By 12 noon on October 16, 1914, the torpedo cruiser "Berk-i Satvet" completed the artillery bombardment and, according to the order from the "Midilli" (formerly "Breslau"), withdrew to the sea. The destruction in the city was palpable, but not yet catastrophic. And at this time the place of "Burke" was taken by "Midilli". At about 12 o'clock, he appeared on the horizon and soon came close to the breakwaters of the bay, bristling with twelve 105-mm main guns.
Soon the frigatten-captain Paul Kettner gave the order to open fire. The city was slowly covered with acrid black smoke. Major General Andrei Frantsevich Sokolovsky, who made every effort to establish contact with the scattered garrison and gather all the forces, could only watch the cruiser shoot the defenseless city. The general did not have a single combat-ready artillery piece at his disposal.
Shells rained down on oil tanks and the port elevator, on cement plants and transport ships, on warehouses and peaceful quarters. The execution was carried out almost point-blank. Sometimes the fire was fired from a distance of 6 cables, i.e. just over a kilometer. Novorossiysk drowned in horror. Here is how this October nightmare described one of the direct perpetrators of this war crime:
“Death and horror are raging on the shore, and we are looking for new targets - other cisterns with kerosene, warehouses for vegetables and firewood, then the ships standing in the bay replace each other.
Soon we see flames vibrating everywhere and thick black smoke hanging over the city. A snow-white cloud over the coast indicates the explosion of the boilers of some factory, where work was actively going on for several hours.
You can see people running through the streets of the city and frantically rushing carriages, seized with panic horror. Where to run to? Where will the next projectiles fall? Pillars of fire rise again, and on mortally wounded ships, fire engulfs bridges and superstructures, burning brightly against a black background of smoke. Two small steamers are standing at the pier. A volley - and in a minute only one of them is visible, and a sheaf of flame bursts out of the other!
The deed of destruction is done. Fire is raging on the shore, fed by kerosene flowing from the cisterns, which, apparently, lit the nearest part of the city … Even late in the evening we see from the side a bloody cloud over Novorossiysk."
The shelling ended at 12:40. During this time, the cruiser fired over three hundred 16-kilogram shells at the defenseless city. As Governor Vladimir Nikolayevich Baranovsky reported to the governor in the Caucasus, Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov, in Tiflis, “all the oil tanks, two steamers, and the distillation plant were on fire”. In addition, the report, addressed directly to the headquarters of the Caucasian army, provided a whole list of destroyed and damaged infrastructure facilities, including an elevator, port cranes and even railway cars.
The flames that engulfed the oil tanks continued until October 24 (November 6). 19,200 tons of oil burned out, covering the entire unfortunate city with black sediments. Port facilities were also badly damaged. So, according to the estimate compiled by the engineer of the Novorossiysk port, engineer Zharsky, "the cost of repairing damaged structures will be expressed in the amount of 15167 rubles."
Batum saluted the enemy while Russian ships were sinking
Tragic events also affected the civilian ships that were in the Tsemesskaya (Novorossiysk) bay at that time. So, despite the demands and pleas of the shipping company's agents, directed to the captains of the ships to leave the water area immediately, only the transport ship "Batum" was able to leave the bay. Later, a lot of questions arose to the crew of this vessel. First, "Batum" at the exit from the bay saluted (!) To the enemy, who also suddenly greeted such a friendly ship. And, secondly, having met the Otvazhny steamer in the Gelendzhik region, heading for Novorossiysk with 60 passengers on board, Batum did not even warn colleagues about the danger.
As a result, the Otvazhny coaster crossed with Midilli in the Penai lighthouse area. At first, the captain of the steamer Danilov mistook this cruiser for a Russian warship. When the Turkish flag flew over him, Danilov threw the ship onto a sandbank near the village of Kabardinka so as not to risk the lives of passengers who were immediately disembarked. True, it is worth mentioning that the captain "moored" so successfully that the next day he was able to independently withdraw from the shallows and reach Novorossiysk on his own.
In the bay itself, complete chaos was going on. On the eastern side of the water area, having received multiple damages, the steamship Fyodor Feofani sank. The motor schooner "Rus" practically burned out. The captain of the cargo-passenger steamer of the Russian Society of Shipping and Trade "Nikolay" Mr. Artifeksov, seeing the artillery horror that was taking place, managed to transport the ship aground and evacuate passengers ashore towards the railway station.
Captain of the steamship "Chatyrdag" Tarlanov went even further. Assessing the scale of the bombing, Tarlanov decided that a landing would follow after it, and, therefore, his ship could be in the hands of the Turks. The captain, in order to prevent the capture of his steamer, flooded the engine and boiler rooms, opening the kingstones. However, due to shelling, a fire broke out on the steamer, a cargo consisting of barrels of oil and sacks of flour burned.
Near the Cabotage pier a battle for survivability flared up on the Trud steamer, which received hardly a direct hit from a shell into the hull. At the same time, his brother unfortunately, the 630-ton sailing ship "Doob", moored nearby, sank to the bottom. Another tragedy broke out at the mooring at pier number 2. The nose of the Russian transport ship "Pyotr Regir" was on fire. Slightly more fortunate was the Panagius Vagliano steamer, which was covered with shrapnel, but the ship managed to stay afloat. As a result, the port technician Astafyev estimated the cost of repairing damaged ships in the amount of 5 to 35 thousand rubles.
At the same time, foreign ships were also in the harbor - two English steamers ("Frederick" and "Volvertorn") and one Dutch ship ("Admiral de Ruyter"). The English freighter Wolverthorn and the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter were unharmed, but the Frederick was less fortunate. The crew at the beginning took the shooting for a salute and poured out onto the deck to gawk at the sudden amusement, when fragments rained down on the superstructure, the captain immediately ordered the crew to go ashore. As a result, "Frederick" suffered from the fire and got a trim on the nose.
By two o'clock in the afternoon, the enemy ships disappeared over the horizon, leaving the scene of the crime. Around the same time, the head of the Novorossiysk garrison, Major General Sokolovsky, received a report that enemy ships were found in the Shirokaya Balka area, which had launched the boats. The observers reasonably assumed that a landing was being prepared. Sokolovsky immediately dispatched a Cossack squadron to the Balka area under the command of the captain Kryzhanovsky, while the general himself at that time was gathering scattered detachments of the garrison in order to personally arrive at the place of the proposed landing.
However, it was not possible to get even with the enemy. Polesaul soon reported to Sokolovsky that two enemy ships, in fact, were present in the Shirokaya Balka area, and the boats were also lowered into the water, but the sailors' actions were limited to several depth measurements without landing on the shore. The ships themselves could not be accurately identified, except for their belonging to the Ottoman Empire.
The victims of the bombing and the fate of the attackers
Despite the major destruction and flooding of some ships in the bay, large casualties were avoided. Only two people were killed, one civilian was wounded, not counting the wounded donors from the 229th squad of the state militia. During the shelling, as the author pointed out in the previous part, they lingered in the open space of the Sudzhuk Spit, having come under fire from the Berk. As a result, non-commissioned officer Bedilo, corporal Kravtsov and private Denisenko were wounded (the latter was ultimately amputated).
Such small losses (no matter how cynical it may sound) were achieved thanks to those officials (employees of the port, radiotelegraph, railway station, gendarmerie) who remained in the city and did their best to help evacuate the population. But in the memory this bombardment remained rather that complete helplessness of the garrison, deprived of artillery, thanks to the "wisdom" of the higher ranks. Alas, during the Great Patriotic War, the city will again meet the enemy in a state of "emergency", erecting fortifications almost under the bombs of the Nazis.
Berk-i Satvet survived the First World War and almost suffered the Second World War, being decommissioned in 1944. The cruiser Midilly was less fortunate. In 1918, in the battle off the island of Imbros, with the British squadron, Midilly ran into a minefield. As a result, the cruiser sank with most of the crew on board, never having time to regain its original name - "Breslau".
Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, who planned the barbaric and unjustified bombing of Russian ports, and also initiated the gossip about Russia's aggression near the Bosphorus, even survived the Great Patriotic War. He died in Bremen in 1946, having had time to fully enjoy the sight of Russian soldiers marching through the streets of Germany.
Enver Pasha, who agreed to attack the Russian coastal cities, due in part to his own political intrigues, was forced to flee to Germany in 1918. After that, he fled to the already revolutionary Moscow, where he longed to find allies among the Bolsheviks. Enver found some understanding and was sent as an ally in the fight against Basmachism, but soon he joined him. In 1922, during a battle with the Red Army, Enver Pasha was killed by Yakov Melkumov (Melkumyan). The initiator of pan-Islamism, pan-Turkism and the Armenian genocide was killed by an ethnic Armenian, a former head-captain of the Russian Imperial Army and a Bolshevik.
