Q: How did your next patrol start?
It started well. We started our diesel engines at 8:45 in the morning on the 18th of August 1941. Together with the shturman
[navigator], we discussed our patrol options while the starpom
[first officer] conned the boat on the way out of the Polyarnyi inlet and Kola bay. We agreed that at first we’ll concentrate on the exits from Uls-fjord and Lungen-fjord, since we had information on minefields that have been laid both further into the fjords and further out at sea. We plotted a course all the way to our patrol zone, some 1600km away, at a distance of 25-30km from the Norwegian shore so that we’d be able to watch for any coastal traffic.
Of course, we anticipated the enemy airplanes to be active, and took measures to avoid them as much as possible. It only took 6 hours of sailing out of port before we saw our first airplane - a distant enemy scout flying near cape Tsyp-Navolok. We made an emergency dive, but it seemed that they hadn’t noticed us.
The first few days of the voyage were uneventful. The days of war elsewhere were anything but, of course - enemy forces were making breakout attacks in all directions, including encircling Kiev and punching through our lines in the direction of Leningrad. Mercifully, on the Northern Front they were unable to make such a breakthrough. We listened to the radio broadcasts intently in those days, nervous and hoping for something - anything - to stem the tide of the Fascist advance.
It should be said that there was no defeatism on our boat, and we were sure we’d come through. The politruk, of course, did his part - one of the “upgrades” that the
[D-2] “Narodnovolets” underwent during our time in port was a proper war propaganda kit: glossy new posters, slogans, literature, and even new records for the grammaphone. The sounds of the
[popular song] “Katyusha” were now almost mandatorily followed by the “Sacred War”, a sort of official war hymn that was written within 2 days of the German invasion and became ubiquitous, with rousing content such as:
Quote:
We shall drive a bullet into the forehead
Of the rotten fascist filth,
We shall build a solid coffin
For the scum of humanity!
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And so forth. Comrade Stalin now appeared on the radio often, and in spite of the dark days that the country was living through, the broadcasts were certainly upbeat.
By the 21st of August, 1941, we entered patrol area No.2, surveying the conditions. We’d decided to try and avoid the major entrances to Uls-fjord, and instead to try and sneak into it via one of the shallower inlets which were unlikely to see much shipping or patrols. Our new shturman knew the waters here very well and was confident in our plan. By now, although days were still fairly long, we did have a few hours of darkness every night. We figured that we would have no trouble slipping through on the surface by nighttime.
The first couple of days of our journey were in sunny, warm weather with smooth seas. This allowed us to pre-flood some of our ballast tanks and proceed with a lowered freeboard (or even decks awash, although that was a bit more difficult as it required keeping watertight hatches from the tower all the way to the engine room open to provide air intake for the diesels - a safety risk in itself). Although this reduced our speed and fuel efficiency, it also allowed us to stay surfaced safely in heavily-patrolled areas, because we could dive very rapidly - in 30 seconds or less.
But in the early afternoon of the 21st of August, as we rounded Nordkapp, strong winds and high waves blasted us from the west. It was no longer possible to safely reduce the boat’s freeboard (unless we wanted to risk our watch deck being washed over by a high wave), and so we blew our tanks and hoped for better conditions soon.
To be continued...