Before Patrol 2
Q: What was the situation like at base before your next patrol?
Like I already mentioned, the war situation was very severe and uncertain back then. Now, of course it was nothing like the fighting on the main front in the south, but the Germans and Finns were on advance and our troops were in retreat. We lived day to day, hoping that everything would turn out. The Germans were advancing towards our base along the coast from Norway, with solid support from aircraft and occasional bombardments by their destroyers - but they soon ran into an impenetrable defense on the small Rybachyi peninsula, where our troops were cut off but stayed firm in their positions. The Northern Fleet successfully kept them resupplied for many long months, until the Germans were driven out.
Further down south, they were also advancing towards the town of Kandalaksha on the White Sea, together with the Finns, trying to cut off the rail and road links to Murmansk and the Kola peninsula. That would have been a much more serious blow to us, and could have caused the Northern Fleet to evacuate from Kola Bay, which was our only warm-water harbour in the north - and that would mean that for months each year, we’d be unable to operate. Luckily, they did not succeed in this either. The Germans had a lot of military strength and better equipment, but their weakness was supply. And because most of their supply came by way of shipping along the coast of Norway, we knew that submarines were some of our best weapons to make a difference.
Q: How many submarines did you have in the Northern Fleet then?
Before the war started, the Northern Fleet Submarine Brigade was made up of 4 divisions of submarines, 16 boats total: three type D-type boats (including our D-2) in the 1st division, seven Sch-type medium submarines in the 2nd and 3rd division, and six M-type “baby” boats in the 4th division.The D-1 went missing without a trace in November 1940, so that left us with 15 boats when the war broke out. Luckily, the VMF [navy] command quickly realized that we needed more, and the big “Katyushas”, the K-type cruiser/fleet boats were reassigned to us from the Baltic Fleet.
(K-1 and K-2 arrive at Polyarnyi)
(D-2 and K-2 moored next to each other - note the size difference)
The K-1 and K-2 arrived together on August 6th, by way of the Belomor [White Sea-Baltic canal] and joined our division. Our division commander was very fond of these new boats and very quickly got to the business of introducing them to Arctic service. Meanwhile, as I mentioned when I was talking about the Tuman, just 4 days later we got another submarine visitor - the British submarine “Trident”, our first foreign visitor of the many that came during wartime.
(HMS Trident)
Q: How did you greet the British?
The way we always greet guests in Russia - warmly and with friendship. War doesn’t cancel hospitality, and even though it was a tough day for us having lost a ship, we’d still put our best on the table, had newspaper and radio people come in, and lots of gifts. We even gave them a baby reindeer to keep as a pet, which they took on board the sub and which lived through a patrol with them. Who knew that deer could get used to submarines so well? We never had anything bigger than a cat on my submarines. But their deer did well and lived a long life at a zoo in Scotland after the war.
The Trident’s crew didn’t come empty-handed either - but their greatest gift to us was their operational intelligence and know-how on fighting the Germans. They’d been patrolling and sinking German ships off Norway for the better part of two years, so they had plenty to teach us. Fleet command, too, was very keen to quickly make friends with the British, because once the agreements for lend-lease were made, we especially needed their help to escort the convoys with military aid. We simply did not have the ships for such an operation. And those convoys came soon - in fact the first one left Iceland on August 21st, while we were still on our way to our patrol area.
To be continued...