The story of Kamchatka, the world’s most useless ship, has become well known on the internet.
Who wouldn’t remember the story of a ship that fired off over 300 shells at fishing boats
without scoring a single hit, accidentally hit a friendly ship when firing a salute with live ammo,
reported Japanese torpedo boats everywhere it went,
and had predatory animals roaming the decks? But how much of this is actually true?
In this video, we tell the REAL story of the Kamchatka, one of the unluckiest ships ever.
In 1903, the steamship Kamchatka entered service with the Imperial Russian Baltic Fleet.
She was designated a repair ship and stocked with machine parts for fixing up damage sustained by
the fleet’s fighting ships. This role made her indispensable when, in 1904, the Tsar ordered
the Fleet to begin the mammoth journey from its home base in St Petersburg all the way
to the Korean Peninsula. It took the fleet seven months to complete the 18,000-mile journey. . The
Russo-Japanese kicked off in the empire’s eastern fringes, and the Tsar’s forces weren’t doing well.
Kitted out with brand-new British warships, the Japanese had wrecked Russia’s Far East
Fleet and were advancing towards Port Arthur — a prize the Tsar couldn’t afford to lose.
All military units have their problems, but the Baltic Fleet had a lot more than usual. Its ships
were new and its crews barely trained. Most of the sailors were military conscripts, but many
were just hired civilians. Skilled seamen were in short supply, and the Russians took whoever
they could find. The best military sailors were kept on the battleships, while poor old
Kamchatka and the other auxiliaries had to make do with a motley crew of conscripts and civilians.
Morale in the fleet mirrored morale in Russia, in that it was abysmally low. Political and economic
factors were causing the once-great empire to decay from the inside, and many of the
officers and men of the fleet were well aware of this. Their solution was brutal discipline.
This was enforced by Admiral Rozhestvensky, whose violent outbursts won him the nickname “Mad Dog.”
Morale in the fleet mirrored morale in Russia, in that it was abysmally low. Political and economic
factors were causing the once-great empire to decay from the inside, and many of the officers
and men of the fleet were well aware of this. Their solution was brutal discipline. This was
enforced by Admiral Rozhestvensky, whose violent outbursts won him the nickname “Mad Dog.” When
any ship in the convoy misbehaved or was slow to follow orders, he would scream curses at it from
the bridge. When he reached a crescendo, he would throw his binoculars overboard. His stewards,
who were used to it, kept a stock of 50 binoculars so Mad Dog always had more.
Not too long after leaving the Mediterranean,
one incident angered Mad Dog so much that his binoculars supply was at risk of running out.
We’re talking, of course, about the Dogger Bank incident — when Russia and Britain
nearly went to war after Mad Dog’s fleet blew up some fishing boats.
We’ve done a video on it already, which you can watch here.
Before the incident, the fleet was on high alert. While steaming through fog in the English Channel,
Kamchatka radioed in: "All lights shut down. Attacked from all directions. Torpedo boat closer
than [200 yards]. Steering in different directions to escape torpedo boats." The crew was panicking.
Mad Dog ordered her back on course and asked whether she could still see the torpedo boats.
The response was an infuriating "We cannot see any." From then on, the whole fleet was
paranoid it would run into Japanese torpedo boats and be sunk in the North Atlantic.
It’s nuts to us, but for the Russian officers, finding Japanese torpedo boats around Britain
seemed like a real possibility. Japan didn’t have the industry to build modern warships,
and instead ordered most of them from Britain. The Brits even built their Asian ally a fleet
of 10 torpedo boats. Russian spies had told the Navy about this, and provided sporadic reports on
where these torpedo boats might be. Based entirely on hearsay, these reports were about as reliable
as the Kamchatka’s engines — useless most of the time, but still keeping everyone on their toes.
Dodgy spy reports and Kamchatka’s ghostly torpedo boats
made the Baltic Fleet paranoid, which lowered morale even more.
As the fleet left European waters and tracked along the African coast , morale declined.
Kamchatka was leading the convoy, but not because of her prowess. She was put in front so Mad Dog
could keep an eye on her and, presumably, swear and throw binoculars in her general direction.
Mad Dog's sailors weren’t happy either. Many had been conscripted from villages
that had never seen modern technology. Most didn’t understand how the machinery worked,
and some were scared of the ships, dubbing them “Iron Monsters.”
Men raised in arctic Siberia couldn’t get used to the tropics, and neither could the ships.
Humidity sabotaged the ventilation, making sections of the ship
virtually uninhabitable and forcing men to sleep naked on the decks at night.
One Kamchatka sailor decided he’d had enough, and jumped overboard hoping to swim to shore. When
he was spotted and fished out of the water, he said, "I wanted to walk a bit on land."
Discipline was breaking down across the fleet. On some ships, lookouts struggled to read the
signal flags because there was so much laundry hanging on the lines! Some ships were also
teeming with monkeys and chameleons bought by officers to show off to their friends at home.
There are, however, no records of anyone buying larger predatory animals, as some have suggested.
New pets didn’t fix the ever-present morale problem. And this problem would
come to a head in the worst possible way: mutiny.
The fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope in early December but was battered by a
ferocious storm. When the tempest was over, Kamchatka sent a rather odd signal. “Bad coal.
Cannot keep up steam. Seek permission to throw 150 tons of coal overboard. Would be able to proceed
then.” 150 tons is a huge amount of coal, and the message appeared ludicrous, especially when
paired with Mad Dog’s answer, “Tell them that I allow only saboteurs to be thrown overboard.”
But the admiral wasn’t taking the piss. “150 tons” was, in fact, a secret pre-arranged code
that all captains of the fleet knew. It meant that mutineers were aboard Kamchatka
and the captain needed help dealing with them. Fights had broken out in the lower decks between
the naval engineers and the civilians who had been forced onboard as stokers. Exacerbated
by the horrendous storm the day before, weeks in the tropics with no air-con, and constant
supply shortages, the Russian revolutionary spirit of the crews was beginning to show.
We don’t know exactly what happened, or if anyone was thrown overboard, but we know that,
by the end of the day, the mutiny was suppressed and Kamchatka was back amongst the fleet.
By the time the fleet got to the Tsushima Straits for its final,
disastrous battle, Kamchatka had been involved in several other incidents
that have since been embellished. Just to set the record straight, here are the facts.
Kamchatka didn’t hit the cruiser Aurora after firing a salute with live ammo.
One live shell was fired accidentally but flew clear over the ship.
Kamchatka didn’t signal “Do You See Torpedo Boats?” while steaming in the South Atlantic.
The signaller on Mad Dog’s ship misread Kamchatka’s report on her engine state.
Kamchatka didn’t report that it was sinking because of leakage from a cracked steam pipe.
In fact, a scuttling valve had broken,
and the engineers were working in chest-high water to fix it.
The ship had a lot of bad luck, but Kamchatka and her crew weren’t quite as useless as they
are often made out to be. Most of her problems stemmed from low morale — which was an epidemic
across the whole Baltic Fleet. Kamchatka, a lowly auxiliary vessel, became the fleet’s scapegoat.
She certainly had many issues, but the Kamchatka was just one problematic ship,
from a problematic fleet, from a foetid empire only months away from revolution.