Stalin’s Baltic Fleet attempted to escape from Tallinn during the bleak days of summer 1941.
Here s What You Need to Know: Events at Tallinn were comparable to the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk over a year earlier.
Early in World War II, a bitter joke circulated within the Soviet military. It ran, “What is the first thing Russia does when war is declared? It scuttles the fleet!” The joke referred to sad events in Russian naval history. In 1855, after the Crimean War, Russia lost the right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea, and in 1904-1905 during the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, Russia lost two out of its three fleets. In 1941, the Soviet Union, born out of old Imperial Russia’s ashes, almost lost its Baltic Fleet.
Dreams of reopening Soviet submarine at Strood still afloat despite pandemic
Published: 06:00, 01 February 2021
Looking for the perfect self isolation location? If the new strains of Covid keep growing more extreme then a U-475 Black Widow Soviet submarine could be the ideal retreat of choice.
And as luck would have it there s one moored in the River Medway just off Strood, where it has been for almost two decades.
The Black Widow submarine at Strood
But the man in charge of it, John Sutton, remains optimistic he won t have to seal the hatch and prepare to dive next time Boris Johnson calls a press conference.
All of the great powers were busily constructing battleships as the 1920s and 1930s went on.
Key Point: Battleships were seen as the way to go if you wanted to be a serious naval power. However, the advent of aircraft carriers and their effectiveness during World War II meant the battleship era had to come to a close.
The late 1930s promised a renewed era of battleship construction, similar in some ways to the bonanza that immediately followed the construction of the
HMS Dreadnought. The “naval holiday” restrictions imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty system were relaxing, and in any case Japan and Italy had determined to abandon the system, reducing the constraints on Britain, France and the United States. Moreover, Germany and the Soviet Union were preparing to re-enter the battleship construction game.