THE 190 SHIPS OF THE TALLINN EVACUATION HAD BEEN divided into four convoys. They formed up off Tallinn, waiting for orders to proceed. Desultory German fire splashed toward the ships. At 11:30 the signal to be prepared to proceed at noon was run up. Ahead of the convoy stretched an odyssey of 220 miles, of which 150 miles lay between two coasts occupied by the Germans and 75 miles were heavily mined. German airports were in easy range of almost the whole course. No Soviet air cover could be expected before the ships got to the immediate vicinity of Kronstadt.
Shortly after noon the first ships got under way—nine troop transports, including the Virona, and an escort of three submarines, five trawlers, five mine sweepers and five coastal cutters. The torpedo boat Surovy (Grim) commanded the escort. From the Minsk, Panteleyev could see how jammed were the transports, not a free spot on deck. They waddled along behind the tiny trawlers like turtles after frogs. Next came Convoy No. 2, headed by the Kazakhstan, guarded by the gunboat Moskva,
The signal officer reported: “The Virona has raised anchor. . . . The Kazakhstan has raised anchor. . . .”
The first and second convoys had just begun to move out of the harbor when the first of the German contact mines were touched off.
“It’s begun!” someone on the bridge of the Minsk exclaimed.
Admiral Panteleyev kept his binoculars fixed on the shore. At about 1:35 P.M. the red flag on the ancient tower of Long Herman fluttered down and the tricolor of bourgeois Estonia was run up in its place.
At 2 P.M. Convoy No. 4 began to move. It was composed of nine ships, including self-propelled barges and tugs. It was protected by two cutters and nine trawlers.
Convoy No. 2 started moving again at 2:50 P.M.—ten large transports, four mine sweepers, nine trawlers and four gunboats.
Twenty minutes later came Convoy No. 3, the last and largest—nine big transports, including the Luga, the Tobol, the Lucerne, the Balkhash, the Asumaa, the Kumari and the Vtoraya Pyatiletka.
It was protected by five gunboats and cutters and eight trawlers. The two transports which rescued the garrison from Paldiski joined this convoy.
The channel was clear. The ships drew off to the north and further on, at the very horizon, moved to the east. Now that the transports had gotten away General Moskalenko touched off the last depots at the water’s edge. The Amur was sunk at one channel entrance, the transport Gasma at another and the tug Mardus at the eastern approach to Minna Harbor.
Under the direction of Vice Admiral Yu. F. Rail, the mine layers Bury a (Storm), Sneg (Snow) and Tsiklon (Cyclone) planted mine barrages around the harbor and in the channel. Finally, at 4 P.M. the Baltic Fleet itself raised anchor. Five fleet trawlers led the procession. Then came the Kirov, bearing the fleet commander’s flag, followed by the Leningrad, a squadron of mine layers, submarines and other warships. In all there were 28 fighting ships in the contingent, including rescue boats and icebreakers.
Not until 5:15 P.M. did the Minsk leave the harbor under German shrapnel fire. It headed a detachment of some 21 naval vessels. The Minsk steamed out, allowing an interval of twelve cable lengths behind her escorting trawlers. Finally, the rear guard of 13 ships under Admiral Rail departed at 9:15 P.M.
The hegira to Kronstadt was under way—a line of ships that stretched out over fifteen miles.
At 6 P.M. the dinner bell sounded on the Minsk, The steward laid the officers’ mess with the usual white linen and gleaming crystal. But Panteleyev remained on theimdge. Already over the long line of transports stretching into the horizon the German air attack had begun, and the first ship had gone down, the transport Ella.
Aboard the Virona it was also the mess hour. Mikhailovsky, his notebook in hand, sat down at the long table. Among those waiting on table was a young girl with black braids, sensitive face, blue eyes. She looked to Mikhailovsky like a girl graduate. After dinner everyone went on deck to watch the German planes. The girl, her hair neatly braided, stood next to Mikhailovsky.
“How strange war begins,” she said. “So unexpected. I just don’t understand anything.”
“Are you from Leningrad?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “and I happened to be in Tallinn quite by accident.”
They talked a while, then the ship moved on to the east. The islands of Naissaar and Aegna lay far behind. Again the German planes attacked. Nine struck at a tanker and a steamer. A smoke screen concealed the results. Suddenly the cruiser Kirov steamed ahead with its protective cover of trawlers. Fog began to spread over the sea.
They were coming into heavily mined waters now. The ships put out paravanes to touch them off. About suppertime a fierce new air attack was launched. The Vironcfs antiaircraft guns chattered ceaselessly. The ship swung wide and zigzagged madly. Wave after wave of German JU-88’s plunged down, attacking singly and then in trios.
Passengers began to run from side to side, but the stern base voice of Professor Tsekhnovitser halted them: “Comrades! Be calm! Nothing is going to happen to us. Panic is the most dangerous thing!”
The whistle of falling bombs filled the air. Suddenly Mikhailovsky felt the ship shudder. The deck under his feet seemed to rise up. The next moment he was under water, sinking to the bottom. The end. So it seemed. Then he rose. Blood was flowing from his forehead and into his left eye. Bullets flew through the water. He turned on his back and saw planes in the sky. They seemed to zero in on him. He ducked his head under water. When he came up again, the sky was clear. The sound of motors was fading into the distance. He felt something in the water—something firm and cold. He turned about and saw a body floating, the skull crushed and the face a mass of pulp. Only by the black braids did he recognize the schoolgirl from Leningrad who had found herself in Tallinn by sheer chance.
Mikhailovsky swam away. He swam for a while, then turned on his back and rested. He was miles from shore. All around him he heard cries for help. He saw a box float by. It had on it the letters: “Theater: Baltic Fleet.” He grabbed for it, but had not the strength. The sun was setting and its red rays ran like tongues across the sky. He saw no people. Darkness—that is the worst, he thought. He grew cold. Suddenly, almost on top of him, a cutter appeared. Strong hands reached out and pulled him from the sea.
Admiral Panteleyev witnessed the Virona tragedy. He saw the ship, standing without movement, listing to the right. Over it rose a heavy cloud of oily smoke. The rescue ship Saturn made its way to the Virona to bring it under tow. The gunboat Surovy stood by, and the transport Alev hove to. But disaster followed on disaster. First, the Saturn was mined and sunk, then the Virona and finally the Alev and two more transports.
A sailor on the gunboat Sneg saw the Virona sink. The passengers were mostly staff of the Baltic Fleet, officers’ wives, propaganda workers, newspapermen, Party officials. The quarterdeck was crowded, but in the sea the sailor could perceive the dark figures of people swimming. Across the watery expanse he heard the faint sound of the Internationale. The crowd on the deck was singing, and the stirring strains rolled over the waves. Then the sailor heard the thin crack of shots and the yellow flash of flame as officers took their own lives in the last moment before the ship disappeared below the waves.
The Sneg picked up dozens of survivors. Some of the women had lost all their clothes. Some of the men were hysterical. Later another gunboat picked up a woman who had clung to a German mine for hours before she was taken off. She was a commander’s wife. She had sung the Internationale with the others. But she put no bullet in her head. She simply leaped into the water and eighteen hours later was rescued. Anatoly Tarasenkov jumped from the ship in full uniform, wearing his greatcoat, his pockets filled with manuscripts and notes, his pistol in his belt. He joined a circle of passengers who were holding hands and attempting to support each other with the help of life belts. Soon his limbs grew stiff, and he slowly swam off. How long he had been swimming he did not know when a tug appeared and he was hauled aboard.
As the tug plowed through the murky waters, he heard the cry again and again: “Save us! Help! Help!”
The tragedy of the Virona shook those who saw it. A commissar on the Sneg said bitterly: “Did you ever think we would drown like blind cats in a puddle? Where were our planes?” He was bitter at the commander of the Kirov for steaming proudly ahead, as though trailing his cape to the Germans. Why, he demanded, did not the commander go ahead with torpedo boats and organize aid?
The poet Yuri Inge watched the Virona sink from the foredeck of the icebreaker K. Voldemars. Inge was thirty-five years old, a tall, straight man with serious gray eyes and blond hair which was only beginning to darken a little. Vissarion Sayanov, his fellow poet, thought he looked like a Scandinavian.
“What bastards!” a friend heard Inge exclaim as, notebook in hand, he tried to jot down impressions for the poem already taking shape in his mind. Every life preserver on board the Voldemars was thrown to the struggling victims of the Virona. A moment later the Voldemars itself was hit and sank immediately.
Inge’s wife, Yelena Vechtomova, knew of the tragedy as soon as the survivors got back to Kronstadt. A young boatswain named Virchik said, “I saw him almost at the end.” But no one wanted to believe in Inge’s death, and the letters he had written Yelena kept coming by slow military post week after week: “Good morning, Alenushka. It’s a perfectly beautiful morning . . .”; “Broushtein has come and he brought two letters from you . . .”; “I’ve been to the post office and there are no letters . . .”; “How is Serezhenka? . . .”; “I’ve bought you some blue wool gloves.” It was almost too much for Yelena Vechtomova.
The losses of the Virona were great: the writers F. Knyazev and Ye. Sobolevsky, Professor Tsekhnovitser, the poet Vasya Skrulev, the Pravda photographer Misha Prekhner. The elderly novelist and revolutionary president of Estonia, Johannes Lauristin, was lost on the Volodarsky.
No witness of the tragedies ever erased the scene from his memory. On the distant horizon the lagging ships of the rear guard loomed as dark shadows silhouetted against the rose-and-black sky where Tallinn lay burning. Enormous plumes of dense smoke poured upward and curved inward over the heavens, reaching toward the enactments of horror in the nearer sea. In the total blackout the burning carcasses of sinking ships glowed like campfires in a watery desert. Occasionally the sea would be blindingly lightened as the thunder of a torpedo or mine sent another ship to its end. The antiaircraft guns of the warships chattered ceaselessly at German dive bombers which swarmed in for the kill, their bomb paths illuminated by the flames of vessels already afire. The sea boiled with wreckage amid which swam survivors, some clinging to planks, others staying afloat with the aid of life preservers. The few lifeboats were loaded to the gunwale. Patrol boats and submarines picked their way through the waters, saving as many of the swimming men and women as they could. All around was the shuddering roar of mines, being exploded by the paravanes of the surviving ships. Within one hour the Minsk had touched off a dozen. The Kirov exploded five in half an hour.
As the ships neared Cape Uminda-Nina, they came under shellfire from German shore batteries. Coveys of German attack boats launched torpedoes amid the stricken convoys.
Just after 8 P.M. the submarine S-j, which was escorting the cruiser Kirov, struck a mine and disappeared under the water. A few moments later the right paravane of the Kirov caught a mine and, to the horror of the crew, began to draw it aboard the cruiser. Sailors managed to cut loose the paravane at the last moment, preventing an explosion aboard the cruiser. While the Kirov struggled with the faulty paravane, another escort, the mine layer Gordy, blew up at 8:36 P.M., followed in a few moments by the Yakov Sverdlov, which took a torpedo aimed at the Kirov. Many sailors were drowned. The flagman on the Kirov’s lookout kept up a continuous call of mine sweepers and minor ships sinking in the puree of mines. Another mine caught in the Kirov’s paravane just as a German torpedo boat dashed in for the kill. The torpedo boat was beaten off by the Kirov’s main guns. Simultaneously shore batteries opened up, but the cruiser silenced them and finally won a moment’s respite when the mine layer Smetly covered it with a smoke screen.
It was much the same on the destroyer leader, Minsk. At 9:40 P.M. a mine exploded in one of the Minsk’s paravanes. Vice Admiral Panteleyev estimated that the ship took on 650 tons of water. The mine layer Skory came to the aid of the Minsk as it lay in the water without movement. The Skoryand a tugboat took the Minsk in tow, but were sunk by a mine. The five base trawlers at the head of the Minsk detachment did not notice what had happened and steamed ahead, leaving only one trawler with the Minsk. Without escort amid waters filled with mines, Vice Admiral Panteleyev ordered his protective detachment and convoy to cast anchor. He did not resume course until after daylight the next day.
The rear guard was almost obliterated. About 10 P.M. the guard ships, Sneg and Tsiklon, were sunk and twenty minutes later the squadron leader, Kalinin, was lost off Cape Uminda-Nina. The Kalinin stayed afloat for an hour, and most of its wounded and personnel were removed. But at the same time the mine layers Artem and Volodarsky went down. Vice Admiral Yu. F. Rail, commander of the detachment, suffered severe wounds. The transports Luga, Everitis and Yarvamaa were sunk.
In view of the density of the mines, the terrible losses already suffered and the inability to cope with the hazards in the night, the fleet commander ordered all ships to anchor until daylight. Patrols were set up to ward off torpedo attacks.
What were the Tallinn evacuation losses? Of the 29 large transports which left Tallinn, 25 were lost, 3 were beached on Hogland Island and only 1 reached Leningrad. One of the three ships beached on Hogland, the Saule, later was towed to Leningrad. In all, the Baltic Merchant (noncombat) Fleet lost 38 ships in the Gulf of Riga and the Irben Strait. More than 10,000 lives were lost. In addition, 16 warships, mostly gunboats, mine sweepers and cutters, were sunk and 6 small transports were sunk. Among the great ships which went down were the Ivan Papanin, carrying 3,000 troops; the V tor ay a Pyatiletka with about 3,000; the Luga with 300 wounded; the Balkhash and the Tobol, each carrying several hundred. Of a total of 67 non-Navy ships, 34 were lost; of something over 100 naval craft, 87.5 percent were saved along with about 18,000 personnel.1
The Kazakhstan, carrying 3,600 troops, including 500 wounded, was the largest transport in the convoy. It was captained by Vyacheslav Kaliteyev, one of the most experienced Baltic skippers. He had been captain of the steamer Cooperation, which brought to Russia children of the Spanish Republicans. He had taken the Kazakhstan on several dangerous trips through the Arctic, and he had captained his boat through the Baltic from the beginning of the war.
The Kazakhstan took its place in the first convoy to leave Tallinn. Kaliteyev, was on the bridge. The ship quickly drew German attention. First there were submarine attacks and then wave after wave of JU-88’s struck. A stick of bombs fell harmlessly in the water. Then one struck. It hit a glancing blow at the bridge, killing the commander of the antiaircraft battery, the signalman and all those on the upper bridge.
The Kazakhstan was left without command. It lost speed and dropped out of the convoy. More than a hundred bombs fell around the ship. Flames broke out. The decks swarmed with hundreds of persons, most of whom had never before been at sea. Soldiers and passengers were pressed into service to fight the fire. For nine hours the battle raged before the flames were brought under control. Only seven members of the thirty-five-man crew survived. Headed by Second Boatswain L. N. Zagurko, they managed to get steam up and steered the Kazakhstan to a lonely spit of land called Vaindlo or Stenskjiner, about 500 yards long and 150 yards wide. There stood a lighthouse, a round cast-iron tower, painted white, manned by a small detachment of sailors. It was located about sixteen miles off the coast, between Naissaar and Gogland. The passengers were landed and picked up by sloops and small boats, which brought them to Kronstadt. Then, lightened of its load, the Kazakhstan, still under the command of its seven-man crew, was navigated, without charts, with field telephones connecting the bridge and the engine room, to Kronstadt. It got there September 1. All seven members of the crew won Orders of the Red Banner for their achievement.
But what of Captain Kaliteyev? There was no word of him in the Supreme Command’s communiqué No. 303 of September 12, 1941, hailing the achievement of the Kazakhstany sole troop ship to survive the nightmare of Tallinn.
Nor was this an accident. For Captain Kaliteyev was trapped in another nightmare. He was not dead, as most of those aboard the Kazakhstan had supposed.
The bomb which killed the men on the bridge did not kill Kalitayev. It merely knocked him unconscious.
“I heard the crash,” he said later, “and felt the crack of the ceiling breaking and I don’t remember anything more.”
When he came to himself, he was lying on the right side of the bridge with his head toward the ladder leading to the upper bridge. He felt that his head was wet and putting his hand to it found it covered with blood. But he saw no wounds on his body.
He then lost consciousness again and apparently slipped from the bridge for when he came to he was in the water with the ship sliding past him. There were many others in the water around him, and about 60 or 80 yards away was a small sloop, afire, with ten or fifteen persons clinging to it. He slipped out of his coat and boots. He wore no life jacket as he had felt that to don one would have aroused fear among the passengers.
He kept afloat for half an hour and then with a sailor named Yermakov was picked up by the submarine S-322. The submarine was unable to return him to his ship. Instead, it took him to Kronstadt, where he arrived ahead of the Kazakhstan.
An investigation was immediately launched into the captain’s conduct. Why had he left his ship? Why had he returned ahead of it? At first all went well. His associates in the merchant shipping service vouched for his character. The seven who saved the ship spoke up for him. Two medical experts said his story rang true.
But then came derogatory stories from passengers on the boat. The captain had abandoned his post. He had leaped into the water in fear. Gossip went to work. The suspicious investigators of the NKVD grew more suspicious. Kronstadt at that moment was gripped by panic. Some measure of the atmosphere in which the case was judged can be grasped from the fact that Vladimir Rudny, a Moscow correspondent, and Yuli Zenkorsky, a Tass correspondent, were picked up as “spies” a few days before the Tallinn ships came in. A few days later the writer Mikhail Godenko saw a young sailor, drunk on a couple of bottles of eau de cologne, shouting, “Down with the Soviets.” A commander drew his nagan, his holster pistol, and shouted, “Stop!”
“What. do you mean stop?” said the sailor. “You rats of the rear. Where were you when we were fighting at Gatchina, at Detskoye Selo?”
“I’ll shoot,” the commander warned.
“Shoot. Shoot ahead,” the sailor yelled. “Shoot me. But tomorrow the Germans will be fighting in Piter.”
A single shot brought the sailor to the pavement.
Admiral Kuznetsov, the Naval Commissar, visited Kronstadt August 31 —the day the evacuation of Tallinn was completed. Even before he arrived at Kronstadt he fell under the influence of the disorganized, panicky events. He found at Oranienbaum, where he embarked in his cutter for Kronstadt, undisciplined gangs of sailors, not in uniform, separated from their units, wandering aimlessly, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around them. Kronstadt was gloomy. The officers and the sailors were filled with depression.
That was the atmosphere in Kronstadt in which the case of Captain Kalitayev was judged by the secret police. Their verdict: death before the firing squad. The chargé: desertion under fire, cowardice.
Seventeen days after Order No. 303 was issued, honoring the seven men of Kalitayev’s crew for saving the Kazakhstan, the captain went before the firing squad and was executed.
Not until January 27, 1962, did the Leningrad Military District Court get around to “rehabilitating” the reputation of Kalitayev and informing his widow, the actress, Vera Nikolayevna Tutcheva, that the chargés against her husband were quite without foundation. So closed one of the last and most tragic episodes of the Tallinn disaster.2
Admiral Kuznetsov, Admiral Tributs, Admiral Panteleyev, Admiral Drozd and the other top naval men conducted a lengthy post-mortem in the ensuing weeks into the Tallinn affair. Admiral Kuznetsov tended to blame the Leningrad Command, which had operational control of the Baltic Fleet, for delay in ordering that evacuation plans be drafted for Tallinn—if necessary.
Panteleyev felt that, while the decision to defend Tallinn to the last regardless of cost was right and necessary in order to draw as much German strength off Leningrad as possible, a major error had been made in not evacuating from Estonia long before the end thousands of civilians and all nonmilitary organizations, as well as the rear echelons of the fleet. Some officers felt the basic concept of the Baltic defense had been wrong—that the fleet should have evacuated Hangö and the islands, thrown up a strong defense line at Tallinn and then pulled back to the secure base at Kronstadt.
As for the effort to plow through the German mine field, all admitted this had been a disastrous mistake. A later study by the fleet’s mine experts reached the conclusion that the mine field had the extraordinary density of not less than 155 mines and 104 mine protectors per mile. To traverse such a field with any safety would have required not less than a hundred seagoing mine sweepers.3
The worst handicap, Panteleyev concluded, was the fact that the fleet had no secure bases. From the beginning of the war it had been in movement, falling back from Libau, to Riga, to Tallinn and finally back to Kronstadt. It would have been far better off never to have moved.
The magnitude of the losses stimulated the search for scapegoats. The whole affair came under high-level security review. Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a fervent naval partisan and keen observer, wrote a sixteen-page report in the first days of his return to Kronstadt and submitted it to the Fleet Military Council and the Political Administration. He also wrote a fourteen-page report for publication in the fleet newspaper, Red Fleet. The public report was never published. The formidable Ivan Rogov, Political Commissar of the Fleet, had Vishnevsky in his black books. Moreover, the Tallinn disaster was a matter for very high-level politics. It was, in fact, a case for Lavrenti P. Beria and the secret police.
Panteleyev and his fellow command officers were the subject of sweeping inquiry by police and prosecutors. They attempted honestly and realistically to explain what had happened. The explanations were not accepted.
“A live criminal was what they wanted,” Panteleyev concluded, after going through a long night of questioning.
The memory of one confrontation burned long in his consciousness. It was with an individual whom Panteleyev described as “a highly placed officer.” Could this have been Malenkov or Beria—or one of their chief aides? He does not specify.
“Comrade Chief of Staff,” said this official, “why didn’t our fleet fight? Why have the Fascists been able to fight and we have not?”
Panteleyev attempted to explain the complicated situation. The official would not listen.
“No, no,” he said, “I do not agree with you. The staff is not supposed to concern itself with that kind of business. It must work out active operations and fight, and attack, and . . .”
As Panteleyev dryly notes: “In the eyes of this important official the staff of the fleet came very close to being guilty for all the tragedies that had occurred.”
Looking back at the Tallinn tragedy from a perspective of twenty-five years, the Soviet naval historian, Captain V. Achkasov, was convinced that its cause lay in the reluctance of any of the commanders—of either the Baltic Fleet, the Leningrad Command or the High Command in Moscow— to order preparations for evacuating the fleet.
The reason for this reluctance, he felt, was a well-founded knowledge on the part of all that commanders of encircled units had repeatedly been subjected to the gravest chargés of cowardice and panic, often with fatal consequences. Rather than risk a firing squad, the commanders withheld any recommendations for withdrawal until a tragic outcome became inescapable.
1 By comparison with Dunkirk the Tallinn evacuation was sheer catastrophe. Dunkirk was a far larger operation, involving the safe evacuation of 338,226 men. The casualty figures are not entirely precise but are given as 9,291 (8,061 British and 1,230 Allied). In the retreat to Dunkirk and in the action on the beaches and in transit to England, a total of 68,111 British troops were lost. The British employed 1,084 ships in the evacuation, many of them very small. Only 108 of these were lost. The distance from Dunkirk to Dover and the channel ports was only forty to fifty miles, and there was complete command of the sea route by the British Navy and no problem of mines; even the Luftwaffe was not terribly active. (David Divine, The Nine Days of Dunkirk.) Incidentally, there is some confusion in the Soviet sources as to the number of men brought safely out of Tallinn. One source contends that 18,233 men were saved out of a total of 23,000 who started from Tallinn. This seems to be an obvious underestimate of casualties. (Vtoraya Miro-vaya Voina, Vol. II, p. 100, citing archives of the Baltic Fleet Command.)
2 The “rehabilitation” of Captain Kaliteyev is in itself an epic and throws a penetrating light on the atmosphere which prevailed in Stalin’s Russia, during the war and after. The naval correspondent and playwright, Aleksandr Ilych Zonin, was a passenger on theKazakhstan and a witness to what happened. Zonin did his utmost to establish the true facts and again and again implored his colleagues not to write the story as though it was the tale of “Seven Who Saved the Transport.” He placed his own version of theKazakhstan affair in the naval archives, although he could not get it published. Orders had been issued coincident with the Order No. 303 honoring the “Seven” that Kaliteyev’s name was to be “blacked out.” The chief credit for establishing the truth is assigned by Vladimir Rudny, who long interested himself in the case, to Georgi Aleksandrovich Bregman, a correspondent of the newspaper Water Transport. Bregman had known Kaliteyev before the war and was completely confident of his bravery and honesty. He was in a military hospital recovering from wounds when he heard of the catastrophe which had befallen his friend. He began to collect evidence and after sixteen years of work managed to get the verdict against Kalitayev reversed. (Vladimir Rudny, Deistvuyushchii Flot, Moscow, 1965, pp. 57-72.) Zonin narrowly escaped the fate of Kalitayev. He was expelled from the Communist Party as a result of one of the literary political quarrels of the late 1920’s but, unlike most of his colleagues, was not arrested at that time. He served with great distinction in wartime as a Baltic Fleet correspondent and was recommended for readmission to the Party. But the Party control officials rejected him. In 1949 he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He survived to be released after Stalin’s death but died soon of a heart attack, his health crippled by his sufferings. His son, Sergei, is now an officer in the Soviet Navy. (A. Shtein, Znamya, No. 4, April, 1964, pp. 78-84; Literaturnaya Gazeta, December 8, 1964.)
3 After World War II when Soviet naval specialists subjected the Tallinn disaster to careful analysis, they concluded that the Baltic Fleet seriously overestimated the dangers of Nazi submarine attack. Had the fleet steamed straight out to sea, it would have been able to avoid most of the German mine fields and shore batteries. It would have risked attack by Nazi submarines, but the Germans were not present in strength in that area and, moreover, the Baltic Fleet was much better equipped to cope with submarine attack than with mines. There was also a channel close to the shore which Soviet ships had been using and which was known to be comparatively free of mines. However, it had been closed August 12 by order of the Northwest Front Command after the Nazis reached the Finnish Gulf at Kunda. (V. Achkasov, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 10, October, 1966, p. 30.)