FIGHTING NAZIS IN THE SOVIET POLAR REGION

By Lyubov Tsarevskaya

This country’s Polar Region abounds in rocky mountainous terrain, marshes and lakes, it’s a country of tundra, a short summer and long winter. The severe and changeable northern climate grows somewhat milder towards the coastal area of the Barents Sea, which never gets ice-bound thanks to the Gulf Stream, - a current of warm water in the Atlantic Ocean, flowing northeast towards Europe from the Gulf of Mexico. 

During this country’s war against Germany in 1941 through 1945 the Soviet Polar Region became the scene of bitter fighting between the units of the Soviet Army and the German Mountain Army in Lapland. The Mountain Army was assigned the task of wiping out the bases of the Soviet Northern Fleet, as well as capturing the cities of Murmansk and Archangel, and the Kola Peninsula, - a large promontory in the Murmansk region. The German Mountain Army comprised crack mountain chasseur and grenadier units, with a lot of fighting experience in Greece, Yugoslavia, France, northern Norway and on Crete island. To support the Mountain Army, Finnish Army units were mounting an offensive on the Isthmus of Karelia, since Finland was an ally of Germany and at war with the Soviet Union. 

The German troops that invaded the north-west of the USSR in June 1941 succeeded in advancing deeper into Soviet territory only a little, when they were stopped and made go over to the defence by the Soviet Army’s Karelian army group. The Nazis remained riveted to their positions until 1944, when the Soviet Army launched a powerful counteroffensive and sent them rolling back. 

To make up for their failed offensive against targets deeper in the Kola Peninsula the German Command galvanized action by their combat aircraft that were based on airfields in Finland and Norway and enjoyed overwhelming air superiority in the first war years. They flew daily sorties to bomb targets in Murmansk and other Soviet ports, as well as to attack convoys of cargo ships making for those ports. 

Fighting in the Soviet Polar Region was going on on land, in the air and at sea. Right after the Germans besieged Leningrad, on the Baltic Sea, and seized the Soviet Black Sea ports, the importance of Murmansk and the city of Archangel became crucial. The ports were used by the Anti-Hitler Coalition allies to send petrol, tanks, trucks, aluminium and other strategic materials to the USSR. For a while the German Command, dazzled by their successful offensive operations at the initial stage of the war, cared little for the convoys of cargo ships en route to Soviet northern ports. But as soon as they realized that the Blitzkrieg plan failed, they started to feverishly build up their naval force in northern seas. The German flotilla “NORD” was charged with destroying allied convoys en route to Murmansk and other Soviet ports, and sinking warships of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Germans grew very active in a bid to deprive the USSR of its northern sea lines in the Norway, Barents and Kara seas, but the Soviet Fleet responded with a number of well thought-out strikes and forced the German Command to keep their ships in safe fjords along Norway’s coastline. All Nazi attempts to galvanize fighting at sea were invariably foiled. In July 1942 Germans sent a large squadron of surface ships to sink a Russia-bound convoy. The squadron comprised eight destroyers, the heavy cruiser “Admiral Scheer” and battleship “Admiral Tirpitz”, -the German Navy flagship. “Tirpitz” was built just a year before, in 1941, it boasted heavy armour, state-of-the-art instruments of all-round observation and 36 various-calibre artillery guns. On the 5th of July the Soviet submarine “K-21” under the command of Hero of the Soviet Union Captain Second Rank Nikolai Lounin caught sight of the German squadron. The submarine placed itself on a collision course with the enemy ships, then dived and let the destroyers and the cruiser pass by, and then it surfaced and fired two torpedoes to hit “Admiral Tirpitz”. The battleship was badly damaged in the attack and was forced to retreat to its base, where Royal Air Force planes turned it into a huge heap of scrap-iron later. 

By hitting the German Navy’s biggest battleship Lounin’s submarine saved a USSR-bound convoy of ships, since after “Tirpitz” was struck in the attack, the squadron decided to abort the mission and turned back to escort the flagship to its base. The loss of the battleship “Admiral Tirpitz” dealt a severe blow to the German Navy. 

Fierce fighting by the Soviet troops and this country’s Northern Fleet in the Soviet Polar Region foiled the German Command’s plans for seizing the northern part of the country. No matter how hard the Germans tried, they failed to crush the 80 kilometres (50 miles) of Soviet defences that separated them from Murmansk. In 1944 Nazi troops were finally kicked out of the north of the European part of the USSR.