) while three others sank in peacetime operations. Four, as well as two of the unfinished hulls, were captured by the Germans in 1917-18. Post-war, the Soviets kept a dozen of the class in operation into the 1930s, with at least two surviving until the 1950s in use as training ships and battery charging barges.
The Soviets considered them the first “modern” submarines in Russian service.
Evolution of Soviet subs from 1914-1955 with Bars-class at top
In 1993, in the Baltic Sea, in the area of Gotska Sandön Island, the Swedish minesweeper Landsort discovered a Bars-type submarine (most likely Bars herself, which went missing in May 1917) at a depth of 127 meters.
Cap ribbon and model of the Russian submarine Bars at Vladivostok
As for her father, designer Bubnov died of typhus during the Russian Civil War in 1919, aged just 47.
MG Bubnov, in front of the building Tsarist submarine Akula, in happier days