World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseFilipp Sergeyevich Oktyabrsky was born in the village of Lukshino in Tver Governate, Russia in 1899; his surname at birth was Ivanov. He enlisted in the Russian Navy in 1918 and was assigned to the Baltic Fleet. Between 1925 and 1927, he studied at the naval academy in Leningrad, Russia. Starting in Mar 1939, at the rank of vice admiral, he was the commanding officer of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Between Jul and Oct 1941, he participated in the Battle of Odessa in Ukraine, inflicting heavy casualties against the attacking Romanian 4th Army and then evacuated his surviving troops to fight another day just as the city fell. He landed his sailors in Sevastopol, Russia (now Ukraine) to serve as naval infantrymen in the defense of that city, and used his ships to bring in men and supplies during the siege as well as using his warships for naval bombardment. Although he conducted a brilliant defensive campaign at Sevastopol, when the city was about to fall in mid-1942, he fled by submarine after giving little thought to the 23,000 troops still left in the city. He was promoted to the rank of admiral in 1944. After WW2, he was made the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Navy and was placed in charge of all naval testing facilities. Between 1957 and 1960, he took command of the Black Sea Higher Naval Institute named after Admiral Pavel Nakhimov in Sevastopol. In 1958, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. He passed away in Sevastopol in 1969.

Filipp Oktyabrsky Timeline