The escape of Orzeł from Tallinn

On the night of 17–18 September 1939 the Polish submarine ORP Orzeł, interned for three days in the naval harbour at Tallinn, overpowered two Estonian sentries, cut her mooring lines and slipped out to the open sea under fire from machine guns and shore batteries. Without charts, without the breech-blocks of her guns and with six torpedoes that the Estonians had not managed to unload, she began a voyage that ended a month later in Scotland. For the Poles the escape became one of the legends of September 1939. For Estonia it had bitter consequences: the Soviet Union, which had invaded Poland the day before, took it as proof that a small state was incapable of guarding its neutrality, and within a few days turned it into a pretext for demanding military bases on Estonian territory.

A ship paid for by the nation

Orzeł was the most modern vessel in the Polish submarine fleet. She had been built by the Dutch De Schelde yard at Vlissingen, and much of the money had been raised by the public through collections organised by the Maritime and Colonial League and the Maritime Defence Fund. She was commissioned on 2 February 1939. She was 84 metres long, had twelve torpedo tubes and, for her time, a long range. Poland could not contest command of the Baltic with the Kriegsmarine. Three destroyers had left for Britain before the war, and Wicher and Gryf were sunk at Hel on 3 September. Five submarines were to defend the approaches to Hel and Gdynia under the Worek Plan.

On 1 September Orzeł, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Henryk Kłoczkowski (PL), left Oksywie for her sector in the Gulf of Gdańsk. In the first days of the war she was bombed from the air and depth-charged several times. On 4 September Kłoczkowski, without informing Fleet command, left his assigned sector and took the boat north, to the waters around Gotland. He did not carry out fresh orders assigning him a patrol area off Pillau, and on 12 September he decided against attacking a German tanker he had come across. The commander was ill: since the start of the war he had been complaining of stomach trouble, had stopped eating and left his cabin less and less often. On 10 September his second-in-command, Lieutenant Commander Jan Grudziński, reported this to headquarters. An order came from Hel to land the commander in a neutral Swedish or Finnish port or to return to Hel. Kłoczkowski, however, chose Tallinn, which he knew from his service in the Russian navy and from inter-war visits, explaining that a damaged compressor could also be repaired there. On 13 September the submarine set course for the Estonian capital.

Internment

Some chronologies state that Orzeł entered Tallinn harbour on 13 September. Polish and Estonian sources agree on this point: on 13 September the submarine only set out for Estonia, and she entered the Tallinn roadstead at about 9.30 p.m. on 14 September, sailing on the surface, with her lights on and her ensign flying. After midnight, on 15 September, Estonian naval and intelligence officers came aboard. The Poles explained that they had to put their sick commander ashore in hospital and repair the compressor. Kłoczkowski went ashore and was taken to hospital, from which he never returned to his ship. The Estonians at first agreed to let her stay for repairs, but stipulated that she could not leave for 48 hours, since the German tanker Thalatta was due to sail from the port. The law of naval warfare required that at least 24 hours should elapse between the departure from a neutral port of warships or merchant ships of two belligerents.

On the morning of 15 September an Estonian commission reported to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Johan Laidoner, that the damage to Orzeł was not serious and did not endanger her safety. Under the Thirteenth Hague Convention of 1907, a belligerent warship could remain in a neutral port only for as long as was needed to repair damage that prevented her from putting to sea. The commander’s illness and a minor breakdown were no such reason. Around midday on 15 September an Estonian officer informed Grudziński, who had taken over command, that the boat and her crew were interned. Grudziński protested and refused to cooperate. The submarine was towed into the basin of the naval harbour. The Estonians took away the crew’s small arms, the breech-blocks of the guns, the charts, the navigational aids and the logbook, and began to unload the ammunition and torpedoes. The Polish envoy, Wacław Przesmycki (PL), lodged a protest, but the foreign minister, Karl Selter, replied that the decision was final. The crew burned the codes and secret documents.

The affair was controversial then and remains so today. Some Polish writers considered the internment unlawful and forced on Estonia by Germany; others pointed out that Estonia had applied the rules of neutrality as the law required, and that responsibility for the loss of the boat lay with her commander. In 1942 the Polish Naval Court Martial in London sentenced Kłoczkowski, among other things for leaving his sector without authority and bringing about the internment of his ship, to reduction to the ranks and four years’ imprisonment, which was not carried out because of the war.

The escape

The Estonians did not take the crew off the boat at once, because they needed the help of Polish specialists to disarm her. That decided everything. The escape plan, devised chiefly by Lieutenant Andrzej Piasecki, was drawn up on the evening of 16 September. The seamen held up the work as best they could. On Sunday 17 September the cable of the crane being used to hoist the torpedoes out of the stern tubes was cut, so six torpedoes remained on board. The boatswain, pretending to fish from a small boat, sounded the depths along the route from the basin to the roadstead. Others memorised the positions of the searchlights and batteries, and the mooring lines on the quayside were partly sawn through. That same day news reached Tallinn that the Red Army had crossed Poland’s eastern border. A ship interned in a country that might soon fall under Moscow’s control now risked being handed over to the second invader.

At about 2 a.m. on the night of 17–18 September, after the Estonian officer inspecting the boat had gone ashore, the seamen overpowered both Estonian sentries without bloodshed and took them with them. One of the crew cut through the cable supplying the boat with power from the harbour mains with an axe, which put out some of the lights in the basin. Orzeł snapped her sawn-through moorings and made for the harbour exit. At that point she was spotted: searchlights picked her out, machine guns opened fire on her, and at the exit from the basin she ran onto the spur of the breakwater. After a quarter of an hour or so of manoeuvring she got off it and reached the roadstead, where the shore batteries opened fire. An Estonian battery fired a dozen or more shells at her, but without effect. The submarine dived and lay all day on the bottom of the Gulf of Finland, while Estonian ships and aircraft searched for her in vain. Estonian accounts indicate that some gun crews were told not to aim accurately or to cease fire, and that the Estonians did not do everything they could to stop the fugitives. Estonia and Poland had enjoyed friendly relations between the wars, and the sympathy of Estonian sailors for their invaded ally was no secret.

On 18 September itself President Konstantin Päts, at Laidoner’s request, dismissed the commander of the Estonian navy, Captain Valev Mere, and his chief of staff, Captain Rudolf Linnuste. The inquiry found no evidence that any Estonian had knowingly helped the Poles, but established that the guard on the boat, with her crew still aboard, had been wholly inadequate, and that, contrary to orders, her fuel had not been pumped out and not all her torpedoes had been unloaded. German propaganda and some newspapers claimed that the Poles had murdered the abducted sentries. On the night of 20–21 September Grudziński put them ashore in a boat off the coast of Gotland, with food, alcohol and 50 dollars each for the journey home. On 24 September they flew back to Tallinn.

A pretext for Moscow

The escape coincided with events that changed the situation of the whole region. That same night the Polish President, government and Commander-in-Chief crossed the Romanian border, while the Red Army was occupying eastern Poland. In the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Estonia had been placed in the Soviet sphere of interest, something the Estonian government did not know for certain, though it feared it. Moscow was merely waiting for an opportunity.

On 18 September Selter received the German envoy, who was asking about the escape. According to Selter’s account, the diplomat assured him that no one in Berlin was taking the matter seriously, since interned ships and soldiers had escaped from neutral countries before, but added that he feared the reaction of the Soviet Union. Soon afterwards the Soviet news agency TASS accused the Estonian government of having deliberately allowed the submarine to escape, and suggested that other Polish submarines were hiding in the ports of the Baltic states. This communiqué is usually dated to 18 September. The next day, 19 September, at around midday, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, summoned the Estonian envoy, August Rei, to the Kremlin and told him that, since the Estonian government was unable to guarantee its neutrality, the Soviet Baltic Fleet would search for the Polish submarine throughout the Baltic, including Estonian territorial waters. That evening Soviet warships appeared near the islands of Aegna and Naissaar at the entrance to Tallinn Bay, and Soviet aircraft flew low over the city. Estonia, which was at war with no one, had to accept that a foreign fleet had taken control of its waters.

The argument was legally flimsy. The Soviet Union was not formally at war with Poland, since Moscow presented its aggression of 17 September as the “defence” of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, so it could not invoke the rights of a belligerent against a neutral state. That did not stop Molotov, a few days later, from putting the Orzeł affair on the table in his talks with Selter as the main reason for the Soviet demands.

To Scotland

For three weeks Orzeł roamed the Baltic. A list of lighthouses with their coordinates, overlooked by the Estonians, was found on board, and from it the navigating officer, Sub-Lieutenant Marian Mokrski, drew a hand-made chart of the Baltic. The submarine looked for German ships, avoided aircraft and motor torpedo boats, and ran aground several times. Fuel and fresh water were running out, and the crew was exhausted. On 7 October Grudziński decided to leave the Baltic. On the night of 8–9 October Orzeł forced the shallowest stretch of the Sound on the surface, under a home-made Swedish flag, with almost the entire crew on the bridge, ready to abandon and scuttle the boat if she was detected. Through the Kattegat, the Skagerrak and the North Sea, in stormy weather and with a damaged wireless set, she reached the coast of Scotland on 14 October 1939. The British destroyer HMS Valorous escorted her into Rosyth. The Admiralty had long since given her up for lost.

Place in the war

The escape of Orzeł mattered above all as a sign. At a time when Poland was falling and its leaders were being interned in Romania, a crew that had earlier fallen victim to its commander’s errors had itself wrested its ship from captivity and brought her to the Allies. At the beginning of 1940 Orzeł joined the Royal Navy’s 2nd Submarine Flotilla. On 8 April 1940, off the coast of Norway, she sank the German transport Rio de Janeiro, carrying troops bound for Bergen, one of the first signals of the impending invasion of Norway. On 23 May 1940 she sailed on her last patrol in the North Sea and disappeared with all hands, Lieutenant Commander Grudziński among them. The cause of her loss is still uncertain. In Poland her story became a legend, kept alive in books and in the 1959 film Orzeł.

For Estonia the consequences of the escape were dramatic. The Soviet Union treated it as proof that the country was defenceless, and over the following days its warships and aircraft demonstratively entered Estonian waters and airspace. On 24 September Molotov demanded of Selter a mutual assistance pact with Soviet bases, and on 28 September Estonia, with no help to be had from anywhere, signed it in Moscow. Latvia and Lithuania were soon forced to accept similar agreements, and in June 1940 the Red Army occupied all three countries. By the time Orzeł surfaced off the coast of Scotland on 14 October, Moscow no longer needed to return to the affair that had served it as a pretext for a few days. Today the escape is commemorated in Tallinn by plaques on the Fat Margaret tower and in the harbour.