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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, May 28, 2025: Part Eagle, Part Phoenix

Above we see a port bow view of the Tsar’s brand-new Borodino-class squadron battleship Orel (also seen transliterated in some Western sources as “Oryol” and “Ariol”), taken in the Baltic soon after her completion in September 1904.

She had a curious history that saw her rushed to the losing side of one of the worst naval defeats of the 20th Century, some 120 years ago this week, after an 18,000-mile shakedown cruise. She would then be reborn to fight the Germans in China (!) while under a Japanese flag, return to her homeland under very different circumstances, and meet her ultimate fate at the hands of budding technology that would echo into another Pacific war.

The Borodinos

In the 1900s, the Imperial Russian Navy was full speed ahead to create three top-notch fleets: one in the Baltic to defend against the Germans (or attack Swedes, who knows); a second in the Black Sea to take on the Turks who were rapidly rearming with new vessels from America and Britain; and a third in the Pacific to be able to hold on to its Manchurian possessions which had been essentially stolen from Japan after the latter’s cakewalk victory against China in 1895.

A key acquisition during this period was the one-off 388-foot tumblehome hulled battleship Tsesarevich, which had been built in France at Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée, La Seyne-sur-Mer. The same yard had produced a series of 12,000-ton leviathans for the French Navy (Jauréguiberry et. al.) and patterned the new Russian ship along those lines.

Weighing in at 13,000 tons due to her thicker armor (up to 10 inches of good German Krupp plate), Tsarevich was powered by 20 Belleville water-tube boilers that ate coal like it was going out of style. Armament was in two pairs of impressive Russian-built (Obukhov) French-designed (Canet) 12″/40 (30.5 cm) Pattern 1895 guns mounted in double turrets fore and aft, with six French-made Canet Model 1892 6-inch guns in double turrets arrayed along the hull of the ship. Capable of 18 knots and able to steam over 6,000nm before needing more coal, she was capable of deploying to the Pacific, which was to be her homeport at Port Arthur.

With Tsesarevich as a cue, the Russians embarked on a campaign to build at least five (with potential for up to ten) new ships in the St. Petersburg area for their Baltic fleet. Just nine feet longer than their inspiration but with heavier engines, thicker armor, and larger turrets (but with the same general armament), the Russian admiralty packed another 1,400 tons onto essentially the same hull. This gave them a draft pushing 30 feet– on a hull just 397 feet long!

The new ships, the Borodino class, would have significantly less coal bunkerage, cutting their range in half, which was not seen as a hindrance, as their Baltic role would ensure they never operated very far from a Russian port. When loaded with more coal than designed, their protective armor belt submerged, and their 6-inch guns rode so low and close to the waves as to be useless at all but point-blank range.

Equipped with old-style (1880s-designed) French Lugeol stadiametric rangefinders, which typically maxed out after 4,000m, their guns were handicapped when it came to fire control. The Russians made a move to change these out for more modern British Barr and Stroud coincidence rangefinders, but training in their use was minimal before the class was rushed to war with Japan.

The five ships of the class were all ordered within months of each other from yards around Saint Petersburg, with Borodino constructed at the New Admiralty Shipyard; Imperator Aleksandr III, Knyaz Suvorov, and Slava contracted at the Baltic Works (now OJSC Baltic); and our subject, Orel, ordered from the Galernyi Island Shipyard (now JSC Admiralty Yard). The cost for each ran between 13.4 and 14.5 million rubles, with Orel being the cheapest.

Meet Orel

Our subject was at least the fifth ship to carry the Russian name for “Eagle” in the history of the Imperial Navy. The first was the first sea-going warship of the Russian Empire, a Dutch-style three-mast pinnace ordered by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1667 to protect Russian merchant ships on the Caspian Sea from pirates. Of note, the ship’s crew consisted of 20 Dutch sailors and officers and 35 Russian musketeers.

Our Orel was laid down on 20 May 1900, launched 6 July 1902, and– despite sinking to the bottom of Kronstadt during a storm while fitting out on 7 May 1904 and settling with a 24-degree list– was commissioned on 1 October 1904 following three weeks of builder’s trials.

Her construction was overseen by Russian Maj. Gen. Mikhail Karlovich Yakovlev, the senior shipbuilder of the Admiralty.

Those who are savvy with military history will realize that Orel entered the fleet eight months into the Russo-Japanese War, at a time when the bulk of the Russian Pacific Fleet was bottled up by the Japanese in their besieged homeport at Port Arthur.

The bad news for Orel was that, with her three other finished sisters (Slava was still under construction), and almost everything in the Baltic fleet that could float, would be rushed to the Pacific to clock in against the Japanese, changing the course of the war.

At least that was the plan.

War!

Covering the nightmarish 7-month, 18,000-mile voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet (renamed the 2nd Pacific Squadron) to reach the Tsushima Straits from St. Petersburg is a bit beyond the scope of this post. We will be more narrow in our focus, relying on Orel’s part in the trip– which she began on 15 October, just two weeks after she was commissioned.

Not a misprint. She sailed to war a fortnight after hoisting her colors for the first time, and just six months after she sank pierside while fitting out.

With so many battleships rushed to completion in a country without a huge maritime tradition, the Russians were scraping the barrel to crew Orel. Many were pulled from shoreside assignments and the far-away Caspian Sea flotilla and Black Sea fleet. As the standard term of service for new Russian recruits was seven years active and four reserve, many of the men aboard were of the latter category and less than enthusiastic when it came to returning to the colors amid a war they did not understand.

Her skipper, Capt. (1st rate) Nikolay Viktorovich Jung (Naval Cadet Corps 1876), had dallied with the Narodnaya Volya revolutionary movement as a young officer, for which he had been arrested and blackballed for a time. Despite nearly 30 years of service, his largest command before Orel was a 4,600-ton cruiser, having spent most of his career on training ships.

Her XO, Capt. (2nd rate) Konstantin Leopoldovich Shvede, had entered the Navy in 1884 but had never held a seagoing command and had spent most of his career in shoreside service as a functionary. His last assignment before Orel was as the officer in charge of the mess hall at the Kryukov barracks.

A few capable young officers, such as LT (future RADM and polar explorer) Nikolay Nikolaevich Zubov, quickly sought transfer to other vessels. Zubov, reassigned to the destroyer Blestyashchy, fought his ship at Tsushima until it sank under his feet and made it to internment in Shanghai for the rest of the war.

Some among her enlisted only narrowly missed the brig, or worse. This included one of her senior sailors, Alexey Silych Novikov-Priboy, who had been cashiered as an “unreliable person” for spreading revolutionary propaganda while on the old cruiser Minin, but, with the fleet in need of bodies, was reassigned to Orel. Soon, with the help of a like-minded engineering officer, he maintained a full-blown revolutionary library aboard. As he was paymaster steward, Novikov-Priboy had contact with every member of the crew.

Orel suffered from numerous incidents of sabotage on the way to the Pacific, with steel shavings found in her engines, a propeller shaft nearly ruined on the outbound cruise, a grounding, a rudder cable incident that forced her to stop briefly at Tangier, and one good-sized fire reported. Still, she pressed on to meet her destiny, albeit punctuated by breakdowns.

Orel and her three sisters formed the Russian First Division, with Squadron commander, VADM Zinovy Rozhestvensky, flying his flag from Orel’s sister, Knyaz Suvorov. The Second and Third Divisions, respectively, were formed of increasingly older battlewagons. Of note, the Second Division commander, RADM Baron Dmitry Gustavovich von Folkersahm, who had previously been the naval gunnery school commander, was ill with cancer. He was pulled out of convalescence for his seagoing billet and would perish in his cabin while on the cruise, well before the force met the Japanese.

The morning of 27 May 1905, the end came as the Russian battleline was crossed by that of ADM Togo’s Japanese Combined Fleet. The revolutionary Novikov-Priboy recalled that, with the straits approaching, Orel’s crew held a mass on deck just before the battle, “crossing themselves furiously as if swatting away flies.”

Our subject fired the first shots of the battle at 11:42, hurling 30 12-inch shells unsuccessfully at a distant Japanese cruiser that was shadowing on the horizon some 9,000 yards out. Rozhestvensky’s flagship, Knyaz Suvorov, the lead ship in the Russian battle line, later opened fire at the Japanese battleship Mikasa, Togo’s flagship, at 14:05. Over the next five hours, the battle went very badly for the Borodino class.

Imperator Aleksandr III turned turtle and sank at 18:50, leaving but four survivors.

Knyaz Suvorov, with Rozhestvensky switching his flag to a destroyer, sank with all hands at 19:20.

Borodino went up in a flash when a shell from the battleship Fuji ignited her magazine at 19:30, leaving just one survivor. Gunlayer Semyon Semyonovich Yushchin swam out of a flooded casemate, held onto a floating debris, and was picked up by the Japanese destroyer Oboro later that night.

Orel was the only battleship of the First Division to survive the maelstrom; her three other sisters were sent to the bottom with just five men living to tell the tale. She limped off into the night, riddled with holes and her decks filled with mangled bodies. Her skipper was mortally wounded.

The next morning, falling in with RADM Nebogatov’s Third Division, including the old battleship Imperator Nikolai I (his flag) and the two small coastal battleships General-Admiral Apraksin and Admiral Seniavin, the badly damaged Orel, under the command of her XO, surrendered to the Japanese just after 1300 on 28 May, the group’s withdrawal to Vladivostok cut off by the Japanese.

Capt. Jung, who succumbed to his wounds, was buried at sea as the group sailed toward captivity.

Taken under escort by the battleship Asahi and the armored cruiser Asama to Maizuru Navy Yard in Japan, Orel’s crew was moved ashore, politely, and would spend the rest of the war under a very gentlemanly confinement, a stark contrast to how enemy POWs were treated by the Emperor’s forces in WWII. They were repatriated in February 1906.

Orel lost 43 killed in addition to Jung and had over 80 seriously wounded, casualties that amounted to about 15 percent of her complement.

One of those nursing a life-changing injury was LT Leonid Vasilyevich Larionov, the battleship’s junior navigator. Entering the service in 1901 and cutting his teeth on the cruisers Africa and Abrek, Larionov was at his battle station in the conning tower of Orel during the fight. Wounded seriously in the head, he persevered. He had managed to destroy the battleship’s sensitive papers before reaching Japan, keeping one of her logbooks hidden on his person. In captivity, he carefully began the task of reconstructing the ship’s brief history.

Knocked out by Japanese shrapnel while in command of the left bow 6-inch turret, LT Konstantin Petrovich Slavinsky later reported:

At about 3 o’clock I felt a strong blow to the tower, my eyes were blinded by the explosion on the roof, I was thrown from the command platform and lost consciousness. When I came to, I saw that I was lying on the floor of the tower, there was blood all around, a stream of which was flowing from my forehead, the gunners were trying to lift me up and arguing whether I was killed or just wounded. Having forbidden them to see me off, I got to the operations point with the help of the porters, where they bandaged two deep wounds to my head and a knocked out left eye, after which I was placed in a room in front of the operations point, where I again lost consciousness from severe pain.

Slavinsky recovered enough to help lead firefighting efforts until knocked unconscious by another shell. He spent three months in a Japanese hospital in Maizuru, wearing an eyepatch for the rest of his life.

Orel survived some serious damage. Some reports contend she had 76 hits (five from 12-inch shells, two from 10-inch, nine from 8-inch, 39 from 6-inch, and 21 from smaller shells). Russian sources, namely from engineer Vladimir Polievktovich Kostenko of Orel (who helped Novikov-Priboy store his library), cited that the ship suffered more than 140 hits.

New Jersey-born Lloyd Carpenter Griscom, the 33-year-old U.S. Minister to Japan, was able to almost immediately obtain several very detailed images of the captured Russian battlewagon, a vessel considered well-protected at the time. It is known that he passed them on to Teddy Roosevelt personally.

As they showed Russian/German armor (on ships largely designed with help by the French) under the effects of Japanese/British weapons (especally the Shimose powder/cordite filled shells and the new Barr and Stroud FA3 coincidence rangefinders and the Dumaresq, the latter an early mechanical fire control computer), the snaps were surely of great interest to the man who was readying his “Great White Fleet” to circle the globe.

The photos were likely widespread in Japan at the time, as one of Orel’s senior signalmen, one V.P. Zefirov, who filled at least three journals with drawings during his captivity in Japan (preserved in Russian archives), depicted several in his work.

Rebirth

By far the most powerful Russian warship captured at Tsushima, Orel was an important trophy. Further, unlike the Tsar’s ships salvaged from the mud of Port Arthur, her crew did not have extensive opportunity (and will) to wreck her.

Renamed Iwami on 6 June 1905 after a traditional feudal province, now the western part of Shimane Prefecture, the former Russian battlewagon was presented a statue of Umashimachi as the guardian deity of the ship by Mononobe Shrine in Oda City. The Japanese also renamed the other four captured Russian warships from Tsushima on the same day, with Imperator Nikolai I renamed the battleship Iki, Admiral Senyavin renamed the coastal defense ship Mishima, General Admiral Apraksin dubbed the coastal defense ship Okishima, and the destroyer Bedovy renamed the destroyer Satsuki.

This set up Orel for an extensive 29-month reconstruction which saw her French Bellville boilers replaced by Japanese-built Miyabara boilers, her superstructure and funnels rebuilt lower to help change her overloading, and her armament greatly modified. Retaining her Russian 12-inchers (the Japanese had a quantity of shells and replacement guns captured at Port Arthur), new gun tubes were later ordered from the Muroran Works of the Japan Steel Works.

Her heavy twin 6-inch turrets were placed by single 8″/45 Armstrong guns in deck mounts as used in the cruiser Takasago, further saving weight. Her 3″/48 Canet guns were landed, replaced by fewer Japanese Type 41 guns of the same caliber. Likewise, her 47/40 Hotchkiss and 37/20 Hotchkiss light guns were removed, replaced by a smaller number of Yamauchi-type 47mm guns. Even two of her four torpedo tubes were removed, saving only her twin submerged beam tubes, which were upgraded from 381mm to 450mm. The above-water torpedo tubes at the bow and stern were eliminated.

Emerging from the Kure Naval Arsenal on 26 November 1907, at the time, Iwami was the newest battleship in the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fleet at the time, excluding the two new Vickers-built Katori-class battleships, which were only slightly larger and only delivered in May 1906.

Assigned to the 1st Fleet, Iwami was rated a first-class battleship and saw serious service with the Japanese fleet for the next five years, only re-rated to a second-class coastal defense ship in 1912 after the two 20,000-ton Satsuma-class and two 21,000-ton Kawachi-class dreadnoughts were completed under the 1907 Warship Supplement Program.

The U.S. Navy, keeping tabs on the Emperors’ increasingly suspect fleet from 1905 onward, dutifully photographed every Japanese warship when encountered in the region. Cataloged by the Office of Naval Intelligence, this left a ton of photos in the NHHC’s files.

Another War

When the Great War began, Japan, an ally of Britain, jumped at the chance to gobble up German colonies in the Pacific. Iwami helped in this task, joining in the reduction and capture of the Kaiser’s treaty port in China.

Added to the VADM Kato Sadakichi’s Second Fleet, from September to November 1914, Iwami was exclusively engaged in bombardment of the artillery batteries in the Tsingtao (Qingdao) area, adding her 12- and 8-inch shells to the more than 43,000 fired into the German positions during the siege. As Sadakichi’s force was made up primarily of cruisers (Tokiwa, Tone, Chitose, Akashi, Niitaka, Otoha, Kasagi, and Yakumo) and destroyers, Iwami was an important asset.

Spending the rest of the war on duty in Japanese home waters, Iwami was tapped for an ironic mission on 9 January 1918 when she received orders to leave Kure as part of the 5th Squadron, with the battleship Ashai under RADM Kato Kanji, bound for Vladivostok, where the newly-formed Bolshevik government was in charge.

Her marines and armed naval infantry spearheaded the seizure of the port on 6 April, and Iwami would remain in Russian waters for most of the next four years until the final Japanese withdrawal.

With the Japanese evacuation from Russia, Iwami was removed from the fleet list in September 1922.

The following May, she was ordered disarmed and prepped, along with the old battleships Aki and Satsuma, the unfinished Tosa, and the Hizen (former Russian battleship Retvizan, salvaged from Port Arthur) for use as target ships in line with the naval limits of the Washington Conference of 1921–22.

In July 1924, the ships were used for the Japanese equivalent of Billy Mitchell’s Virginia Capes experiment in airpower, subjected to bomb runs from aircraft from the carrier Hosho, Navy H-450 and F-5 flying boats, and land-based Army T2 bombers. Heavily damaged over two days, Iwami slipped under the waves near Jogashima on 9 July.

Epilogue

Iwami’s armament outlived her, with her Armstrong guns emplaced in the coastal defenses around Tokyo Bay and on Iki Island in the Strait of Tsushima (what irony).

One of her Russian 12-inch guns was installed vertically in the schoolyard of Iwataki Elementary School in Yosano, Kyoto, in 1927, where it remains, surrounded by inert shells.

The statue of Umashimachi carried by Iwami from 1905 through 1922 was returned to the Mononobe Shrine in Oda City, where it remains today.

In Japanese service, her skippers included several officers who went on to lead the fleet in the 1920s and 30s, including Admiral Baron Sadakichi Kato, and vice admirals Kumazo Shirane, Ishibashi Hajime, and Yoshita Masaki. Kato had an outsized influence on Japanese naval thinking, advocating a “big-ship, big-gun doctrine” that ultimately led to the construction of the super battleships of the Yamato class.

As for Orel’s Russian crew that rode her into captivity, Capt. Shvede, the XO who was in command when she surrendered, was court-martialled when he returned to Russia in 1906. Acquitted as he was following RADM Nebogatov’s orders, he never did command another ship at sea, although he did continue in shoreside service until 1917. He passed in 1933.

The revolutionary Novikov-Priboy would become a noted writer under Soviet rule– after penning scathing essays on the loss of his ship and the Russian fleet at Tsushima, which sent him into exile in Western Europe until 1913. Serving on hospital trains along the Eastern Front during the Great War, his fame grew under Stalin with the publication of the rather spicy novel “Tsushima,” which saw seven printings. During WWII, he wrote numerous patriotic articles about the Red Banner fleet, having found his patriotism. He passed in 1944, aged 67.

The good LT Larionov, who saved Orel’s logs, recovered from his wounds while in Japanese custody, then returned home and served on the Naval Staff. Commanding the minelayer Neva during the Great War, he fell in with the Reds post-Revolution, then worked as a historian in the Central Naval Museum in Leningrad, compiling the official history of Tsushima and Orel. His shoulder straps that he wore in the battle are on display in the Peter the Great Naval History Museum.

LT Slavinsky, who gave his eye to the service, returned to naval service and by early 1918 was a captain in the Volga-Caspian Flotilla. Post-war, he was tossed into a Red prison for three years. Released in 1923, he worked as an engineer in Soviet shipyard concerns until 1930, when he was arrested on charges of “espionage” during the Gulag Archipelago phase of Soviet history. Sentenced to 10 years at hard labor, he was released in 1940 and died in exile in remote Syktyvkar, some 500 miles north of Moscow.

Since 1905, the Russians have recycled the name Orel several times. This included an auxiliary cruiser in the Siberian Flotilla during the Great War and being attached to at least two CVN projects (Project 1153 and 1160) in the late 1960s – early 1970s that never left the drawing board.

Since 1993, a Project 949A Antey-class (NATO “Oscar II”) SSBN, (K-266) has carried the name Orel as part of the 11th Submarine Division of the Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

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