Orzeł reaches Britain

On the morning of 14 October 1939 the Polish submarine ORP Orzeł surfaced off the east coast of Scotland, level with the Firth of Forth, and transmitted a message in plain language announcing her arrival. Before noon she met a British destroyer sent out to meet her, which escorted her to the base at Rosyth. So ended a voyage that had begun in Gdynia on 1 September and had taken her through internment and an escape from Tallinn, three weeks of roaming the Baltic without charts and a night passage through the Danish straits. The British Admiralty had long since given the boat up for lost. Her arrival coincided with news that shook Britain: that same night a German U-boat had sunk the battleship Royal Oak at the fleet base in Scapa Flow.

The last leg

Orzeł had got out of the Baltic on the night of 8–9 October, forcing her way on the surface through the shallow Drogden channel in the Sound. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Jan Grudziński, her former executive officer, who had taken over the boat in Tallinn. On 10 October she was in the Kattegat. Grudziński did not head straight for Britain. Hoping to encounter German ships, he spent the whole day patrolling the waters between Cape Kullen and the island of Anholt, and the following day, by then in the Skagerrak, in stormy weather. He found no target, but near Cape Skagen the boat strayed into a minefield and luckily got out of it again. Merchant ships kept to Swedish territorial waters, where they could not be attacked.

The boat was in poor condition. During the passage of the Sound she had run aground three times, and the jolts as she worked herself free had damaged the radio, so Grudziński could not let the British know she was coming. The propeller blades were chipped, the rudder was faulty, the tanks were leaking, and the gun was useless without its breech-blocks, which the Estonians had taken. The charts of the Baltic and the straits had been drawn by hand by the navigating officer, Sub-Lieutenant Marian Mokrski, on the basis of a list of lighthouses that the Estonians had overlooked. Before noon on 12 October Orzeł set course across the North Sea for the rendezvous point that the Fleet Command had designated back in September for ships breaking through to Britain: 30 nautical miles east of the Isle of May at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. The greatest danger now came not only from German warships but also from British minefields and from Allied aircraft and escort vessels, which might take an unknown submarine for a German one. The crew, exhausted by six weeks at sea, sailed on through a storm.

On the morning of 14 October the radio operator managed to repair the transmitter. At 6 a.m. Orzeł sent a message in plain language, which was picked up by a British shore station and passed on to the Royal Navy. At around 11 a.m., at the rendezvous point, she met the destroyer HMS Valorous, sent out specially, which led her to Rosyth.

The Polish Navy in Britain

Orzeł was the last Polish warship to break through to Britain in September and October 1939. The first to arrive had been three destroyers, Burza, Błyskawica and Grom, which under the Peking Plan had left Gdynia on 30 August so as not to be bottled up in the Baltic. The alliance with Britain, signed on 25 August, gave them a base there. On 20 September the submarine Wilk, which had forced the Sound in the middle of the month, reached Rosyth. The three remaining submarines, Sęp, Ryś and Żbik, damaged and unable to replenish their supplies, put into Swedish ports in the second half of September and were interned for the rest of the war. The rest of the fleet was lost in the Baltic or fell into German hands: the destroyer Wicher and the minelayer Gryf had been sunk by aircraft as early as 3 September, and the capitulation of Hel on 2 October ended the Polish Navy’s fight on its own coast.

In Britain its command was being rebuilt. Rear Admiral Jerzy Świrski, head of the Navy Directorate (PL), reached London through Romania and France after the state authorities had crossed the Romanian border. On 18 November 1939 a Polish–British naval agreement was signed in London. Polish ships kept their ensign, their crews, their Polish command and Polish regulations, but operated under British operational command, and the Royal Navy was to supply them. The agreement also provided for British warships to be handed over to the Poles, who were to man them. Orzeł and Wilk became the nucleus of the Polish submarine fleet in the West.

From Dundee to Norway

After a short stay at Rosyth, Orzeł sailed with Wilk to the shipyard at Dundee, where she was refitted. Armament was the hardest problem: breech-blocks for the gun had to be ordered from the Swedish manufacturer, since there were no such guns in Britain, and the torpedo tubes were adapted to take torpedoes brought over from France. On 16 November both boats were visited by the Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski. Grudziński received the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, and twenty officers, petty officers and seamen the Cross of Valour. The refit was completed on 1 December. Orzeł returned to Rosyth and joined the Royal Navy’s 2nd Submarine Flotilla, with a British liaison team on board consisting of an officer, a telegraphist and a signalman. Only on 8 December did the British publicly announce that Orzeł and Wilk were in Britain, and three days later King George VI awarded Grudziński the Distinguished Service Order.

From the end of December 1939 Orzeł escorted a convoy to Norway and then patrolled the North Sea off the Norwegian coast, usually without meeting the enemy. Her greatest success came on 8 April 1940: off the southern coast of Norway she sank the German transport Rio de Janeiro, carrying troops and equipment bound for Bergen. The survivors, picked up by the Norwegians, stated that they were on their way to defend Norway against the British. This was one of the signs that the German invasion of Norway was beginning, but the Norwegian authorities failed to draw the conclusions in time, and the German attack on 9 April took Norway by surprise.

Place in the war

Orzeł’s voyage from Tallinn to Scotland became one of the legends of the Polish Navy and one of the few episodes of the autumn of 1939 of which the Poles could be proud. It also showed how meagre were the naval forces left to the Polish Republic: three destroyers and two submarines. From these, from ships handed over by the Royal Navy and from the sailors who made their way to Britain through Romania, Hungary and France, the Polish Navy built up over the following years a fleet that took part in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Norwegian campaign, the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Arctic convoys and the war in the Mediterranean.

Orzeł herself did not live to see those years. On 23 May 1940 she left Rosyth for another patrol in the North Sea. She did not answer the signals changing her patrol area, and when she failed to return by the appointed date she was declared missing in June 1940. Sixty-three men were lost, among them Grudziński and the three Britons of the liaison team. The cause is still uncertain to this day. It is most often assumed that the boat ran into a German or British minefield. A mistaken attack by an Allied aircraft or German aerial bombs have also been considered; the commander of British submarines, Vice Admiral Max Horton, inclined towards the latter. Despite many search expeditions, the wreck has never been found. Grudziński was posthumously promoted to the next rank, komandor podporucznik, and after the war awarded the Gold Cross of the Virtuti Militari.