Dnieper Flotilla

At the start of the Russo-Turkish war in 1735, the Dnieper Army of Field Marshal B. K. Minich requested naval assistance in capturing the Turkish fortress of Ochakiv on the Black Sea.

At the instigation of Vice-Chancellor Count Osterman, the Governing Senate issued a decree on January 4, 1737 for the building at Bryansk of a flotilla for operations on the Dnieper River.

In the spring of 1737 a flotilla consisting 355 vessels with troops, supplies, siege artillery, and ammunition on board was sent down from Bryansk on the Desna to the Dnieper.

Due to shallow water on the Dnieper that summer, most of the ships could not pass to the target destination (Ochakiv),[2] and the first boats past the rapids arrived there only on July 17, when the fortress had already been taken by Russian troops.

[2] Ochakiv remained besieged for two weeks, and naval combat continued in the area through October, during which time the flotilla was reinforced by another 30 small vessels.

Although the Turks abandoned their attempt to retake Ochakiv, Russian access to the Black Sea remained blocked by the strong Turkish squadron.

The war ended with the Treaty of Niš on October 3, 1739, and the Dnieper Flotilla – by then numbering 647 boats – was disbanded by 1741; most of the vessels were burned.

[6] The Turkish fleet was roughly equal in large ships, but somewhat inferior in smaller craft to the Dnieper Flotilla.

He wrote to Potemkin "...unhappily, the wind was contrary, so our ships could not attack and had to retreat under the guns of the sailing squadron".

[5] Ultimately, the Siege of Ochakiv was successful and the Russians gained a permanent powerful presence on the Black Sea.

In a legendary incident, a dubel boat of the Dnieper Flotilla commanded by Captain Second Class Christian Ivanovich Osten-Sacken, scouting for the Black Sea Fleet, was surrounded and outnumbered by Turkish vessels.

A main component of the Dnieper Flotilla in both the 1735–1739 and 1787–92 Turkish wars was the dubel boat (Дубель-шлюпка, with variant names also used).

Their name may come from the English "double" in the sense of "duplicate", on the grounds that the boats appeared to be smaller versions of larger ships.

[2] Chief Quartermaster R. Broun designed the boats and made the first model (still existing, at the Central Naval Museum).

On August 27, 1919, control of the flotilla was transferred to the Commander of Naval Forces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

The armored boats were purpose-built patrol craft inherited from the Imperial Navy; their armament consisted of one Maxim machine gun in a rotating turret, with a crew of 7.

Beginning in April 1919 the Dnieper Flotilla supported about 21,000 Soviet troops engaged in a campaign against anti-Soviet forces under the turncoat rebel Daniil Ilich Terpilo (known as Ataman Zelyony (Зелёный, literally "Green")).

The Trypillia Incident, where Zelyony's men massacred a Komsomol special forces detachment, occurred on July 3, 1919.

Crucial to this was an operation by the Dnieper Flotilla which landed troops in the rear of the rebel army and rendered their position in Trypillia untenable.

In the summer of 1945 Armored Gunboat Number 302 was transferred to the far east, where it became part of the Amur Flotilla and fought in the 1945 war against Japan.

They carried a crew of 10 and had a single gasoline engine generating 720 boiler horsepower for a speed of 37 kilometres per hour (23 mph).