Giuseppe De Chiara

On this day in 1955, the flagship of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet blew up and rolled over in her own harbor in the dead of night, and hundreds of her sailors died, many of them sealed alive inside the capsized hull while rescuers listened helplessly to them tapping on the steel. Seventy years later we still do not know for certain what killed her, and for decades the Soviet state pretended it had never happened. This is the Novorossiysk. She had not been born Russian, and her earlier life was remarkable in itself. She began as the Giulio Cesare, an Italian battleship launched before the First World War and named for Julius Caesar. Rebuilt and modernized between the wars, she went to sea for Mussolini's navy in the Second World War and saw hard service. At the Battle of Calabria in 1940 she traded fire with the British Mediterranean Fleet and was struck by a shell from the battleship HMS Warspite at the staggering range of around fifteen miles, one of the longest range gunnery hits ever scored by one moving battleship on another. She was at anchor at Taranto the night the British torpedo bombers crippled the Italian fleet, and she survived that too. When Italy surrendered in 1943, she sailed into internment, her war over. Then the victors divided the spoils. As part of Italy's war reparations, the old battleship was handed to the Soviet Union, and in 1949 she was renamed Novorossiysk and became the pride and flagship of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet at the great fortress port of Sevastopol. The Soviets refitted her and used her to train a new generation of sailors. On the night of October 28 into the 29th, 1955, the Novorossiysk lay moored to a buoy in Sevastopol harbor, most of her crew asleep below. At around half past one in the morning, a tremendous explosion ripped through her from beneath the bow, forward of her first great gun turret. The blast tore a hole in her hull estimated at four by fourteen metres, punching clean up through the decks, the force consistent with over a thousand kilograms of high explosive, so large that investigators later suspected more than one charge had gone off. Hundreds of men were killed or maimed in that first instant. What followed was a slow, agonizing catastrophe that should not have been fatal to the ship but became so. Water poured in through the enormous wound, and the efforts to save her went badly. Precious time was lost, decisions were muddled, and attempts to control the flooding and keep her in place rather than quickly running her aground in the shallows allowed the water to spread. Slowly the great battleship listed further and further over, and then, more than two hours after the explosion, she rolled completely over and capsized, turning turtle right there in the harbor in full view of the fleet. And now came the worst of it. Hundreds of men were trapped alive inside the overturned hull, sealed into pockets of air in the flooded, upside down ship. Rescuers could hear them, the trapped sailors banging and tapping on the steel from within, calling for help that could not reach them in time. Divers and cutting teams worked frantically, and a handful of men were pulled out alive, some after days, but for most there was no escape. They died in the dark inside the hull of their own flagship. In all, around six hundred and seventeen men were lost, including sailors from other ships who had rushed over to help and died in the capsizing. The cause has never been settled, and it remains one of the great mysteries of the Cold War at sea. The official Soviet finding, and the one most historians think likeliest, was that the Novorossiysk had set off a German magnetic mine left on the harbor bottom from the Second World War, perhaps dragged into contact by her own anchor chain as she moored. Searches of the seabed afterward turned up dozens of such old mines, some lying within a stone's throw of the blast. But another theory has clung to the story ever since, dramatic and unproven, that the battleship was sabotaged by Italian combat frogmen, veterans of a famous wartime special operations unit that had once been the world's masters of attacking ships in harbor, striking either in revenge for the handing over of their old Giulio Cesare to the Soviets or at the secret behest of the West. No proof has ever been produced, and the Italians denied it, but the legend endures. As it so often did, the Soviet state buried the disaster. The loss of the fleet flagship and hundreds of its men was hidden from the public, the grieving families sworn to silence, the whole affair classified for decades. Blame was handed out behind closed doors, and it fell hardest on the head of the entire Soviet Navy, Admiral Kuznetsov, who was made the scapegoat and removed from his post, even though he had not even been present. The battleship herself was eventually raised from the harbor mud, upside down and ruined, and quietly cut up for scrap. So ended one of the longest and strangest lives any warship ever had, a battleship that had fired on the Royal Navy for Mussolini and been hit by Warspite at fifteen miles, that had survived Taranto and the whole Mediterranean war, only to be given to Stalin's navy and then blow up and capsize at her moorings with her sailors trapped inside, in a disaster the Soviet Union tried to erase, on this day in 1955.