Sinking of Russian WWII Cargo Ship in Portland

There are many books devoted entirely to shipwrecks on the NW coast of the USA, especially at the notorious Columbia River Bar with all the drama of the big waves, sand bars, rocks and loss of life. But 100 miles inland, maritime casualties around Portland typically lacked those hazards and were more likely to be caused by human error! That was probably the case in the loss of the 390-foot Soviet cargo ship Ilitch that sank in Portland Harbor on June 24, 1944–“not with a bang but a whimper.” This dramatic event was as close as Portlanders ever came to seeing the loss of a ship in wartime, though there was never any evidence that it was caused by sabotage….

When Larry Barber, the marine editor of The Oregonian newspaper, heard the news he was quickly on the scene at Northwest Marine Iron Works in the St. Johns district, upstream of Kaiser’s Oregon Shipbuilding yard. He found the capsized Ilitch, a converted ferry, was barely visible in the muddy Willamette River. The hull was surrounded by a pile of flotsam that had floated off the deck as it rolled over. A group of workers had gathered on the dock, including Tex Morrison, superintendent for Northwest Marine Iron Works. Larry learned that an engineer from the yard had noticed the ship listing at about 4:30 am; he climbed onboard, went down into the engine room, and found “water boiling up into the bilge.”

The cause was likely a mistake in ballasting, which happens occasionally even in the 21^st century, or a leak in the 50-year old riveted steel plates below the waterline. Portable pumps were located and a salvage attempt began, but ten minutes later chains, welding machines and winches all began sliding off the increasingly angled deck as the ship heeled further. Morrison ordered all his men off the ship and informed the Russian crew that the Ilitch was going down and they should abandon ship immediately.

Within 30 minutes, the ship was on its side and the captain, chief mate and about 20 crewmen had clambered to the highest point of the hull to escape the water. Some were rescued by means of a “cherry picker” basket lowered by a mobile crane while others climbed up a rope ladder that had been lowered by men on a newly-launched Liberty ship in the next berth. A total of 58 crew escaped before the ship rolled over at about 5 AM. When the roll was called on shore, only the 20-year old female cook, named Agreppina Arakhpaeeva, was missing.

The Ilitch settled slowly onto its side in 45 feet of water–and refused to surrender without a fight. It presented a problem that resisted the best efforts of the local maritime community. Not only was the hull blocking the dock, which was used for repairs to visiting ships and fitting out newly-launched Liberties, it was also obstructing the port’s main drydock and preventing it from being used. With new Liberty ships being launched in the Rose City every few days, this was a serious obstacle to the smooth flow of work in the Kaiser yard and needed to be removed as soon as possible.

The story appeared in the Oregonian the next day, and was followed by Barber over the next five months as the authorities dealt with the wreck, though it was no more than a footnote to the big picture of the war effort in Portland. The Ilitch was one of dozens of old vessels that the Soviets had pressed into service to carry war cargo from Portland to Vladivostok, many apparently built before the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Some were in such poor shape that they needed extensive repairs or strengthening before they could be loaded, which was the situation on the Ilitch.

The wreck was destined to occupy the berth for five months while Soviet ships continued loading cargoes of all types. Portland was the main port in the NW where Lend-Lease cargoes were loaded in the vast U.S program of military aid to the Soviet Union. The USSR was in desperate need of these supplies to feed its population and equip the army fighting the German forces on the Eastern Front and the fleet made over 600 calls in the Rose City during 1941-45. So it is likely that some crews would have passed the sunken ship on their way home to Siberia only to return months later and find it was still sitting on the bottom of the river!

When it arrived, the Illitch still had the look of a grand passenger liner in the Victorian style, having spent the early 1900’s running between resort towns on the Black Sea, and must have been an exotic site on the Portland waterfront compared to the functional cargo ships moored around it. Larry had previously noted that this was not a typical ship, writing: “She had a clipper bow with a long bowsprit, and her masks and stacks were set at rakish angles.” Unfortunately, he failed to take a photograph before it sank, an error he must have regretted.

But being a dedicated newspaper man, he began making amends by gathering more information to fill out his column. With a narrow beam of 45 feet, a large accommodation block, and limited cargo capacity of only 500 tons, it was barely worth traveling 5,000 miles across the Pacific. (Perhaps it was sent as a symbol of Russia’s need for aid, like the small craft that symbolically helped carry Allied troops to safety during the retreat from Dunkirk.) It had been re-fitted with gun turrets, but would not have been able to put up much of a fight. Now its fate was sealed without a single shot being fired.

Hoping to learn more, he asked around the waterfront for some more details. This was how he heard the rumor that the Ilitch had once been the personal yacht of the Tsar Nicolas. The workers who had been installing some new cargo winches on deck and extra bunks below decks confirmed that it still had all the comforts of a luxury hotel with the walls lavishly paneled and decorated. The elegant passenger rooms were partitioned off and were not accessible by the wartime crew, so it seemed likely. Every ship has a builder’s plaque on the bridge, with name and date of launch; Larry was informed this ship had been built in Dumbarton, Scotland in 1895 and added this to his notes. (This is contradicted by two reliable sources that state it was built in Germany—a curious error considering how much trouble the ship caused!)

I decided to do some research on the web myself, and easily found a couple of sites full of information about the Tsar’s real yacht, the magnificent Standart, a 5,557-ton vessel 401 feet long and 50 feet wide, built in Copenhagen in 1895 with two funnels and three masts. It was the largest most luxurious private ship ever built until the mega-yachts in the late 20^th century—reported to have a crew of 260 including over a hundred servants and a brass band. The Tsars were absolute rulers of Russia and lived in unparalleled luxury until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The entire royal family–the last of the Romanovs–was eventually executed on the order of the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin. Their magnificent yacht was converted into a minelayer and renamed the Marti. It fought the Germans on the Baltic Sea in World War II and was not scrapped until 1963.

The dimensions and description of the Ilitch match almost perfectly with the Standart. Add to this the fact that it was launched as the “Emperor Nicholas II” and probably renamed after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin during the Russian Revolution. So it’s easy to see how the facts could have become blurred. The idea that it was the Tsar’s yacht could have emerged after the name was changed, when it became a communist ship on the Black Sea, on the other side of the world from Portland, or later when it was based in Siberia. Larry decided this rumor of the royal connection was worth mentioning, as it added an exotic touch the harsh situation in the USSR, and he continued to follow the saga.

Regardless of its age or history, the Ilitch was now a problem that had to be solved as quickly as possible. Two hard-hat divers from the local salvage experts, Devine & Zimmerman, arrived by noon on the next day and began diving on the wreck in the afternoon. They recovered the body of the cook, which was taken to the city morgue. The divers returned the next day, a Sunday, to clean up the welding leads, cables and ropes that had slid from the ship’s deck, then inspect the port side of the hull to look for the cause of the sinking. They reported the bottom looked in reasonable condition, while the starboard side was buried in the mud. Coincidentally, the sinking also produced another corpse, that of Joseph Ricchie age 49, who had fallen into the river from the drydock a week before.

So that was as far as the investigation into the accident could go, and no cause was ever identified. The most important task was to stop the current from sliding the wreck under the drydock. Within five days, a steam-powered piledriver arrived to install several “dolphins”–clusters of three piles lashed together to form a stable tripod. Wire cables were run from the wreck to the dolphins and winched tight, to hold the hull in place temporarily. By the end of the week, many officials had arrived to represent stakeholders, including the US Army Corps of Engineers, the port, insurers, shipping agent, Russian consulate etc. But there was no agreement on how to proceed until July 8 when Captain Ivan Sergeiv signed the papers to release the vessel. “Just what this means is as yet not clear,” Larry pointed out.

On July 14, he wrote that the Army Engineers’ office had received clearance from Washington DC to move ahead with the salvage. The contract was opened for bidding with just two weeks until the bids were opened on August 1. Only two companies showed any interest, and when the work finally began at the end of October, they were not even mentioned. Instead, the Army Engineers were given the responsibility. By this point, it had been decided that the Illitch was not worth re-floating even to use the bare hull as a barge.

Larry noted that Captain. J.L. Tooker, a veteran salvage master had arrived from the east coast to supervise the work, aided by a few of his expert team that had salvaged the famous French trans-Atlantic liner S.S. Normandie in New York harbor. This was one of the last great ocean liners that was interned in the USA after Germany occupied France in 1939. After the US declared war on Germany, the ship was being converted into a troopship in February 1942 when it caught fire while moored in February 1942. and rolled over from the weight of water pumped into it by fireboats. The Normandie lay on the bottom for a year and a half, until it was righted in August 1943. The ship was found to be beyond any future use and was broken up and scrapped in 1946.

To expedite the work, Captain Tooker was given the use of the government’s giant derrick barge Cairo, which had been sent to Portland from the gulf coast to assist the Kaiser shipyards. It had also found a second use loading steam locomotives onto Soviet ships under the Lend Lease program. By the end of October, the wreck was surrounded by support vessels large and small, with a large array of equipment on the dock. Tooker hired eight divers who each had their own team of helpers to supply their air and ensure their own safety. Their task was to cut up the submerged ship where it lay; they began cutting through the plates with torches burning a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases.

On October 21, Larry filed his eighth column on the saga. After describing the process of underwater demolition that was slowly dismantling the ship, and sending the steel for recycling, he turned to the giant derrick barge to complete the report. The mighty Cairo was reputed to be one of the largest floating cranes in the world with a capacity in excess of 160 tons.

“The big Cairo in itself is one of the nation’s most interesting vessels. It is a huge steel barge upon which is mounted a tremendous A-frame, complete quarters for its crew, a machine shop, numerous power units, and all the gadgets that go to make it one of the most formidable lifting units of its kind. It was built in 1929 to construct the lower Mississippi levees and then sported a 240-foot boom and a 7.5 cubic yard clamshell bucket.

Three years ago, the War Shipping Administration towed the dredge to New York and converted it into a derrick barge to be lend-leased to the British government for the removal of sunken ships in Egypt, but the British failed to take it away. More than a year ago, the WSA started the Cairo to Portland, After it was nearly wrecked in a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, it was drydocked in New Orleans for installation of a raked bow to improve towing qualities. It finally arrived here after a hectic voyage (via the Panama Canal). The crew ranges from 16 to 22 men. The main fall block stands 8 feet high and weighs 12 tons. It takes something like that to pick up sections of sunken ships like the ill-fated Illitch.”

Through November 1944, the Illitch was cut down piece by piece, reduced to a pile of scrap on the riverbank (sold for $2.27 per ton) and hauled away to feed the local steel mills. On December 1, Larry’s final report ran with a description of the last large lift for the Cairo, “a great unwieldy stern section, which included the stern frame, rudder, propeller and stern plate, as well as a gun mount. The piece towered about 60 feet in the air and was estimated to weight about 150 tons, according to Captain J.L. Hooker.”

(This scene is the subject of one of Larry’s best wartime news photos and marked the sad end of this fine old ship and all the history it had lived through. As for the hand-carved walnut paneling and fine fixtures in the first-class passenger suites, if they were not pulled off by the current and swept downriver, they would have been burnt off of the steel plate onshore.)