page_title: Odessa Operation (1920)
section_title: Evacuation by the sea
hierarchical_section_title: Odessa Operation (1920) / Evacuation by the sea
caption_attribution_description: English: British blue-jackets landed from HMS Ajax in Odessa port. Evacuation of Odessa. February 1920
context_page_description: The Odessa operation is an offensive operation during the Russian Civil War of the South Western Front of the Red Army against the Novorossiysk Oblast Army Group of the White Armed Forces of South Russia.
  The operation was a success for the Red Army, as Odessa was taken on February 8 and, despite the organisation of an evacuation over the Black Sea supported by the British Navy, many White soldiers and material were captured.
context_section_description: Aware of the desperate situation, the command of the AFSR in Odessa had started an evacuation over the Black Sea on February 3. 
  Contemporaries of events and historians called the Odessa evacuation of 1920, ill prepared and "mediocre". Only 1 in 3 could be evacuated. In the city of Odessa, 3 AFSR generals, about 200 officers and 3,000 soldiers (including 1,500 sick and wounded in hospitals) were taken prisoner. 
  According to reports of the Odessa Soviet newspapers of those days, 300,000 pounds of grain also remained in the port of Odessa, 50,000 pounds were found on barges moored in the quarantine harbor. On the ship "Alexandria" a load of brand new British motorcycles of the brand "Triumph" was found, sent by England to the AFSR and 3,000 pounds of coal. The Railroad tracks were clogged with abandoned wagons with a variety of goods evacuated from Kiev and current Southern Ukraine, including 130,000 pounds of firewood. 
  The total number of evacuees is difficult to calculate, as transport ships with evacuees dispersed to different ports and many refugees were evacuated privately. Soviet sources reported 3,000 evacuees, which did not correspond to reality. White Guard sources reported 16,000 as a reasonable minimum number of evacuees, with about 40,000 people willing to be evacuated. From the military equipment and supplies, it was possible to evacuate all the tanks that had arrived in Odessa from Nikolaev (now Mykolaiv), almost all serviceable armored vehicles and parts of the equipment of the technical troops, cars and aviation assets.
  The British ships involved in the evacuation were :
  HMT Rio Negro, received about 1,400 refugees, wounded officers and cadets. Went to the port of Thessaloniki (Greece)
  HMT Rio Pardo, transported refugees to Greece
  HMS Ajax
  HMS Cardiff
  HMS Ceres
  HMS Emperor of India
  several destroyers
  Coalship Votan
  The French sent 
  French cruiser Jules Michelet
  French cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau
  And the US sent the destroyer USS Talbot with Hugo W. Koehler on board.
caption: British troops in Odessa port, February 1920
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