Leningrad

The Eighteenth Army launched its attack on the evening of 19 August. Shells crashed among the cobbled alleys and steep red-tiled roofs of the old city, and among the clapboard summer houses and canvas bathing machines of Pirita beach. The Kirov’s guns replied, flashing orange from her anchorage in the harbour. The city’s civilians watched and waited behind shuttered shops and barricaded doors. A week into the bombardment Tributs’s second-in-command, Admiral Yuri Panteleyev, described the situation in his journal:

Beat off strong attack on city during the night. Enemy has changed tactics, infiltrating in small groups. . All airfields captured by the enemy. Our planes flew off to the east. Fleet and city under bombing and shelling. Lovely Pirita burning. . Other suburbs also burning. Big fires in the city. Barricades being built at the approaches to the harbour. Smoke everywhere. . Fire of ships and shore batteries has not slackened. Our command post at Minna Harbour constantly under fire.29

Later that morning Stalin finally gave permission to evacuate the fleet to Kronshtadt, Russia’s historic island naval base at the head of the Gulf of Finland. While the defenders fell slowly back towards the harbour, setting fire to a power station, grain elevators and warehouses on the way, embarkation began of the Fleet’s civilian entourage — officers’ wives, Party officials, a theatrical troupe and senior Estonian Communists, including the president of the puppet Estonian Republic. The flamboyant war correspondent Vsevelod Vishnevsky, grandstanding at the quayside, insisted that his driver not simply remove his car’s carburettor, but blow up the vehicle with a hand grenade. Loading of troops began the following day, and by the small hours of 28 August nearly 23,000 people and 66,000 tons of munitions had gone aboard a motley collection of 228 vessels, which formed up into four convoys outside the harbour mouth.30

Through the morning of the 28th the ships lay in the roads, rolling at their anchors in a force seven gale. By noon the wind had eased, and the signal went out to get underway. Stretched out over fifteen miles of sea, the convoys had an unenviable task ahead. Their equivalents at Dunkirk fourteen months earlier had had to cover fifty miles, through waters controlled by the Royal Navy. Tributs’s ships had to travel 220 miles, over the first 150 of which they would be subject to attack by shore batteries, submarines and Finnish torpedo boats. The route was also thick with enemy mines — ‘like dumplings in borscht’. At least a hundred minesweepers, Red Fleet commander Admiral Kuznetsov later calculated, would have been needed to clear a safe path; Tributs had thirty-eight, mostly converted trawlers. Nor, despite a last-minute plea to Zhdanov for air cover, did the fleet have any protection from the Luftwaffe, Zhdanov’s orders having been issued ‘with great delay’.

Under attack from Junkers 88 dive-bombers from departure, the convoys hit their first major minefield at six o’clock in the evening, off Point Juminda, forty miles east of Tallinn. The first ship to go down, at 6.05 p.m., was Ella, an Estonian merchantman. While rescuing survivors, a tug from the fourth convoy also hit a mine, and sank fifteen minutes later. Ten minutes after that an ice-breaker, the Kristjanis Voldemars, was sunk by bombs. Vironia, carrying civilians, was damaged in the same air attack and taken in tow by the Saturn. Less orderly now, the convoys steamed on eastwards, zigzagging to avoid the Junkers and fire from batteries on the point. The warships were too preoccupied with dodging or disentangling themselves from mines to give much protection to the transports, most of which had no anti-aircraft guns. The minefield’s next victims, as dusk began to fall, were the sweeper Krab, then a submarine, which disappeared beneath the waves in less than a minute, then the Saturn, still towing the Vironia. A gunboat went down at 8.30 p.m., as the sun was setting, and another submarine at 8.48 p.m. Two minutes later a destroyer, the Yakov Sverdlov, took a torpedo aimed at the Kirov and sank in six minutes. ‘Darkness’, as Admiral Kuznetsov describes it,

set in quickly. The ships steaming in the tail were sharply silhouetted against the background of the fires raging in Tallinn. Erupting out of the sea, huge pillars of flame and black smoke signalled the loss of fighting ships and transport vessels. With nightfall, the hideous roar of Nazi bombers subsided. But this didn’t mean that the crews could relax, because of the danger still threatening from the water. In the darkness it was difficult to see the moored mines, now floating amongst the debris of smashed lifeboats.