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be used only on the territory of the Soviet Union and only in a defensive war. It was obvious
why Stalin believed he did not need it.
Stalin divided the defensive Dnepr flotilla into two: the Danube flotilla and the Pinsk
flotilla. In the summer of 1940, Stalin tore Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia from Romania.
e Soviet Union received an area of several tens of kilometers on the eastern shore of the
Danube River. e Danube flotilla, formed in advance, was immediately transferred to this
area. It was not easy to transfer the ships from the Dnepr: small ships were sent by railroad,
and large ones sailed in the Black Sea during quiet weather and with special precautions. e
Danube military flotilla included sixty-three river warships and motorboats, among them
five monitors and twenty-two armored motorboats, plus air force units, and anti-aircraft and
shoreline artillery. e location of the flotilla was horrible. e Soviet shore of the Danube
2
was bare and open. Ships were stationed at the banks, while Romanian troops stood nearby,
sometimes three hundred meters from the Soviet ships. In the event of a defensive war, the
entire Danube flotilla would fall into a trap from the beginning: there was nowhere to retreat
from the Danube delta but to the Black Sea, the waves of which could sink the ships built
for river. e flotilla had nowhere to maneuver. A surprise attack from the enemy would have
meant machine-gun fire at the Soviet ships, not giving them the possibility to lift anchor and
detach the mooring lines. Moreover, no enemy would invade the Soviet Union through the
Danube delta, since it consisted of hundreds of lakes and impassable swamps. is means
that the Danube flotilla was not needed to defend the newly “liberated” lands of Bessarabia.

ere was only one possible action for the Danube flotilla: in the course of a general
invasion by the troops of the Red Army, the flotilla could carry out operations up the river. If
you amassed in the delta of a great river more than sixty river warships, they would have no-
where to go except up the stream. ere were no other directions. If it sailed up the Danube,
the flotilla would have to fight on Romanian, Bulgarian, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, Slovak,
Austrian, and German territory.
In a defensive war, the Danube flotilla would be useless, and it would be sentenced to
immediate destruction at its open bases on the shores. But in a war of aggression, the Danube
flotilla was deadly for Germany: it only had to sail three to four hundred kilometers up the
river, and the strategically important bridge at Chernavoda would be within firing range of
its cannon, which meant that the petroleum supply from Ploieşti to the port of Constanza
would be disrupted. Another hundred kilometers upstream, and the entire German war ma-
chine would stop, simply because German tanks, planes, and warships would be out of fuel.
Here is an interesting detail: several mobile shoreline batteries of the Danube flotilla
were armed with 130-mm- and 152-mm-caliber cannon. If the Soviet command had truly
decided that someone would try to invade the USSR through the Danube delta, the shore-
line batteries should immediately have been dug into the ground, and at the first chance
reinforced concrete caponiers should have been built. But no one built any caponiers, so the
cannon remained mobile. eir mobility could only be used in aggressive operations: the
mobile batteries could accompany the flotilla, moving along the shorelines and supporting
the warships with fire.
e reaction of the Danube military flotilla’s commanders to the beginning of the
Soviet-German war was surprising. e word “war” meant to Soviet commanders invasion,