Opening Moves

He sat down on the small commanders’ perch and started to hum the 1812 Overture loud enough that all in the control room could hear, eyes closed, dramatically building in volume on his way to the climax of the piece. This was his routine and the crew undoubtedly always drew strength from it.

The Petty Officer Quartermaster with the stopwatch had made his calculations and was counting down the seconds. He indicated first strike time but no sound of an explosion echoed through the waters.

The humming continued.

Again, he counted down and on reaching two, all ears were greeted with a distant rumble and Kalinin’s musical interlude was complemented with the sound of the explosion.

Cheers were quickly silenced and the count went on.

Four more hits were heard, two of which could not possibly have been ShCh-307’s torpedoes, unless an escort had run foul of one of the weapons. Kalinin correctly deduced that K-56 had also scored.

Water is capable of transmitting sound over great distances and the sound of tortured metal is unmistakable to the submariners.

They could hear a ship dying, almost screaming like a wounded animal in its death throes.

A sudden huge explosion was heard, causing some of the less steadfast crew to squeal with fright.

Kalinin nodded to himself, devoid of any emotion even though he had probably just killed hundreds of unsuspecting sailors.

He looked at the chronometer and reasoned that, after all, it was now war.

Messages of alarm flashed out from the escorting destroyers and HMS Dido as torpedoes struck home. There were actually seven destructive hits, which given the normal accuracy of Soviet torpedoes, or more importantly their inability to explode, was an unbelievable return as far as Kalinin was concerned. He did not realise that ShCh-303 had also joined the fight.

Above the water, all was blood, fire, and chaos.

HMS Devonshire was gone.

Three of Kalinin’s torpedoes had struck her starboard side but by the fickle fortunes of war it was one of those fired by K-56 which blew her up, striking precisely where the first of Kalinin’s weapons had hit and already caused damage, penetrating deep inside the stricken vessel and instantly exploding her ‘B’ Turret magazine.

Seven hundred and eighty-one officers and men perished within seconds as the ship erupted and sank immediately.

HMS Dido was dying and already down in the water. She had taken two hits, one port, one starboard, diametrically opposite each other between ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets and her bow was already misaligned, nearly removed by the power of the explosions. Trapped within her jammed distorted front turrets men died, incinerated by the gathering inferno.

Two other torpedoes had ripped into her port side vitals and the large engineering spaces were already flooding.

Elsewhere on the stricken ship, the casualties were mercifully light. Her Captain, smashed and dying, gave the dreaded order and her crew moved quickly to escape the rapidly sinking vessel. Only three more men of her complement perished, two who were killed when other escapers dropped onto them in the water below the rising stern and the Captain, who observed naval traditions and stayed with his charge all the way to the bottom of the Baltic.

A few miles away, Kalinin was solely interested in self-preservation as angry escorts commenced their search for the underwater killers. They did not come near the silent submarine but instead started to prosecute other contacts to Kalinin’s north and northeast. Their misfortune spelt continued existence for ShCh-307 and her frightened occupants.

Twenty minutes later, smashed by depth charges, K-56 and her sixty-five crew joined Devonshire and Dido on the bottom of the Baltic.

A short time after they were all joined by ShCh-303, struck down by a hedgehog anti-submarine bomb cluster as she drew her pursuers away from the invasion force. Her stern tubes had destroyed the bow of the Polish destroyer Piorun, which, despite supreme efforts at damage control, would become the last vessel sunk in the action that morning.

Some twenty-three days beforehand, four recently arrived submarines of the Soviet Baltic Fleet had quietly slid from their moorings in GdaDsk and disappeared beneath the waves, carrying the offensive hopes of the Soviet Navy. The crews had benefited from a few weeks of intensive training in their strange new craft before being sent far away on their respective missions. The submarines also contained some German technical experts, who were less than happy to be press ganged into going on combat missions with the Soviet navy.

The crew worked hard to learn how to properly handle the sleek thoroughbreds they had so recently ‘inherited’, and the unhappy Germans quickly reasoned that their prospects of survival were decidedly dependent on the newly acquired skills of their Russian ‘colleagues’. They strove hard to ensure their soviet pupils were the best that they could be.