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.
Between 9 and 11 p.m. another nine ships were lost, including the transport Everita, the Luga, carrying three hundred wounded, and four more of the flotilla’s eight destroyers. The Minsk, with Admiral Panteleyev aboard, lay wallowing after a mine exploded in one of her paravanes. The mine layer Skoriy (‘Rapid’) took her in tow, only herself to hit a mine and sink half an hour later. The best remembered casualty was the Vironia, with her gaggle of glamorous civilians. Listing to starboard and pouring smoke, she was already under tow when she hit a mine at 9.45 p.m. Soviet accounts describe dark figures leaping from the burning quarterdeck, the sound of the ‘Internationale’ drifting across the water, and the crack of revolvers as her officers took their own lives in the moments before she slid beneath the waves.
Shortly before midnight, the surviving ships anchored in the midst of the mines and waited for better visibility. With daylight, they weighed anchor and the carnage resumed. By the end of the afternoon six more ships had been sunk by mines and eight by bombs, and two tugs had been captured by Finnish patrol boats. Among the casualties were the transport Five Year Plan, with three thousand troops aboard, and the patrol ship Sneg (‘Snow’), which had picked up survivors from the Vironia. Four more damaged ships, three of them transports, managed to beach themselves on the island of Gogland (Hogland to Swedes, Suursaari to Finns), from which troops (among them the remnants of the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment) were picked up in small boats and taken to Kronshtadt. The remainder of the flotilla limped into port over the next four days. The whole operation had cost sixty-five vessels and perhaps 14,000 lives.{31}
It was the worst disaster in Russian naval history, at least twice as costly as the defeat of the tsarist navy by the Japanese—the first time an Asian power defeated a European one at sea—at Tsu-Shima in 1905. Later, arguments abounded as to what went wrong. Kuznetsov and Panteleyev both supported the decision to defend Tallinn, but thought that civilians should have been evacuated far earlier, blaming Voroshilov for not ordering plans in good time. The convoys would have done better to take to deeper water, running the gauntlet of German submarines but avoiding the shore batteries and most of the minefields. Obviously, they should also have included more minesweepers (‘But where could we have got them?’ asked Kuznetsov). Today’s military historians question the defence of Tallinn itself, which cost about 20,000 soldiers taken prisoner and pinned down only four German divisions, making little difference to the fighting further east.{32}
The underlying problem, though, was that of the whole Soviet command: senior officers’ well-founded fear of advocating retreat until it became inevitable, and inevitably disastrous. Instructive is the story of Vyacheslav Kaliteyev, captain of the Kazakhstan, the largest troopship in the flotilla. Knocked unconscious by a bomb that hit the bridge soon after departure on the first morning of the evacuation, he fell into the sea and was lucky to be picked up by a submarine, which took him to Kronshtadt. Meanwhile the Kazakhstan limped on, aflame, under her seven surviving crew, depositing her passengers on a sandspit before arriving at Kronshtadt four days later—the only troopship to do so. Immediately an investigation was launched. Why had Kaliteyev abandoned his ship? Why had he returned ahead of her? Had he deliberately jumped overboard? The crewmen who nursed the Kazakhstan home were rewarded with Orders of the Red Banner in a special communiqué from Stavka. Kaliteyev was executed by firing squad, for ‘cowardice’ and ‘desertion under fire’.{33}