October 21, 1904. The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron was sailing through the North Sea on its way to fight Japan. The voyage ahead was 18,000 miles. The officers were exhausted and jumpy. Russian intelligence had been feeding them stories of Japanese officers with torpedoes around the Baltic and of torpedo boats built for Japan in British yards. None of it was true.
Late that evening, the supply ship Kamchatka, last in the Russian line, saw a passing Swedish ship and radioed that she was under attack by torpedo boats. A few hours later, just before 1 a.m. on October 22, the battleships switched on their searchlights in the fog off Dogger Bank. Small boats lay in the beams. Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky thought he saw a torpedo boat and ordered the squadron to open fire.
The targets were British fishing trawlers from Hull.
Shot by her own side
The boats belonged to the Gamecock fleet, about forty trawlers working the Dogger Bank with their nets down. With the gear in the water they could not run. The fishermen at first welcomed the searchlights, thinking the warships were British.
Aurora was sailing apart from the battleships with the cruiser Dmitrii Donskoi. In the confusion, seven battleships in formation took both cruisers for Japanese warships and fired on them. Aurora was hit five times. The ship’s chaplain was killed, along with a sailor, and another man was badly wounded. Russian gunnery was so poor that it may have saved lives on both sides. The battleship Oryol reportedly fired more than 500 shells without hitting anything.
The trawler Crane was sunk. Her skipper, George Smith, and his mate were killed. Four other trawlers were damaged and six fishermen wounded, one of whom died a few months later. Five men from the fleet later received the Albert Medal for their rescue work, presented by King Edward VII in May 1905.
The crisis
Britain was furious. Newspapers called the Russian squadron pirates. The Royal Navy ordered 28 battleships of the Home Fleet to raise steam, and British cruisers shadowed the Russians down the coast of Spain and Portugal. Britain was allied to Japan, so a war with Russia was a real possibility, all over a fishing fleet.
Rozhestvensky was ordered into Vigo, where he left behind the officers held responsible. An international commission of inquiry, set up under the Hague Convention, sat in Paris from January to February 1905. It found the trawlers had been properly lit and fishing lawfully. Russia paid £66,000 in compensation. A memorial to the dead fishermen still stands in Hull.
The squadron sailed on. Part of it went through the Suez Canal, and the newer battleships went the long way around Africa. They met again at Madagascar.
Tsushima and Manila
Seven months later, on May 27, 1905, the fleet met Admiral Togo’s ships in the Tsushima Strait. It was one of the most one-sided defeats in naval history. Aurora sailed in Rear Admiral Oskar Enkvist’s cruiser squadron. She was only lightly damaged, but a shell killed her captain, Evgeny Egoriev, and fourteen of her crew died with him.
That night Aurora and Oleg were attacked by Japanese torpedo boats and gave up trying to break north to Vladivostok. With the cruiser Zhemchug, they turned south. Enkvist moved his flag to Aurora and took the three ships to Manila, where the Americans interned them until the war ended. Egoriev was buried at sea on the way. The Zhemchug’s luck ran out nine years later, torpedoed at anchor in Penang by SMS Emden.
Aurora went home to the Baltic.
The shot
During the First World War she patrolled the Baltic and bombarded the shore, and in 1915 she was rearmed with fourteen 6-inch guns. In late 1916 she came to Petrograd for repairs. The city was cold, hungry and close to revolt. When the February Revolution broke out in 1917, her crew mutinied and shot their captain, Mikhail Nikolsky, after he refused to carry a red flag.
On the evening of October 25, 1917 (Old Style calendar), Aurora lay on the Neva. Her crew had sided with the Bolsheviks. Earlier that day she had been sent to clear loyalist cadets from the Nikolayevsky Bridge. At 9:40 p.m. she fired a single blank round from her forecastle gun.
According to Soviet lore, that was the signal for Red Guards and soldiers to begin the assault on the Winter Palace. The Provisional Government fell. Soviet historians turned that one blank shot into the founding image of the revolution. The real taking of the palace was messier and slower than the films later showed. The shot itself became iconic anyway, and in 1927 the ship received the Order of the Red Banner.
A permanent address
Aurora did not escape the next war. In 1941 her guns were taken off for the land defence of Leningrad, and the ship herself, docked at Oranienbaum, was shelled and bombed. On September 30, 1941, she was damaged and sank in the harbour. She was raised and repaired after the war.
Aurora opened as a museum ship in 1957. In the 1980s she was rebuilt at the Admiralty Shipyard, and so much of the lower hull had rotted that it was cut away and replaced with a new welded one built to the original drawings. The old bottom was towed out into the Gulf of Finland and left near the shore. Another overhaul followed in Kronstadt from September 2014, and she returned to her berth on July 16, 2016. She is moored on the Bolshaya Nevka near the Nakhimov Naval School and still flies a special version of the Russian naval ensign.
Not every Russian warship from that era got such a quiet retirement. The Varyag ended up as a floating casino before becoming an aircraft carrier.
One ship. Friendly fire, Tsushima, a revolution, a sinking, and a permanent address.
