Page 187 - The Chief Culprit

148 y e Chief Culprit

ree naval fortified regions protected the direct gateways to Leningrad: the Kronstadt,
Izhorsk, and Luzhsk, so the routes to the city could be shelled by powerful crossfire from all
directions. Each battery, each fort, each fortified region, and each naval base had ammuni-
tion and supplies enough to last them for the entire four years of the war. No one would have
the idea of launching an amphibious assault here or storming the city. Besides, Leningrad
had ninety-one anti-aircraft batteries with a total of 352 anti-aircraft cannons. Why on earth
would the Baltic region need a fleet on top of all this?
If the Soviet Union meant to defend itself, it did not need battleships in the Baltic
Sea. In case of need, even without battleships, it was possible to quickly unload barges full of
mines at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland and thus to cut off the approach to Leningrad. In
defensive warfare a Soviet Baltic fleet was unnecessary. In fact, that is what happened—the
Soviet Baltic fleet stayed without action for the entire duration of the war. In the event of
attack by an aggressor, the Soviet Baltic fleet was extremely vulnerable. e aggressor could
simply block the Soviet fleet by laying a couple of hundred mines on the shallow accesses to
the naval bases. Indeed, that was done by the German fleet in June 1941. In a defensive war,
ships, especially large ones, are forced to sideswipe in a shallow and narrow gulf, trapped in
a blind alley.
In 1939 Hitler launched World War II against the rest of the world, having in his pos-
session only fifty-seven submarines. His opponents were the almighty British and French
fleets and, potentially, the U.S. navy. Hitler’s navy had to lead an uneven battle in the Atlantic
and the Mediterranean. In the Baltic, Hitler had almost nothing left. In the summer of
1941 in the Baltic Sea, the German navy had only five training submarines and twenty-eight
torpedo motorboats, some of which were also used for training. e rest were secondary
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forces: mine blockers, various motorboats, and minesweepers. But peace-loving comrade
Stalin watched the struggle between Germany, France, and Britain and beefed up the might
of his Baltic fleet. What for?
In 1933 Stalin had already said: “ e Baltic Sea is a sealed bottle, and we can’t open
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it.” Nevertheless, out of every three battleships, Stalin kept two in the Baltic, as if in a corked
bottle. In 1941 on the Baltic Sea alone Stalin had sixty-nine submarines. No one in the
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world had such a number of submarines collected in one place. What task could Stalin set
before his battleships and submarines in the closed aquarium of the Baltic Sea? Only one: to
sink German transports of iron ore. ere was no other work there for them.
Aside from submarines and battleships, Stalin had two cruisers, twenty-one destroyers,
forty-eight torpedo motorboats, and other forces. On the Baltic Sea, the German navy did
not even have its own air force. e Soviet Baltic fleet had 656 war planes, mostly bombers
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and torpedo carriers. Once again we ask: what was this all for? Why such a huge quantity of
torpedo carriers and bombers, if Hitler had no large ships in the Baltic? e answer is always
the same: the targets were not his warships, but his transports of ore. At any moment, the
Soviet fleet could have raised anchor, reached the German and Swedish ports, blocked them
with thousands of mines, and sunk the defenseless transports. is would have ended the war
for Germany, and this must have been known and understood in Berlin from the start. Hitler
fought against Britain and France, while behind his back Stalin held up high a glittering ax.
At the end of November 1939, Stalin made a huge mistake—he launched a war against
Finland. e victory in Finland was a second warning to Hitler that Stalin was approaching
the Swedish sources of ore. e Red Army, acting on Stalin’s orders, got through the Finnish