by Alexey Statsenko
[REGNUM] Eighty-five years ago, Leningrad was besieged. From December 1941 to July 1942, up to half a million people died in the city, but it did not surrender, and its defenders inflicted losses on the enemy. Among them was a unique unit, barely remembered during the Soviet era and only declassified in recent decades. This unit was the Special Purpose Company (RON) of the Baltic Fleet's Intelligence Department.
These were the forerunners of modern Russian combat swimmers, who were called underwater infantry because they didn't swim underwater, but walked.
The modern image of scuba divers is a relatively recent development. The French invented the aqualung in 1943, and fins only appeared in the USSR in the 1950s.
So, the special forces of the RON, created on August 11, 1941, breathed through rebreathers (breathing apparatus that recycle exhaled gas so that a person can reuse it) and moved along the bottom on foot, fortunately the depths in the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga are relatively shallow.
Lieutenant Ivan Prokhvatilov, a former experienced diver from EPRON—an organization that was engaged in the raising of sunken ships and other underwater work in the USSR—was appointed to command the company.
The soldiers cobbled together all their special equipment themselves from materials salvaged from downed balloons. This included diving suits, sealed bags for weapons, ammunition, and explosives, and special inflatable boats with trouser legs cut into the bottoms.
ON ZHUKOV'S PERSONAL ORDERS
In early September 1941, the first mission came: to dislodge the Finnish landing force from an island near the Karelian Isthmus near Vyborg. After three days of preparation and a reconnaissance sortie by two divers, 50 soldiers landed… but the Finns were no longer there.
The next mission was not long in coming. The Leningrad Front command decided to break the siege back in September 1941. A diversionary landing from Lake Ladoga was to be a key component of the operation.
40 RON fighters, on the personal orders of the front commander, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, were ordered to land on the shore north of Shlisselburg and hold their positions until the main landing forces arrived.
On the night of September 23, a landing party under the command of Prokhvatilov boarded two small boats and set out onto Lake Ladoga in a force six storm, which usually prohibited navigation.
The men were dropped off in icy water 1.5 kilometers from the shore—the boats couldn't get any closer. By the time the soldiers finally reached dry land, many had caught a cold, and the radio was wet, so they couldn't report the successful landing. A day passed, then another, and the main force still hadn't landed. They were dropped off elsewhere, where almost all perished.
Meanwhile, Prokhvatilov’s group ran out of provisions, people were suffering from coughing, and then it was decided to break through.
Early in the morning of September 25, the paratroopers set out to break through. Prokhvatilov led the way. The paratroopers were discovered almost immediately—a group of Germans blocked their path. A corporal ran ahead of the group, shouting especially loudly.
Prokhvatilov pumped three bullets into him with his rifle, knocked out the second German with his rifle butt, and hurled an anti-tank grenade into the thick of the enemy. The sailors leaped to their feet and rushed to break through. Hand-to-hand combat ensued, in which pressure and courage were decisive. The special forces broke through, destroying ten enemy machine-gun nests and up to 80 soldiers. The sailors themselves lost three killed and ten wounded, but they carried everyone back to their own side—no one was left behind.
"SOUP WITH DUMPLINGS"
In November, famine began in Leningrad. Prokhvatilov had to figure out how to feed the people. Working underwater requires that a person not be hungry, otherwise they will lose consciousness. Due to the explosions, the Neva Bay was filled with stunned fish and well-fed seagulls. Specially assigned soldiers collected the former and hunted the latter—this is how Prokhvatilov kept his soldiers combat-ready. The food was disgusting, but nutritious, and that was all that was required.
When the surface of Lake Ladoga became covered with ice, it was decided to build a route across it – the legendary Road of Life.
RON soldiers also participated in its construction. They descended to the seabed and measured the depths, ensuring the route was constructed where the depths were minimal. This made it easier to recover sunken equipment and cargo, which they also did.
When the ice melted, they were involved in laying a cable to supply electricity and a pipeline to pump oil products along the bottom of Lake Ladoga to Leningrad.
Beginning in 1942, the Germans began attempting to disrupt maritime communication between Leningrad and Kronstadt. At night, enemy aircraft constantly dropped mines by parachute in the area of ​​the Sea Canal (running from the city to the naval base).
From the captured shores of the Neva Bay, near Peterhof and Strelna, the Germans launched leaky boats and simple crates of mines, which sank in the fairways. The Gulf of Finland was so full of mines that sailors jokingly called it "dumpling soup."
Soldiers from Prokhvatilov's company had to defuse them. But the mines often had "surprises"—their detonators were connected to a hydrostatic pressure gauge, and when the mines rose to the surface and the pressure dropped, they would detonate.
Special forces solved the mystery. They constructed a special raft with a tripod and a hole in the center. The mine wasn't brought to the surface, but simply attached to the tripod while underwater. The raft, with the mine attached, was then towed to the side, where it would rise and detonate.
Most often, RON soldiers were sent on reconnaissance missions. The front line was frozen in place, making it nearly impossible to penetrate into the enemy's rear. But the enemy couldn't reliably cover the coastline. The Germans soon realized that Russian divers and saboteurs were fighting against them in the Baltic, and they began taking action. They blocked the mouths of rivers and streams with barbed wire.
RON soldiers cut it underwater, leaving the above-water section intact, made their way underwater to the rear, removed their diving gear in the undergrowth, and then set out on their mission in German uniforms, armed with captured weapons and documents. The prisoners were also transported underwater: tied up, stunned, outfitted with a rebreather, and dragged off. If a prisoner died, they went for another.
Back in 1941, a ship lay half-sunk across from Peterhof, which had been captured by the Germans, a few hundred meters from the lower park. A hole was carefully cut into the ship's backside at night for access, and small observation windows were made on the side facing the Germans. RON soldiers would sneak in at dusk and conduct surveillance from there.
It was discovered that at the end of September 1942, the Germans delivered about seven high-speed motorboats to Peterhof by rail. Apparently, they planned to load them with mines from the pier at night, thus establishing a routine operation for mining the fairways of the Neva Bay.
EXPLOSION IN PETERHOF
Kronstadt was the heart of Leningrad's defense—it supplied the coastal batteries and the Oranienbaum bridgehead. It housed a naval base, supporting the defense with their guns and covering the skies with anti-aircraft guns. Blockading Kronstadt would have been a major problem—the pier had to be blown up immediately.
To detonate the mines, the special forces decided to use two naval mines dating back to the Tsarist era. By attaching weights to them, they achieved neutral buoyancy, so they would neither sink nor float, but remain submerged. They then placed other mines on top of the mines, magnetic triggers with timers.
On November 6, 1942, a boat carrying mines and three divers approached within 400 meters of the pier. To avoid getting lost, they tied themselves to each other. A spool of telephone wire was attached to the boat's bow, which unwound as they moved. The lead diver navigated by compass. The others followed, towing the mines. Half an hour later, they reached the pier.
Just then, a searchlight flashed on, and sledgehammers began to pound the deck—a new shift of German sappers had begun work—it was time to clear out. Holding on to the wire, the divers carefully made their way across the bottom to their boat in 15 minutes.
The RON fighters fashioned a makeshift sail from oars and groundsheets and reached the opposite side of the Neva Bay in just two hours. An explosion caught them at sea. Observers from the sunken steamship reported: "At 9:12 a.m., two explosions were observed almost simultaneously in the area of ​​the Peterhof pier. Amidst the rising columns of smoke and fire, people and pieces of the pier were clearly visible flying upward." The note concluded: "They did not fall back."
FIND U-250
After the blockade was broken in 1944, fighting for the Karelian Isthmus began, during which Prokhvatilov was seriously wounded. He had not yet fully recovered when news arrived that German submarines, previously unknown, had begun operating in the Gulf of Finland. At midday on July 30, 1944, one of them, the U-250 commanded by Lieutenant Commander Werner Schmidt, was sunk by our small "hunter" MO-103. Six German submariners, including the commander, surfaced alive.
Prokhvatilov was ordered to search the bottom for the submarine so it could be raised to the surface. However, the search yielded nothing, so he asked to interrogate Schmidt. He dared the German, daring him to lie about not being able to get to the Björkösund Strait, where he was sunk. The submariner angrily revealed exactly where he had been and where he had been attacked.
On August 5, the RON commander, along with his best men, once again headed to the location of the U-250 on the seabed in a diving boat. The diving boat soon anchored, and the special forces began their work. The submarine was found on the third attempt—it lay smashed into a rock, listing at a 30-degree angle. The hatch in the conning tower was open. However, accessing it in light diving gear was problematic—the boat lay at a depth of 30 meters, the maximum allowed for light divers. When the men surfaced, bloody foam was coming from their mouths.
Prokhvatilov sent an experienced diver in heavy gear into the boat. Although unnerved by the crew's bodies floating inside, he found the captain's cabin and a pencil case with charts.
Among the recovered documents, a map of the fairway used by German submarines to penetrate the eastern Gulf of Finland was discovered. But even more important was the presence of the latest acoustic torpedoes on board. The U-250 was subsequently raised, but this was done by EPRON divers.
The Baltic Fleet Headquarters's Intelligence Department demonstrated in practice the enormous potential of underwater special forces. Building on this experience, permanent combat swimmer units were created in the Navy in 1956