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During the late war between Russia and Turkey one of the most daring exploits of the campaign was an attack by a Russian squadron of torpedo-boats on the Turkish monitor Hifse Rahman. The flotilla comprised four ships, the Czarevich, the Xenia, the Czarevna, and the Djirid.
The flotilla left the Roumanian side of the Danube on the 25th of June 1877 at about midnight, and in something less than an hour the Hifse Rahman loomed in sight, a shadowy mass on the dark waters.
A tremendous explosion; a column of water shot up into the air, and the launch was nearly swamped! A breach had, however, been made in the Hifse Rahman's bulwarks.
The fate of the Hifse Rahman was now sealed, and in a few minutes she sank. The Russian launches succeeded in getting clear of their enemy again without losing a single man, and thus ended the first torpedo expedition ever made against an enemy's ironclads, but which may, as a writer describing the event says, "end in completely revolutionising our present system of monster iron walls."
The sentry at once challenged, when Lieutenant Doubarsoff, the commander of the Czarevich, answered "Friends." But his speech betrayed him; the alarm was spread; and the Hifse Rahman opened a sharp fire upon the launches. But Lieutenant Doubarsoff succeeded in attaching his torpedo-chain to a rope hanging at the monitor's bows, and then rapidly backed his little vessel and fired the torpedo.
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