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 leaderLeningrad 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:
Saw the film Masquerade. Rain. Dark night. Went to bed at 2 a.m.
On the eighteenth he wrote:
Worked in the library until 5:30 ... 9 o’clock—concert. Cold wind from the north, fires at Peterhof.
On the nineteenth:
Sunny day. Old woman at the gate said of the German planes, “They’re black like crows.” Heavy shelling of Kronstadt.
On the twentieth:
Talk about last night’s bomb. It was the first bombing in the center of Kronstadt since the war started. Leningrad doesn’t answer on the direct telephone—for some reason.
And now on the twenty-first:
Again air attacks on the ships and the center of Kronstadt. Base headquarters rocks. Firing. Bombs in the anchorage, attacks on our ships, explosions in the port . . . Another alarm . . . more attacks. Long firing . . .
The water system was knocked out. The electricity was cut. The hospital was hit. The fifth raid of the day was just finishing at 10 P.M. Tens of thousands of rounds had been fired by the antiaircraft guns. Five or six Nazi planes were claimed.3 That night Vishnevsky put himself to sleep reading a cowboy-and-Indian story by Mayne Reid.
The Germans used 180 planes that day. Only five fighters were available to defend Kronstadt. Admiral Tributs angrily demanded better protection from the Leningrad Command. Nothing, they said, could be done.
Panteleyev was up most of the night of the 2ist-2 2nd. The attacks had badly damaged the port city. Repair crews were trying to put the naval factory in order. Everyone was deadly tired. There had been many casualties. One young commander returned from his ship to find his house in ruins, his wife dead and two babies lying wounded in the wreckage.
It grew colder toward dawn. Panteleyev could see the flicker of flames toward Peterhof and along the southern borders of Leningrad. The heavy fleet guns were still firing, slowly, methodically. At 5:15 A.M. there was a new air alarm. The day dawned quiet and clear. Tributs ordered everyone alerted for air attacks—all the AA batteries and the tiny fighter force stationed on the Field of Bulls. At 8 A.M. the battleship Marat and the cruiser Kirov opened up against the Germans on the northern mainland. The Germans replied. Great columns of water flew up from the German shells falling in the harbor beside Petrovsky Park. The water splashed down on the linden trees and over the bronze figure of Peter the Great. These were heavy German guns, and they were firing at the ships anchored off Kronstadt and at the naval factory. Some shells fell in the naval city.
At 2 P.M. Vishnevsky went to lunch and then to the library. As usual he was poring over the history of past wars. This time it was the White General Yudenich and his unsuccessful attack on Petrograd. He had hardly sat down to read in the gloomy old reading room when the air alert sounded again. It was three o’clock. The AA guns opened on Nazi bombers attacking the naval factory and the warships in the Sea Canal. Bombs fell on one of the floating bases. When the all-clear sounded, a dangerous and difficult task began. Delayed-action bombs had fallen. They had to be found and deactivated. No bombs had yet hit fleet headquarters, but it was decided to move into the ARP underground headquarters on the edge of the town. The commanders were reluctant to leave the handsome white building with its magnificent view of the harbor and the shore—a building easily visible to the Germans at Peterhof. But the move was made. The next day the first shells fell on the staff headquarters.4
Vice Admiral Drozd was wounded during the twenty-second but not seriously. That night Vishnevsky noted in his journal:
Yesterday in the flights over Kronstadt there were 15, 40, 15 and 50 planes. It is clear that the enemy, meeting strong attacks from Kronstadt and the Baltic Fleet, is attempting to paralyze us. What next?
So it was that on the twenty-third the sun rose on a world which Pante-leyev somehow found fresh, remarkably quiet, sunny, the air bracing—a beautiful autumn day.
Vice Admiral Gren telephoned from Leningrad, as he did every morning, to report on the fleet batteries. He was in a good mood. The Germans had been firing heavily on the port area and on the cruiser Maxim Gorky. There had already been an air alert. It looked like a big day in the air. But the best news was that the front seemed to be stabilizing^ The Germans had learned to respect the heavy fleet batteries.
Panteleyev reported this to Tributs, who was concerned about the little fighter force at the Field of Bulls. He sent Panteleyev to see how they were making out. The road to the field was very poor. Some shells fell, and as Panteleyev neared the field he saw the fighters taking off, one after another, all six of them. Another air raid.
A moment later the Germans appeared, flying straight out of the sun. They began bombing immediately—attacking the naval hospital and the naval factory. There were forty planes in the attack, one group after another. Panteleyev hurried back to the naval city. The streets were empty except for AA crews, first-aid detachments and military trucks. Everything looked grim and businesslike. At 11 A.M. when the guns began again, Panteleyev was in Petrovsky Park. It was the biggest raid yet. The guns fired crazily, and the ground shook under the explosions. He was standing near the Peter the Great statue under a large lime tree whose yellowed leaves shook with the explosions. To his amazement three or four youngsters were high in the tree watching the attack. He tried to get them down. They wouldn’t come. Too dangerous, they said. Panteleyev looked at the statue of Peter facing the sea, his bronze eyes steady. On the fundament was inscribed: “To defend the fleet and its base to the last of life and strength is the highest duty.”
Panteleyev could see a dozen JU-88’s circling lazily over the battleship Marat, which stood in the main channel not far off Kronstadt. The bombs burst one ofter another . . . explosion . . . explosion . . . burst of flame.
Suddenly the whole foremast of the ship with its crossbars, heavy equipment, crosswalks, filled with scurrying sailors in their white uniforms, slipped away from the body of the Marat and slowly, slowly, slithered sideways into the water, sinking with an enormous explosion. The lower mast then rose up lazily, and the forward gun tower with its three 12-inch guns broke off and fell into the sea. The whole nose of the battleship vanished, including its first funnel. Panteleyev saw hundreds of sailors in the water. He heard their cries, louder than the whine of the AA shells.
He ordered all ambulance squads and every available boat, cutter and sloop to the aid of the Marat. The remainder of the ship, as if cut through by a knife, minus the forward part as far as the second tower, remained afloat. The ship settled to the bottom, but three of its towers remained intact.
Panteleyev made his way by cutter to the stricken battleship. He found its deck cleared and equipment stowed away. Only when he came to the second tower did he suddenly discover himself at the edge of the boat. Beyond this the warship simply had vanished. More than two hundred sailors, including Captain Ivanov, had been killed or wounded. Among the dead was Johann Zeltser, editor of the Marat newspaper and a Leningrad writer. He commanded the A A battery on the forward deck. A few days earlier he had written his wife Clara in Leningrad: “Perhaps I won’t see you again. You can be sure I won’t give my life cheaply. While I am conscious, I’ll fight on. How I hate them! . . . I’ve sent you all the money I have. . . . You’ll need it to bring up our children. I kiss you strongly, strongly—you and the children. . . .”
Within a matter of days the second, third and fourth gun towers of the Marat had been put back into action. But the damage at Kronstadt was not easy to cope with. Enormous craters scarred the streets. There were hunks of metal and piping where the bombs had smashed the mains. Here and there torrents of water gushed up like fountains. Flame and smoke covered the naval hospital and the naval factory. The bombing went on. The work went on. All through the night. It was long after midnight when Admiral Tributs called in the Air Defense Command. He wanted to know why the Nazi bombers had appeared over the fleet almost immediately after the air alert. The explanation was simple but tragic. The Germans had taken off from old Soviet fields nearby. They had flown first to Peterhof, then swiftly reversed course and appeared over Kronstadt in a minute or two. There had been 272 planes over Kronstadt that day. The damage to the hospital and naval works was grave. The mine layer Oka had been sunk. So had the Grozny. Two 200-pound bombs hit the Kirov. The Minsk had been sunk on a shallow footing. A transport and a submarine in drydock had been wrecked.
But the naval guns had not been halted. They went on firing. Some time during the night Panteleyev talked with Gren in Leningrad.
“Why do I see the sky aglow over Leningrad again?” Panteleyev asked.
“This was a record day/’ Gren replied. “There were eleven air alerts. One of them lasted seven hours. The Gostiny Dvor has been destroyed. But the warships haven’t been damaged.”
It was, it seemed clear, the worst day of the German air attack on Leningrad and on Kronstadt.
Aleksandr Shtein thought it was the culminating day of the German assault. The last two days had been a scene from Dante. He found the notebook of a German corporal, Hermann Fuchs, who had been killed in the fighting around Ligovo. It was brought back by a Soviet scout. In it he read:
Yesterday and today here outside Petersburg it has been hell again. Yesterday we attacked a giant line of fortifications. Artillery fired the whole day without cease. The fire was so heavy you couldn’t make out the bursts. Now again the hell has begun. In the harbor there are still one battleship and some cruisers. It is hard to describe the craters which their shells make. One burst 200 meters from me. I can say that I was thrown two meters into the air. I wanted to believe—and couldn’t believe—that I was whole and not hurt. Because I could see the whole area covered with craters I knew that I was alive. All around me rolled parts of bodies—here a hand, there a leg, there a head.
During the endless raids of the afternoon and evening of September 23 Vishnevsky wandered into the dining hall of the Political Administration. It was empty. There was a bowl of kasha untouched on the table and an unopened bottle. The waitress looked at him with glazed eyes and said, “I don’t want to die. I want to live. I have a daughter at home.”
As Vishnevsky lay, trying to sleep, he could hear the bombs still falling, the guns still firing. The Baltic Fleet was still in action. It had gone through the worst day of the war, but it had not been destroyed. Hitler’s orders to raze Kronstadt to the water had not been carried out. And the guns fired on.
Before he opened Mayne Reid and started to read once again, Vishnevsky noted in his diary: “There are some tendencies toward stabilizing the front.”
1 To convert figures from the metric system: 1 kilometer = .62137 mile; 1 kilogram = 2.2046 pounds.
2 They held out there until October 22, when they were evacuated to the Hangö base in Finland. (Achkasov, op. cit., pp. 165 et seq.) The date of October 19 is given by Admiral Kuznetsov for this move. {Voprosy Istorii, No. 8, August, 1965, p. 114). The Hangö garrison was gradually withdrawn to Kronstadt and Leningrad from late October to early December. The evacuation order was issued October 26, and the first 4,000 men arrived at Kronstadt November 4. In all, 16,000 men were removed, and the operation was completed by December 3. There were considerable losses of men and ships, due largely to magnetic mines. At the same time a small garrison of about 1,000 men was removed from the island of Hogland —an action which Admiral Panteleyev characterized as an “obvious mistake.” (Panteleyev, op. cit., pp. 266-272).
3 Vishnevsky, op. cit., Vol. 3, pp. 132 et seq. Panteleyev claims 10 (op. cit., p. 227).
4 Vice Admiral Smirnov is highly critical of Admiral Tributs for his failure to provide a secure bomb shelter for fleet headquarters before the outbreak of war. (Smirnov, op. cit., p. 64.)