[AAR] So Far, So Good - A Soviet Sub in the Arctic

[CCIP]

Q: How did you feel about the loss of your fellow submarine crew?

Sad, of course.

But you could look at it another way - despite all that had been going on at the front, and the difficulties of patrolling both the polar day and night, facing overwhelming German air and naval superiority, we did not lose a single submarine during all of 1941. That’s a pretty impressive achievement. Our brigade grew from 15 to 21 submarines during that first year of war, sank many ships, and yet it was not until nearly 6 months into constant combat that we lost one of ours. We did well.



We knew how bad it could’ve been from the experience of the Baltic fleet, which had faced a bloodbath and lost something like 28 submarines before the ice set in and stopped operations for the winter. And we didn’t even have that winter pause, as Kola Bay was ice-free year round. Of course, “ice-free” is a very relative term in the arctic ocean - and in fact, ice was perhaps our biggest nemesis this patrol.



Q: What kind of difficulties did ice cause for you?

Well, water is that weird chemical that loses density it solidifies - not many do that! But ice is still hard and heavy, and we’re no icebreaker. We had to watch out for drifting ice, and keep the top of the boat ice-free. Of course, compared to surface ships, our problems were not as great - we could dive if things got bad, they usually couldn’t.



In those winter months, the ice proved to be a far greater danger than the Germans had been. On January 13th, as we arrived in our patrol area, PQ-7 made it to Murmansk successfully, but PQ-7A which splintered off from it to go to Arkhangelsk, reported that one of their ships had to be abandoned because of ice damage, and was later finished off by German airplanes or U-boats. One of the escorting guard trawlers also disappeared, and the last thing heard from them was also that they were damaged by ice.



To be continued...

[CCIP]

Q: What was your role in escorting the convoys? Did you encounter any enemies threatening them?

We were a distant guard against attacks by German ships and submarines. At that point in the war, we were still getting a sense for the German pattern of operations, and the Germans for ours. They weren’t terribly effective against the convoys yet, but gave us a few scares. Aside from the submarines, they also had a squadron of destroyers based at Kirkenes - same ones that sank the Tuman in August. On January 15th, we got a report that these had likely sortied against QP-5, the westbound convoy that had just left Murmansk, and were ordered to move north to provide closer support and scouting for the convoy.



In the dark of the polar night, we spotted neither the convoy nor any enemies, but the German destroyers were also apparently seen returning home empty-handed, so we broke off and returned to patrol area No.5 the next day. We remained there for quite a while after that. With night-time temperatures dropping to as low as -37, we were busy staying warm - and with M-175 still not heard from, we didn’t have much in the way of knowing what was going on in our sector south of 71N latitude, the southern boundary of our main patrol area.






Q: What was that sole encounter with the enemy that you mentioned before?

Well, after the M-175 hadn’t been heard from for 2 weeks, on January 23rd, we were given permission to shift patrol south of the 71st parallel. Two days later, while in sight of shore near Pers-fjord, we sighted ships in the dark.





It was hard to discern what we were up against at first because of the dark - I initially assumed it to be an escorted merchant; then a pair of destroyers; then we finally settled on a pair of small armed patrol ships, moving eastwards towards Varde at 10 knots or so. It was hard to keep contact with them in the dark, and they’d often blend into the coast. After about an hour and a half, we got ahead of them and submerged, positioning ourselves so that we’d be attacking from the direction of the shore, which was 3-5km away. I prepared to engage them with the stern tubes.



We missed an opportunity to fire at the first ship as it passed, and decided to aim for the 2nd one behind him - but just as I ordered “tovs’!” [“prepare to fire!”], he began turning away. At first I’d thought they had seen us, but the two ships simply both turned north and continued as though it was nothing. As it turned out, they were simply patrolling a box-shaped area off the coast, and we were unlucky to be in position where they made one of their regular turns. I curse, but stuck to my mission and decided to try again.





As the ships kept turning regularly, it took two hours of maneuvering carefully on the surface to get ourselves another shot. At 6:58 that morning, I finally followed the “tovs’!” [ready to fire] with “pli!” [fire], releasing the torpedo from apparatus [tube] 7, followed by 8 a few seconds later. The first hit the forward part of the ship, the latter missed - but this was enough to wreck them. Rather quickly, the armed trawler began going down by the bow, disappearing from the surface in minutes.









I continued my course away from the wreck to avoid being spotted by his companion, who’d began turning around - but when I raised the scope for an observation 10 minutes later, I saw that the 2nd ship had stopped dead in water next to the wreck site, and was picking up survivors rather than looking for the submarine that put them in this predicament. I don’t know what they were thinking, and certainly any swimming survivors would not last long in this cold water - but, I was not about to miss a chance at another sinking. I ordered hard rudder and prepared for forward tubes for firing…





To be continued...

[CCIP]

Q: You weren’t bothered by the thought of sinking a ship rescuing survivors?

War is war - and in submarine warfare, this was a very standard play. One of the Germans’ most famous submarine successes of the first world war was their commander Weddigen’s attack in 1914 that sank three British cruisers, which also stopped to help survivors when one of their ships was hit. And compared to what we’d heard the Germans were doing in this war, sinking an armed Kriegsmarine patrol vessel was a pretty mild action indeed.



I opened up with a single torpedo from tube 5, set to run at fast speed, at 7:20. It ran straight and true, and the German ship exploded as planned. They had lifeboats in the water for rescue already and abandoned the burning ship quickly. Concerned that we’d already raised enough ruckus and confusion, and were in sight of the enemy coast anyway, I kept the boat submerged until we got out of visual range of the sinking, and then headed back out to open sea north of the 71st parallel, reporting our success to base.






Q: Did fleet command have orders for you?

Not at the time. We kept up a diligent patrol of our sector for the next week, spotting nothing besides drifting ice. Then on February 1st, convoy PQ-9/10 was reported to have left Iceland - it was originally supposed to be two different convoys, but because of delays caused by weather, only one ship from PQ-10 actually made it to the marshalling point in Iceland when they were supposed to, so it was decided to put it into the same convoy as the PQ-9 ships rather than having it sit around and wait for other ships to come, which could take weeks.







There were reports of German submarines scouting off Nordkapp, and we were given permission to go and conduct a search ahead of the convoy’s arrival to try and scatter them a bit. So, we took off to the new area. Of course, as luck would have it, that same evening a German convoy was reported off Varde. By now it was too far behind for us to intercept, so we simply continued heading to our new patrol area.







To be continued...

[CCIP]

Q: Were you able to find any German U-boats?

The Germans were pretty elusive. When we got to our new patrol area, radio direction finding intercepts suggested that a German patrol line was now closer to Bear Island than Nordkapp, so we soon moved our patrol again, even further to the northwest. Here, we continued our scouting until February 8th, reaching as far north as the 74th parallel. We were probably the most Northern unit operating in this war for a while.



Further south, the war continued as usual. On the radio, we heard that as many as 100 thousand Germans were surrounded at Demyansk. A new patrol area for Gadzhiev’s “Katyushas” on cruiser submarine operations, called No.2B, was created - it was a lot like the old No.2, but even bigger. As for us, we saw nothing except ice and ocean. Staying warm was the main concern.



Q: Did you head home after this?

Yes, after more than a month at sea, we arrived back at the Polyarnyi inlet on February 13th. We didn’t see anything on our way home, save for a passing airplane - although head of watch Kislayev insisted that it was a friendly scout.





We arrived back at harbour uneventfully, firing two blank shots from the main gun, for the two patrol ships that we sank. At base, I received the Order of the Red Star, my first award that had been delayed by Khokhryakov’s report, but after Tikhonov reported to division, that was cleared. I also signed orders for awards to be issued to two key crew members - our head of B.Ch.-5 [chief engineer] Matskyavechus, and shturman [navigator] Savin. It is largely to their credit that on this long, grueling patrol we stayed on course and were able to navigate through all the ice and cold with no damage and no major incidents.





Of course, that’s not to say the patrol was easy - and it certainly took a toll on the boat and crew. The boat was put into maintenance, and remained at Polyarnyi for more than a month afterwards. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of the crew were transferred out, for one reason or another. So there were a few new faces by the time we sailed - 12 of them, to be sure.





One of them was the new politruk, Isayev, a relatively new and inexperienced commissar - a bit awed to be assigned to a boat with such a well-known combat record, really. This worked just fine for me as after Khokhyryakov, I needed someone more pliable. The divisional commissar Tikhonov, having completed the previous patrol with us, agreed. I was confident in my ability to handle the D-2 and her crew now, and waited for an opportunity to prove our abilities in the toughest conditions possible. We got that opportunity, in our next patrol at the end of March…



To be continued...

[CCIP]

Q: What were things like at Polyarnyi in the meantime?

Things were at a relative lull, there and throughout the front. The winter weather had really minimized combat, and German raids on Polyarnyi and Murmansk were infrequent until later in March. However rather than bombing our subs, the Luftwaffe had got into the habit of bombing the British merchants and warships to try and convince them they shouldn’t sail to our waters. It wasn’t terribly effective, but our fighter pilots (as well as British ones who’d been based here to help out) had more and more work on their hands as the polar winter receded and the sun showed up more and more often.



At the front, after what seemed like a grand success pushing the Germans back from Moscow, operations had also largely ground to a halt. Of course, we had only a remote idea of the true scale of the war going on to our south. Here in the Northern Fleet, the war seemed intense, personal, on a scale that made everyone important. We knew a lot of the key people in our war effort not just by name, but personally. Whether it’s submarine heroes like Gadzhiev or air heroes like Safonov - I met most of them at one point or another. And they weren’t heroes of books and newspapers to us, either - they were just really good people we served with.



Q: What about the British? How did you get on with them?

Well, the British were people to us too! As I mentioned before, they’d kept their distance a little and they’d kept a distance from us a bit. It was a bit coaxing them out of their ships at first - both their military officers and merchant seamen preferred living aboard their ships, and regarded the Kola peninsula as some sort of alien world, especially in winter. Eventually the Germans “helped” get them ashore, when they focused their bombing on British ships in harbour. Idle crews then promptly decided that there’s better bomb shelters on shore.



There was one change from the start of 1942 - after a few visits, like the very first one by Trident in August 1941, it was decided to station 2-3 submarines on regular rotation here in Kola Bay. We didn’t see much of them as they only came for a few days at a time to resupply, but along with them also came torpedoes, support crews, spare parts. We studied what we could learn from these with interest. We also shared patrol areas with them - they were mainly interested in keeping German warships bottled up in the fjords, and were also experts at hunting submarines.



I remember one time in early 1942, I sat down to drink with a few British submarine officers. One of them had served on the submarine “Salmon” in 1939, when it sank a German U-boat off Norway; another - on the “Graph”, which was actually a captured German U-boat. I got a lot of very useful advice on dealing with the enemy submarines from them, which proved invaluable on our next patrol…



To be continued...

[CCIP]

Back with a little more history!


(ships in Kola Bay)

Q: What were the orders for your next patrol?

Well, by now the Allied convoy traffic was a well-organized operation, and we had a better understanding of how to better protect it. The Germans were also getting a better idea for how to attack the convoys, and so protecting them is what we would have to do. Intelligence showed that the Germans were deploying their submarines in lines to search for our convoys - the main one typically stretched from the Norwegian coast toward Bear Island. It was the narrowest point of the convoys’ journey, especially this time of year when the polar ice was at its furthest extent. So it was this gap where we’d also began deploying our submarines to intercept and scare off the enemy’s.


(the winter route of the convoys, with the ice at furthest extent)

In issuing our orders, Vinogradov - the submarine brigade commander - explained that convoy PQ-13 had left Scotland on the 10th of March and was expected to pass through that main gap about two weeks later. It was them, and the follow-on PQ-14 as well as the outbound convoys QP-9 and QP-10 that we would be covering. We would be doing our best to coordinate our submarines, aircraft, and surface escorts to provide maximum safety for the convoy. To this end, the D-2 was being assigned a staff officer from fleet HQ who would be aboard to coordinate operations - Captain 2nd Rank Yegorov, Pavel Ilyich, himself a former submarine commander and, as it happened, our future division commander as well. This way, we would have more operational decisiveness - after all, now we had an officer on board who was a full 3 ranks above me!


(Vinogradov, commander of the Northern Fleet Submarine Brigade)

Q: What was it like having a senior officer on board? What was Yegorov like?

Well, as an officer, Yegorov was an excellent submariner and totally understood our operations. We never stepped on each other’s toes, and he left tactical command firmly in my hands while doing his best to advise me. In operational decisions, he was quick and decisive, and expected me to likewise trust his judgment entirely. Not like I had a choice of course! But we had a very good working relationship on the boat.



As a man, I can’t say I got to know him much at all - he did not let on much, and kept to his own thoughts. I can say that he made an impression of a troubled man, a tortured soul. He used to be the commander of the M-175, our first loss in February under captain Melkadze who succeeded Yegorov, and I think that weighed on him - but more than that, rumours were that he had trouble with the “organs” [secret police], though I didn’t ask. Yegorov had a brilliant career as a naval officer, and as I said, would become our own division commander in a few months’ time. But not long after the war ended, he committed suicide. Make of that what you will.

And we were not the only boat to go to sea with a senior officer on board - our present division commander Kolyshkin had gone to sea with the Sch-421 just a few days earlier, also to provide cover for the PQ-13’s passage. The Sch-421 was a well-regarded boat in the fleet - it was on its first patrol under its new commander Vidyaev, who was the starpom [first officer] of the boat on its preceding few patrols under Lunin, a very famous commander. I personally didn’t like Lunin that much, I thought he was a bit of a braggart, but he was certainly a good submariner. He’d got promoted and was now commanding one of our large Katyusha’s boats, leaving his old Sch-421 in capable hands. Its’ first (and only) patrol under Vidyaev and division commander Kolyshkin would be an interesting one… but more on that later!


(commander Vidyaev, aboard the Sch-421)

Q: Where were you deployed for the patrol?

We were sent to position No.11a, a provisional patrol box 200 nautical miles due north of Nordkapp. Sch-402 was already in nearby position No.10a, while Sch-421 was in position No.3. So we had a good measure of support and a good position from which to respond to any calls for help from the convoy when it passed. Our main task was to intercept German units, especially submarines, as they came out of the Fjords towards the convoy, which would be passing along the edge of ice to our north.



We left on March 21st, the day of the spring equinox - so from then on, the days would be longer than nights, making German aircraft more and more of a threat by the day. They already were - over the preceding week, the air raids on Murmansk were intense and ferocious, and although here at Polyarnyi we’d largely escaped damage, the civil docks further in Kola bay weren’t so lucky. They were flattened by bombing, along with much of the rest of the city - which forced the convoys to be sent mainly to Arkhangelsk, out of range of the German bombers. The British even sent 3 crane ships with PQ-13 to help better equip Arkhangelsk for unloading these convoys.




(Murmansk under attack by German bombers)

As for us, we’d waited until dark, to avoid being attacked by those German planes on our way out, and left base at about 22:00 on the 21st of March...



To be continued...

[CCIP]

Q: How would you describe your next patrol?

Busy and eventful! For what was a pretty slow patrol the previous time, we had no lack of activity on this one. Well, most of the time we were not in contact with anything, but when events unfolded, they certainly happened quickly and intensely.



By early morning on March 22nd, 1942, we left Kola Bay behind and were heading out to see, careful to avoid known positions of German minefields outside of our harbour. By 5 in the morning, it got bright enough for us to start worrying about air attack; I ordered the main tanks partially flooded just in case, so we’d have a quick way to dive if something showed up.



Soon the sun was up. To complicate things, we got a report from fleet on the radio that not only were there minefields, but a German submarine was spotted by our air scouts not far outside the Kola Bay exits that morning. We proceeded cautiously, zig-zagging to avoid any trouble. I had no plans to dive unless we had to - we were already going slowly enough as it is - so I ordered our battle flag to be raised on the rubka [conning tower] to help friendly planes avoid mistaking us for that German sub.





Mercifully, that day was quiet for us. By 7:30 in the evening it was dark again; I ordered the tanks blown, and we sped up - we had a position to be in to support the convoy, and we had to be there no later than the 26th.



Q: Did you make it to your position in time?

We did, but not without a few adventures along the way. The first was an encounter with another Norwegian boat the next morning, on the 23rd of March. They surrendered without questions; we gave them time to evacuate; they scuttled their boat and we gave them directions to Varde, about 35-40km away to the south. I was a bit worried about them, admittedly, as there was drifting ice in the area and it was quite cold - but I didn’t need any more incidents with the Norwegians, especially with a senior officer from Fleet HQ on board.





Next, soon after the sun came up, we had a Junkers 87 drop in on us and try to attack - he dropped bombs as we were diving, but mercifully missed. We stayed under for 5 hours before surfacing. Then we’d spotted some masts along the coast to the south, roughly in the area where we sank the two patrol ships on our previous patrol. We tried to approach, but weren’t able to get into a good position - and daytime wasn’t helping. I broke off the attack after trying to approach them for an hour, with our senior officer Yegorov’s approval.





The next day we got news on the radio that our forces in the Barents sea had managed to sink a German submarine - nicely done! But there were others, and we were already getting signal intercepts on the German frequency, suggesting that they were gathering to intercept convoy PQ-13, which we were to protect. For the moment, it did not seem that the convoy was having any trouble though, but the weather was getting worse. By the time we’d made it to our patrol area on the 26th March 1942, it turned into a full-blown storm...



To be continued...

[Torplexed]

As before, I'm finding this AAR a fascinating read, and a great source of detailed research. So far, real good.

[Kapitain Oliver Leinkraunt]

Sorry for the question CCIP, where can I download the Patch 1.03 of this mod?

[driver]

Originally Posted by Kapitain Oliver Leinkraunt

Sorry for the question CCIP, where can I download the Patch 1.03 of this mod?

You can download the latest patch 1.4 for this mod from here...

http://www.mediafire.com/?pxu5ilb4v58l4c1

[CCIP]

Cheers, glad you got the link! And thank you folks as always

Sorry I've been a bit slow (I'd got distracted with building a new computer, then work), but all is good and there's lots more reports coming up

[Kapitain Oliver Leinkraunt]

thanks, but I have problems with the mod I don't have the enviromental effects and I can't go near all harbours;
if I do that, the game crashed.
Perhaps I haven't all parts of the mod. I have:
Addon Soviet Waterway (v_099)
Addon Soviet Waterway (v_102)
Addon Soviet Waterway (Patch 103)
Addon Soviet Waterway_Patch_104
Can you help me?
sorry for my bad english.

[CCIP]

Hmm, where did you download it from, and did you use a completely new install of SH4 for it?

My download seems to have been different - I just have a full 1.02 version, plus a 1.03 patch.

[Kapitain Oliver Leinkraunt]

I downloaded the files from www.redrodgers.com and I didn't use a completly new install of SH4. I can't read the instructions because they're in cyrillic.
Have you got an english version of the instructions? And, please, can you post the site where you downloaded the mod?
Sorry for my bad english.

[fitzcarraldo]

Very nice and so good!

It seems this mod deserves a test.

BTW, what environment do you use in the mod?

Many thanks and best regards.