Qualla: Russian cruiser Pallada (1906)

Russian cruiser Pallada (1906): Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The men on the cruiser Bayan, following a few cable lengths astern, saw a column of smoke go up ahead of them on the afternoon of 11 October 1914. When it cleared there was nothing there. Pallada had been leading her sister ship home at the end of an ordinary patrol off the Hanko peninsula when a single torpedo from the German submarine U-26 reached her and set off a magazine. Her entire crew — close to six hundred men — died in the space of a few seconds. Nobody was pulled from the water, because there was no one left to pull. She was the first warship Russia lost in the war.

Russian cruiser Pallada (1906): Nearly Six Hundred Men

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sources disagree slightly on the count, which is itself part of the story: her designed complement was 568 officers and men, while the figure most often given for the day she died is 597. The uncertainty exists because there were no survivors to muster and no bodies to bury. Whol...

Russian cruiser Pallada (1906): The Last of Four

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pallada was the last of four armoured cruisers built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the first decade of the twentieth century — 449 feet long, 7,750 long tons, protected by Krupp armour 190 mm thick over her machinery, mounting eight-inch guns in turrets and a battery of six-in...

Russian cruiser Pallada (1906): What She Took From Odensholm

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Six weeks before she died, Pallada did the single most consequential thing any Russian ship did in the Baltic. On 26 August 1914 the German light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground in fog off the island of Odensholm — now Osmussaar, Estonia — and could not be freed. Pallada and the cr...

Russian cruiser Pallada (1906): The Boat That Killed Her

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

U-26 did not long outlive her victim. Sometime around the end of August 1915 she disappeared in the Gulf of Finland, almost certainly mined, with all thirty of her crew. The exact date has never been fixed — 31 August and 4 September are both on the record. For a century she was ...

Russian cruiser Pallada (1906): Three Pieces, Upside Down

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Finnish diving group located Pallada outside Hanko in 2000 but kept the position quiet until 2012 — a decision that looks prudent in hindsight. She lies in three sections, all of them capsized, in roughly 40 to 50 metres of water. Silt has drifted over much of the wreck. One of...