Q: So why was there a problem between you and the commissar?
It was because of an order I gave. It was on December 12th, as we were patrolling uneventfully off the Norwegian coast. It was afternoon, which meant it was of course very dark; after spending the previous couple of nights only a couple of kilometers from shore near the island of Rolvsoy, we found nothing there, and I decided to shift our patrol to 20-50km off the coast to see if that’s where they were hiding. We had just learned by radio that Germany and Italy declared war on the US, making the Americans our allies at last.
At 4:30 in the afternoon, the watch raised alarm - in the drifting ice mist, they spotted a ship dead ahead, with its lights dimmed. We quickly identified it as a Norwegian fishing boat, and I ordered the guns manned. At 4:35, we fired a warning shot; the trawler immediately turned on their lights and stopped, lowering their lifeboat. We approached them, our guns trained, ordering them off their ship immediately.
A bizarre exchange then took place. The captain of the fishing boat, who spoke pretty decent Russian, had somehow assumed that we only hailed them to buy some fish, and was offering cod to us! Khokhryakov, on the loudspeaker, plainly told them that this was not the case - and soon they realized that we were dead serious. Their captain pleaded with us not to sink his boat, and offered to surrender his vessel as prize. We would have none of it, and, after making sure the crew were off, opened fire and sank the trawler with 5 shots from the “sotka” at 4:46.
I then ordered the captain of the sunk boat on board the D-2 for questioning. He seemed visibly shaken, but cooperated fully. Khokhryakov immediately started grilling him about his knowledge of German positions, German military plans, and where Germans were running their shipping, and what their radio frequencies were - the poor fisherman knew nothing, and explained that the only German he ever spoke to was the military commandant at Hammerfest, to get his permit to fish. He said that the boat we just sunk was not German in any way - in fact, it was his own private property and his whole livelihood.
The notion of private property, of course, was totally alien to party commissar Khokhryakov, who continued grilling the poor Norwegian. I eventually changed the subject, asking the captain about his crew’s situation. As it turned out, all they had in the boats was the clothes on their backs and some cod fish that they’d wanted to trade with us. One look outside the tower hatch told the whole story - the temperature was approaching -30, with icy mist and hardly any wind; visibility was fairly poor and there were ice floes in the area. They wouldn’t last even a few hours out there, and we were some 70-80km off shore, in strong currents.
I ordered their boat taken in tow, and a course back towards the coast. That’s when Khokhryakov flew off his handle, protesting the decision and demanding that we stop aiding the enemy. As commissar, he could not override captain’s orders, but as I insisted, he began threatening to write a kompromat [denunciation] after we got back to port. I stayed firm in spite of his protests, explaining to him that we would leave them off the coast and depart. He countered that we were putting our boat and our mission in extreme danger by letting an enemy go with information about our boat and our patrol position. It would compromise our maskirovka
[operational stealth] and jeopardize crew morale.
I left him off with this question: what would happen if we were sunk during our patrol? Who would most likely be pulling us out of the water? Answer: Norwegian fishermen. I think for most of sailors who’d lived in the north and made our traditional living from the sea, this was not hard to understand. For the commissar from the Russian heartland, it seemed more difficult to grasp. Despite Khokhryakov’s threats and grumbling, we towed the Norwegian lifeboat to within 15km of Rolvsoy and released them, some 6 hours after we’d sunk their ship.
Q: Did the crew side with you or with Khokhryakov on this?
The crew knew who the commander was. During the patrol, I knew that this incident wouldn’t be an issue, because we had a job to do. I was more worried about what would happen when we returned to port, because I knew that Khokhryakov was already putting together his report on the incident, and I couldn’t imagine it being very good for me. You know how things were back then.
He convinced himself that the Norwegians were all on the enemy side, and considering our previous encounter with a Norwegian ship that turned out to have German machineguns on board, that argument was not very hard to make, so I’m sure there were some who agreed with his view because of it. And I’m sure there were some who’d be willing to sign the kompromat.
But for the moment, we had a patrol to complete.
To be continued...