The 900 Days (57 page)

THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 23 DAWNED CLEAR, BRIGHT and crisp on the little island of Kotlin. Kotlin, a mile and three-quarters long by a half-mile wide, was better known as Kronstadt—home of the Baltic Fleet, the naval bastion of Leningrad, the “King’s Fortress” or Kronstadt as Peter the Great christened it in 1710.

Today as on every day for three months Kronstadt awoke to war, grim, menacing, close. There was war all about the little island—war five miles across the sound on the Oranienbaum shore where naval guns at Krasnaya Gorka and Seraya Loshad were holding the Germans back, war in the anchorage where the great warships of the fleet poured molten lead and steel into the Nazi lines, war in the skies overhead where the German planes were attacking in greater and greater strength, war in the old streets and buildings of the naval town where German siege shells smashed down like triphammers.

That was the kind of morning it was. Admiral Panteleyev, a thoughtful man with a deep love of nature, noted in his diary that it was a “remarkably quiet, sunny morning in golden autumn.” Long after, he was puzzled why he had used those words. But everything had become relative by that time.

He noticed that the German artillery fire seemed heavier than usual. The Germans were aiming for the naval factory and the ships in the anchorage. At the moment there was no air alert on, and a smoke screen had been laid to protect the ships and naval installations from the German fire.

The Baltic Fleet had suffered in its terrible exodus from Tallinn, but it was still a powerful force. Standing that day in the road at Kronstadt and in the Leningrad Harbor and the Neva were 2 battleships, 2 cruisers, 13 destroyers, 12 gunboats, 42 submarines, 6 coastal defense ships, 9 armed cutters, 68 trawlers and mine layers, 38 torpedo boats and 134 miscellaneous naval craft. The fleet had at its disposal 286 planes. Its coastal and shore batteries counted 400 guns. Before the year was over it would provide 83,746 sailors for shore combat, most of them in Leningrad. It was not a force to be trifled with.

Hitler had ordered the Baltic Fleet destroyed and Kronstadt razed. Within the week Nazi planes had showered the fortress and the fleet with leaflets saying: “Leningrad to the ground! Kronstadt to the sea!”

Hitler had launched his naval war in the east with one aim only: the extinction of the Baltic Fleet. Now he was not going to let it slip through his fingers. Even before the war Hitler told his commanders in May, 1941, that if the Soviet warships sought to intern themselves in Sweden the Nazi Army must prevent it. If the warships reached Swedish waters, Germany would demand that the Swedes surrender them.

Plan Barbarossa contained a special supplement called Warzburg. Under this, between June 10 and 20 the Germans had laid down a thick barrier of mines designed to keep the Baltic Fleet in Russian waters so it could be destroyed at leisure.

The Baltic Fleet, except for its submarines, had not moved from the Gulf of Finland, and Plan Warzburg had not effected its destruction. A new plan called Valkyrie was set afoot to destroy the main strength of the Baltic Fleet when it was driven out of Tallinn. This, too, had failed, although the Soviet losses at Tallinn were heavy.

Now with the Nazi ring being drawn close around Leningrad Hitler again feared that the Baltic Fleet might escape to Sweden. Two large naval forces had been concentrated by the Germans off the Aland Islands and at Libau. They were to destroy the Baltic Fleet if it tried to break out. The battleships
Tirpitz
and
Admiral Scheer
, the light cruisers
Nümberg
and
Köln
and some smaller craft stood near the Aland Islands. At Libau were the cruisers
Emden
and
Leipzig
.

On September 6 Hitler issued Order No. 35, which said:

“In cooperation with the Finns mine barriers and artillery fire must be employed to blockade Kronstadt and prevent the fleet from entering the Baltic Sea.”

The net was tight. But the Baltic Fleet was hardly passive. It mustered 338 large guns, either on warships, in coastal batteries or mounted on railroad carriages. These were guns of calibers of 100 or more. Among them were 78 guns of calibers from 180 to 406. The biggest was a 406-mm railroad cannon with a range of 45.6 kilometers (28 miles). It fired a shell weighing 1,108 kilograms (approximately 2,440 pounds).
¹
The second largest was a 356-mm gun, also a railroad weapon. It fired 31.2 kilometers with a shell of 747.8 kilos. There was limited ammunition for these guns, and they were used rarely. The old battleship
Marat
had 305-mm guns in its main battery. They fired 29.4 kilometers and used 470.9-kilo shells. The work horses of the Baltic Fleet batteries were 108-mm, 132-mm and 130-mm guns with ranges of 37.8 to 25.5 kilometers.

The naval batteries had been integrated into the Leningrad defense system September 4 by Vice Admiral 1.1. Gren under plans which had been worked out by the Naval Commissar, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, and the Army Artillery Marshal N. N. Voronov in early September.

Admiral Gren was one of the navy’s leading artillery specialists. Like most artillery men he had a tin ear. Once he was attending a meeting at which Stalin savagely criticized the naval artillery plans. He sat silent, apparently unmoved by Stalin’s words. Stalin was curious about this and asked who he was/Admiral Kuznetsov explained he had done much to develop Soviet naval gun power.

“In that case Comrade Gren should be promoted,” said Stalin. “At your service,” responded Gren immediately.

Admiral Gren had set up his command post ashore and divided the fleet into three groups. The first, the Neva group, consisted of smaller craft— gunboats, mine sweepers, smaller destroyers. They were stationed in the Neva from Smolny east to the Izhorsk region. The second detachment, the Leningrad group, included the cruiser
October Revolution
(the former
Petropavlovsk
), stationed at the coal wharves, the cruiser Maxim Gorky, near the grain elevator, and some smaller warships scattered about the commercial docks. The third group was at the Kronstadt-Oranienbaum anchorage. This included the battleship
Marat
posted across from Strelna, the cruiser
Kirov
at Kronstadt, and a strong collection of other cruisers.

Since August 30 the naval guns had been defending Leningrad. That day the Neva squadron went into action against advancing Nazis in the Ivanov-skoye region of the river.

The next day heavy fleet batteries opened up at 1:45
P.M.
against the Germans, probably in the Gatchina area. The Neva flotilla and the heavy Rzhevka polygon answered 28 calls for artillery fire and launched 340 shells from their I3o-to-4o6-mm guns. The next day the 12-inch guns of the Krasnaya Gorka battery on the Oranienbaum plateau went into action against German armor.

Many naval guns were demounted and put to use on land. Two old 130-mm nine- and ten-gun batteries from the forty-year-old crusier
Aurora
, whose guns fired blanks on the Winter Palace that evening in November, 1917, and frightened the remaining Kerensky ministers into surrendering to Lenin’s Bolsheviks, were placed in position on the Pulkovo Heights. Sixteen 130-mm two-gun railroad batteries went into action in late August. Another
55
batteries had been set up before the end of September, including 2 180-mm gun positions and 18 120-mm batteries equipped with guns demounted from warships.

The harder the battle raged, the stronger the naval guns resounded. When the Nazis broke through Krasnoye Selo and into Ligovo, the heavy guns of the cruisers
Gorky
and
Petropavlovsk
poured in their shells. The concentration of naval railroad artillery was so heavy in the Gatchina area that five batteries—Nos. 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24—fell into encirclement. Firing at open range against German tanks, all five fought their way back to the Soviet lines.

Battery No. u, equipped with a 356-mm gun, firing a 1,500-pound shell, got off 568 rounds between September 9 and 25, knocking out 35 tanks, 12 artillery installations, a battalion of Nazi infantry and a train loaded with German troops and equipment. The Kronstadt guns laid down 358 barrages in September, delivering 9,368 shells.

By August 20 the navy had put into action 170 shore batteries, including 48 railroad guns. Six batteries were formed around 13 large guns taken out of the experimental naval artillery park. Leningrad factories worked twenty-four-hour shifts to complete heavy railroad carriages for new naval mountings. Battery No. 1109 was mounted on rails August 25 and at 11
A.M.
, August 26, went into action. Twenty-nine new railroad batteries with 70 guns were put into operation between August 1, 1941, and February 15, 1942, as well as 61 stationary batteries with 176 guns.

Almost half of the navy’s fire power was concentrated along the Neva, backing up the sagging lines just south of the Leningrad city line.

Under intense naval bombardment, the Nazis began to throw in air power in an effort to knock out the fleet guns. Fleet air protection was weak. The fleet air fighter arm and its AA guns had been put under the Leningrad Air Defense Command. Admiral Tributs complained repeatedly that the warships strung out from the upper Neva to Kronstadt were poorly protected. The complaints went unheeded. The Leningrad Command was too busy. The truth was that Kronstadt and the warships had virtually no protection. So long as the Luftwaffe left the warships alone everything was fine.

Now trouble was beginning. For days Kronstadt had watched Leningrad being attacked. The horizon was red each night with the flames. The sound of the bombing, the rattle of the guns echoed over the narrow water barrier. Panteleyev watched the fires of September 8 from the Kronstadt ARP command post. Admiral Drozd watched from his command on the cruiser
Kirov
. The fleet and its shore batteries rained shells all night long on the Germans south of Peterhof and near Krasnoye Selo. By the thirteenth the naval arsenals began to run short of shells, so heavy was the rate of fire. But the need was no less. The guns fired on.

But Kronstadt’s position was growing more difficult. The Germans now had land batteries at Ligovo, Strelna and New Peterhof. They began to shell the fortress and particularly the narrow water lane between Kronstadt and Oranienbaum.

Trouble for the fleet was piling up. The Nazis attacked the isolated naval garrisons on the Moonzund Peninsula on September 11 and Ösel Island off the Estonian coast on September 13. The garrisons were fighting desperately but were being driven back to Dagö Island.
²
The Baltic Fleet was too deeply engaged to help. The garrisons had to fight it out for themselves.

Meanwhile, the fleet was given emergency orders by Zhukov to transfer two broken divisions of the dwindling Eighth Army from the Oranienbaum
place (Tarmes
to the main Leningrad front. The fleet commanders desperately tried to carry out the movement before the Germans brought Oranienbaum port under fire. There were rumors that the German fleet was on the move (it was; it had come out to prevent a suicide dash by the Baltic Fleet), and submarines were dispatched on intelligence missions. The Leningrad lines needed more and more support. The destroyer leader
Leningrad
and three mine layers were sent into the Neva. Four gunboats and the battleship
October Revolution
were positioned off Peterhof in the Sea Canal. So many sailors had been formed into marine detachments for shore duty (sixteen brigades) that the complements of ships afloat were down to one-third their normal rating.

And now the Germans began to find the range of the Baltic warships. On the sixteenth the first 150-mm shells hit the
Marat
and the
Petropavlovsk
, both stationed in the Sea Canal. The
Marat
took a shell through its deck. A 120-mm gun was knocked out and several sailors were killed or wounded. On the eighteenth the Germans concentrated on the
Maxim Gorky
and the
Petropavlovsk
. The
Gorky
was hit, but not seriously. The
Petropavlovsk
, unfinished and unable to move because its engines were not operative, was hit eight times and settled to the bottom.

On the twenty-first the Luftwaffe attacked the fleet. They hit the old battleship
October Revolution
, which was pounding Ligovo from the Sea Canal with its 12-inch guns. Panteleyev heard the explosion and saw the old ship enveloped in smoke and flames. Admiral Tributs ordered him to investigate what had happened. Panteleyev found a fire raging in the forecastle of the
October Revolution
, but it was continuing to fight. Control had not been lost, neither had power. The commander, Vice Admiral Mikhail Moska-lenko, said that a flight of bombers had suddenly swooped out of the clouds and three bombs had hit the foredeck. Within the hour the battleship was being towed by a sea tug into the Kronstadt yards for repairs.

But this was only the beginning.

Life on Kronstadt was changing. On September 17 Vsevolod Vishnevsky had noted in his diary:

On the eighteenth he wrote:

On the nineteenth:

On the twentieth: