The early Soviet Navy had to build from a
very shattered base, for after the revolution and the bitter civil war that
followed, the once powerful Imperial Navy had been reduced to a fraction of its
former size. Further, while the proficiency of the Russian Navy had not been
great for decades, it was so diminished now that former Tsarist officers were
drafted into service as “naval technicians,” and one can only guess what their
relations were with the very crews that had not only mutinied, but led the revolution
that destroyed their world.
Yet mutiny was still in the air, and,
angry with the terrible food and living conditions, the Baltic Fleet at
Kronstadt revolted against their new Bolshevik masters on February 28, 1921. No
one knew better than the still tiny Bolshevik party the danger implicit in a
naval revolt, and a decision was made to crush it with whatever violence and
bloodshed was necessary. The uneven battle lasted for twenty-eight days of
bitter fighting. More than 6,000 of the dissidents were killed immediately, and
many more were subsequently executed. 32 When the Red troops finally conquered
the “counterrevolutionaries,” a decision was made to disestablish the navy as
an independent force. It became instead the "Naval Force of the Red Army,”
and would not be independent again until December 30, 1937.
The “counterrevolution” had a profound
effect upon the future Soviet Navy, because for many years the principal
efforts at reconstructing it were political rather than technical. The
Komsomol-the Young Communist League-became the major source for officer
personnel to en- sure that a future Red Navy would be politically sound. The Japanese were the last of the foreign
countries to pull their troops out of the Soviet Union, leaving in August 1922.
From that point on, there were several efforts to rebuild the Soviet Navy, each
with emphasis on the importance of the submarine fleet. Things moved slowly,
however, and by 1930 there were still only fourteen Soviet submarines in
commission.
In the following years, successive Five
Year Plans and, more importantly, Dictator Joseph Stalin's direct interest
established a sizeable submarine building program. By 1939, the Soviet Union
had the largest submarine fleet in the world, with one hundred fifty submarines
in com- mission. Of these, as many as seventy-five percent were smaller,
coastal boats, but they were suitable for the defensive purposes intended. Unfortunately for the morale and the training
of the force, however, the Soviet Navy had been devastated by the Stalinist
purge of officers that had begun on June 11, 1937. Among the first to be
executed was Stalin’s finest soldier, Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail
N. Tukachevsky, along with the naval
commissar, T. M. Orlov. Among the many bogus charges levelled at them was their
opposition to a powerful Soviet surface fleet. All eight admirals (known, in
Soviet parlance, as “flagmen”) of the navy were executed in the purge. On June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded
the Soviet Union, there were 218 submarines in the Red Navy, spread out among
the Baltic, Black Sea, Arctic, and Pacific Fleets. The submarines were for the
most part modern, but the crews lacked training and the initiative of the
commanders was still stunted by the ferocity of Stalin’s purges. While a
submarine commander could be executed for any reason, including not doing
anything, he was far more likely to be executed for doing something that was
unsuccessful or that resulted in damage to his boat.
The Germans, working in concert with the
Finns, executed 103 mine laying operations to bottle up the Baltic Fleet in the
Leningrad/Kronstadt area. (Both sides made impressive and effective use of
minefields.) German airpower was also very effective in the Baltic, in both
offensive operations and anti-submarine warfare. Soviet submarines would
occasionally break out of the minefields and elude the German anti-submarine
flotillas, but with minimum effect. German naval vessels had escorted some
1,900 merchant ships, of an aggregate 5.6 million tons during 1942, and lost
only 20 ships totalling 40,000 tons-less than one percent of the total.
The Soviet Union regained a presence in
the Baltic in the late summer of 1944. The Red Army reached Riga in August, and
the Finns surrendered on September 4. Hitler insisted that the remaining German
bridgeheads in the Baltic be held as long as possible, but by the end of 1944
it was obvious that some 2,000,000 troops and refugees had to be evacuated.
The German Navy began a massive evacuation
attempt that, despite all the difficulties, was tremendously successful, with
ninety-nine percent of those slated for evacuation reaching Germany. Those who
did not make it included the victims of the greatest sea disasters in
history-disasters that also represented the greatest successes of Soviet
submarines.
On January 30, 1945, the 25,484-ton
Wilhelm Gustloff sailed from Pillau, near Danzig, with some 6,100 people on
board, including soldiers, sailors, technicians, and civilian refugees. Captain
Third RankA. I. Marinesko, commanding the Soviet S-13, fired a spread of four
torpedoes, three of which struck the Gustloff. It sank in a little over one
hour, taking some 4,000 people with it.
On February 10, Marinesko would score
again, this time against the 14,600-ton General Steuben, carrying 3,000 wounded
soldiers and its crew. Of these, only 300 were saved.
Both ships were legitimate targets, and
Marinesko was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. But the very fact
that these two sinkings were the most noteworthy of all the Soviet submarine
activity in the Baltic during World War II is an indication of the relative
ineffectiveness of their very large submarine fleet.
Soviet submarines in other areas did not
have any more success. The submarines of the Northern Fleet were perhaps the
most helpful of all, since they supported the defense of the land areas around
Murmansk. The Black Sea Fleet was
rendered ineffective early on by German air- power and the swift advance of
enemy ground forces. The Pacific Fleet made its greatest contribution by
sending some of its submarines all the way around the world to reinforce the
Northern Fleet. (One of these was lost off the northwest coast of the United
States, sunk by the I-25, a Japanese submarine. Besides sinking some merchant
shipping, the I-25 conducted the only bombing raids on U.S. soil, launching a
Yokosuka E14Yin two attacks on the wooded Oregon coast, where it dropped a total
of four 76-kg incendiary bombs.
Thus the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet
Union, with justifiable pride, termed the Second World War, ended for the
Soviet Navy on an unimpressive note. While the Red Army had distinguished
itself in the most titanic battles in history, and the Red Air Force had
provided close air support for the Army, the Navy had not distinguished itself.
The surface navy (even where numerically superior, as it was in the Baltic) had
not engaged the enemy in any fleet actions, and the level of effort of the
submarines was, as noted, unremarkable. The Red Navy had done well in coastal
defense efforts, in riverine warfare, and in amphibious landings. Rear Admiral
Gorshkov, a future four star admiral, architect of the Cold War Soviet Navy,
and its commander in chief, had distinguished himself in all three of these
efforts, and had also proved himself to be politically adept.
Enter Gorshkov
Born in 1910, Sergei Gorshkov emerged
from the Frunze Higher Naval School in 1931. He spent much of his early career
in the Black Sea and Pacific Fleets accumulating experience in navigation and
ship operations, mostly in destroyers. By 1939 Stalin’s purges had taken their
toll on the naval officer corps and the potential German threat created
fast-track opportunities for junior officers. In that year Gorshkov returned to
the Black Sea Fleet and successfully completed the senior officer’s course at
the Viroshilov Naval Academy. He had command of a cruiser squadron in the Black
Sea when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Active in combined
operations designed to protect Odessa early in the war; Gorshkov became a rear
admiral and received command of the Azov Flotilla in October of 1941, only ten
years after receiving his commission in the Soviet Navy. As the Germans
penetrated his homeland he played a pivotal role in the amphibious landings at
Kerch in December 1941, designed to relieve Sevastopol, and as the deputy naval
commander in operations designed to protect Novorossisk, the latter bringing
him to the attention of the future minister of defence General A. A. Grechko.
Gorshkov ended the war directing the naval operations of the Danube Flotilla in
support of the Army’s effort against the Germans in the Ukraine and in the
Balkans. By 1951, now Vice Admiral Gorshkov became commander in
chief of the Black Sea Fleet. He took up residence in Moscow in 1955 as first
deputy commander in chief of the Soviet Navy under Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov, and
with the assistance of a rising political star, Nikita “Khrushchev, he re-
placed Kuznetsov as commander in chief in 1956. He held that post un- til his
retirement in 1985.
The Soviet Navy Gorshkov knew was in a
very difficult way in 1945, despite a profession by Joseph Stalin that the
Soviet people “wanted to see their Navy still stronger and more powerful.”
Stalin envisioned Hitler’s dream-a titanic struggle between the Soviet Union
against the Western powers-as taking place by 1960 at the latest, and he
planned to have the most powerful army, air force, and navy in the world, able
to take on Great Britain and the United States in combination.
One of the great ironies of Stalin’s vision
was the fact that as he flogged Soviet industry mercilessly to rearm at the
expense of civilian consumption, his putative enemies were disarming at a
frantic rate and jump-starting their consumer industries to provide basic items
that were always luxuries in the Soviet Union,
and luxury items that would never be available. It was the ultimate triumph of
Rockefeller and Ford over Marx and Lenin that the build-up of consumer
industries continually strengthened the economies of the Western powers, while
the efforts of Stalin and his successors in establishing a huge military
economy ultimately brought about the demise of the Soviet Union.
The decade that followed saw the Soviet Union
in Stalin’s iron grip for eight years, during which he followed through by
establishing a ship-building program of colossal proportions. Had it been
fulfilled to the letter, the Soviet Navy would have possessed four aircraft
carriers, ten battle cruisers, twenty-four cruisers, and an incredible 1,244
submarines, along with all of the other ship classes pertinent to a first
-class navy.
The time had passed for such a formidable
navy, but no one was going to inform Stalin of that fact. Ironically, the
paranoia that drove him to the many purges of leadership caused political
shake-ups that damaged the operation of the Soviet Navy. He abolished the Navy
Commissariat, and placed the navy under the People's Commissariat of Defense,
later designated the Ministry of the Armed Forces in March 1946. Then, he
turned on Admiral Kuznetsov, as he had earlier turned on Marshal Tukachevsky,
Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, and many others. Kuznetsov was
court-martialled and dismissed as commander in chief of the navy on the
customary charge of treason. In February 1950, he was recalled as Commander in
Chief of the Pacific Fleet Navy. The new commander in chief of the navy as a whole
was Admiral I. S. Yumashev, but his tenure would be short, for Kuznetsov would
once more resume that role in 1951.
Given the damage done to the Soviet Union
by Germany, and the immense amount of resources that had been poured into the
war, it was impossible to provide the industrial resources necessary for the
creation of such a gargantuan fleet. Instead, the Soviet Navy leadership tried to complete the twenty-four big
cruisers of the Sverdlov class. The main concern of the top admirals was not so
much to have dominating firepower at sea as to create vessels in which crews
would learn the trade of being sailors before being trained to fight.
Much of the momentum to acquire a large
surface fleet died with Stalin in 1953. His death was followed by the usual
Kremlin infighting, and when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced
Stalin. and the “cult of the person of Stalin” in his February 1956 speech to
the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union, it was evident that there was
a new power source, one to which Admiral Gorshkov immediately gravitated. (It
would not be until 1958 that Khrushchev assumed the post of premier, and became
head of both state and party.)
Thus it was in 1956, eleven years after the
Great Patriotic War ended, that Gorshkov was given command of the Red Navy. He
immediately paid lip service to Khrushchev's policy that large surface ships
were obsolete and that missiles and submarines were the weapons of the future.
He also supported Khrushchev’s view that the Red Navy was an important element
of foreign policy and supervised the provision of surface ships, submarines,
personnel, and materials for mine warfare to countries the Soviet Union wished to
influence.
Gorshkov sanctioned the huge Soviet
submarine construction program that was bringing new boats into service at the
rate of eighty per year. Their purpose was to defeat the enemy by disrupting
naval and sea communications. The United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations were seen as
the principal enemy, and if a conventional war were fought, the Soviet Union
believed that between eighty and one hundred large transports would be arriving
at European ports daily, with as many as 2,000 vessels en route simultaneously.
Such a massive effort could only be defeated by
a massive submarine force.
Yet both the United States and the Soviet
Union had moved forward with nuclear weapons and missiles. If the war turned
out not to be conventional, but rather nuclear, submarines would be needed to
launch nuclear missiles against enemy carrier groups, and against the enemy coast.
Gorshkov was thus faced with enormous
opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, under his guidance, the Soviet
Navy had to be swiftly elevated in quality and capability to undertake the
missions that Khrushchev envisioned. On the other, he did not have a large
share of the military budget nor, more importantly,
a broad base of personnel upon whom to draw to command and man his ships.
It would be his most important task to see
that the best possible candidates were selected to command submarines and be
responsible for nuclear weapons. (Nuclear-powered submarines were just visible
on the horizon.) To achieve this Gorshkov had to create the doctrine and supervise the training of the Soviet Navy,
which lacked all the components of naval experience and confidence that are so
vital in wartime. At the same time, he had to elevate the stature of the navy
within the military complex of the USSR, so that it would receive a fair and
adequate share of the military budget. Finally, he
had to attend to the myriad other details of building and running a huge navy,
while still nourishing his private dream of creating a large and balanced
surface fleet.
There are many ways to evaluate Gorshkov's
relative success or failure.
The Haupt book
mentioned above cites 5100 lost on the Wilhelm Gustloff (25,484 GRT) [which
was, as someone pointed out, a KdF ship], 2700 lost on the Gen. von Steuben
(14,660 GRT), and 6500 on the Goya (5,230 GRT). Note that, according to these
figures, the Goya was about five times more overloaded than the Gustloff. Also noteworthy
is the fact that the Goya was sunk 2 ½ months after the Gustloff, both by
Soviet submarines, indicating that the KM should have known better by that
time.
Activity
of Soviet Navy was greatly limited by Red Army’s failure to defend fleet’s strategic bases - all such bases as
Sevastopol (main base of Black Sea Fleet), Odessa, Feodosia, Novorosisk,
Tallin, Liepaia, Leningrad and Kronshtat was in German hands or cut off from
main territory until ay least 1943-44. Great losses in 1941 also minimised
fleet’s ability to operate in the same style as British or
American do. But those losses was mainly
caused by German aviation, not in ship-to-ship battles.
Roman Alumov, Moscow, Russia
To further elaborate on Roman’s comments,
the loss of base facilities for major naval units furthered the emphasis on “mosquito
fleet” tactics by small units such as fast motor gunboats, submarines, etc, and
also on amphibious warfare. The latter,
which was indeed a direct support of the land forces, somewhat in the manner of
the Soviet Air Force, was employed on a huge scale. The Soviets conducted something like 140+
amphibious landings, primarily in the Black Sea and Baltic, but also on the
Arctic coast and later in the Pacific theatre.
During these ops over 300,000 troops were put ashore. The Soviet Navy also conducted extensive
riverine operations, from a crucial role in the defense of Stalingrad to the
use of Soviet Marines on the Danube around Budapest.
PS
The fact that one of the two largest Soviet fleets, the Baltic, was virtually
shut up in its last usable harbor around Leningrad, also contributed to the
preference for small-unit tactics. The
big ships, including two old battleships (MARAT and OKTOBRISKIYA REVOLUTSIYA)
and a partly-completed heavy cruiser, did lend their guns, at least, to the
defense of the city, firing from their berths.
The relative burst of Soviet submarine activity in late 1944-1945 was
directly related to the fact that prior to this period access to the Baltic was
barred by a huge anti-submarine net which had been constructed across the
entrance to that sea (from the Gulf of Finland) between Finnish soil and
Estonia. Only when the German retreat
along the Baltic coast allowed the Soviets to dismantle this obstacle did
large-scale submarine penetration of the inner Baltic become possible. The heavy units of the Black Sea Fleet
suffered, as Roman mentioned, from the loss (or untenability) of their main
bases in that sea relatively early in the campaign, forcing these big ships to
dock at harbors on the west Caucasian coast where facilities for repair and
maintenance were lacking. This and
German air superiority kept them from all but the most occasional sorties, and
as a result many of the specialist crewmen were mobilized for ground combat in
the marines as time passed, further reducing the combat-readiness of the major
units (like the old battleship PARISKAYA KOMUNA) which remained.
Not what you asked, but the Russian Subs
were very active in the Baltic from day 1.
But when the Germans got to the gates of Leningrad, they and the Finns
constructed an extensive series of mine barrages across the mouth of the end of
the Baltic. This was steadily built up
and maintained, effectively ending successful sub forays until the retreat of
Armee Gruppe Nord in 1944. Most of the
heavy surface ships in (DD and above) in the Baltic were used strictly as
gunfire/AA support after 8/41 because of:
1.
the mine barrage
2.
fuel needed to keep the city going
3.
most of crews (excepting gunners and enough engineers to keep power
to the guns) used as infantry
4.
bomb damage that was not repairable given the siege
5.
poor maintenance (again, due to a lack of spares and resources)
The Arctic fleet was extremely active in
support of the forces on the Lista river, as were the riverine forces. Black sea fleet was used extensively to move
troops and supplies to Sevastopol, at times in the face of very heavy air
opposition.