On April 13, 1904 the Russian battleships Petropavlovsk and Poltava, four cruisers and an escort of destroyers sallied forth from Port Arthur to attack the Japanese fleet that had besieged the Russian port. The Japanese forces fell back beyond the reach of Russian shore batteries and as a result the Russian admiral, Stepan Makarov, ordered the squadron to return to Port Arthur. As the squadron steamed back to port, the Petropavlovsk struck two Japanese mines in quick succession and sank almost immediately. The loss of the Petropavlovsk devastated the Russian defenses as not only did it lose one of its most capable ships, but Admiral Makarov and a total of 27 officers and 652 sailors perished in the sinking.
Commissioned in 1898, the Petropavlovsk was armed with four 12-inch guns with a secondary battery of twelve 6-inch guns. The vessel saw service in the Boxer Rebellion and by the time the Russo-Japanese war broke out had been with Russia’s Far Eastern Squadron five years. The ship was succeeded by another battleship of the same name in 1911 which served the Imperial Russian Navy in World War I as well as the Soviet Navy in World War Two before being scrapped in 1953.
Shipwreckology 