and McCully returned to Sebastopol and a short visit to the battle front. Returning to Novorossiysk on February 20 aboard the cruiser , they found the city flooded with refugees from Kharkov and Rostov. Denikin blamed his subordinates for his military failures, particularly General Pyotr Wrangel, who had advocated a concentration of White forces in the Crimea to make a last stand there in December, a plan that Denikin had rejected. Now in March, it was a disastrous, headlong retreat into the port of Novorossiysk that Denikin had made no provisions for. Instead, while many in the White army and navy had called on Denikin to replace the incompetent Shilling with Wrangel, Denikin had banished Wrangel, a respected and highly competent soldier, to Constantinople. The end of Denikin's army came amidst a brutal winter, and a Typhoid fever epidemic. On March 16, Ekaterinodar, capital of the Kuban province about 80 miles northeast of Novorossiysk was captured by the Reds. On March 26, Red forces reached the vicinity of Novorossiysk, advancing along the railway as the British battleship , the cruiser HMS Calypso and the French cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau fired their naval guns into the hills to support the withdrawal of Denikin's forces. Around noon, fires broke out by the railway yards and waterfront, which soon became uncontrolled infernos, consuming buildings, warehouses, ammunition, oil and rolling stock worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tons of weapons, tanks, armored cars and munitions were pushed off the docks into the harbor. As Koehler described it, "Ships lying alongside the docks crowded on human cargo almost to the last inch of space and then, fearing the fire, moved away from the piers into the stream, although they made almost no impression on the multitude seeking to board. packed on the docks and beach, surrounded by raging fire, were thousands who had hoped and expected to be taken away, but who had been left behind for lack of ships to embark them. These were mostly soldiers just arrived from the vanished front, but many women and children were seen among them." Rear Admiral McCully, a humanitarian and a naval officer, recommended to the State Department, that the Russian refugees from the Caucus and Kuban be granted asylum, but was turned down. Although Admiral Bristol was also a humanitarian, and ultimately played a major role in the resettlement of displaced persons from the region, he did not