In today’s translation of an undated Russian document, Osip Borisovich Bron (1896-1988), head of the Department of Theoretical Foundations of Electrical Engineering at the Leningrad Institute of Aviation Instrumentation, related the story of the Soviet Navy’s post-war quest for a rumored instruction on how to properly sweep for German mines, and British efforts to thwart their efforts.
HOW WE RECEIVED INSTRUCTION FROM THE GERMANS ON HOW TO SWEEP FOR THEIR OWN MINES
Air-deployed sea mines were always to detonate if they landed on the coast instead of the water. And yet we would find unexploded mines due to faulty protective mechanisms. This helped us uncover our enemy’s secrets. We would consider all of this to be a show of solidarity with us by unknown German workers on the other side of the front.
I’d like to relate one such instance of solidarity, this time shown by a person that rendered us an invaluable service while choosing to remain unknown.
During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, the enemy was using all new mines and torpedoes against our Navy’s ships. In order to counter them, we had to know their configuration and identify their characteristics. And in order to accomplish we would have to locate unexploded mines and torpedoes and, once we’d disarmed them, learn our enemy’s secrets. Throughout the course of the war, our mine and torpedo men busily occupied themselves with this difficult and dangerous work, even in spite of the fact that the enemy carefully protected the mechanisms and booby-trapped the devices, obliterating their secrets along with anyone trying to work their way in. Danger came with every step, and ultimately most of the enemy’s secrets were divined. Most, but not all. The question would always arise: what’s the newest torpedo or mine, and how will their characteristics change? What else is out there that we aren’t aware of?
And then the war was over. Well, it was over for everyone except the mine men. A vast quantity of enemy mines were left behind in our waters, and they would still have to be dealt with. Post-war minesweeping missions became delicate.
Back during the war, the prevailing supposition was that the enemy had to have methods of countering their own mines. After all, the Germans were counting on seizing all of our seas, and if that were the case, the would have to have methods for sweeping their own mines. But we had no information of any such methods. When our troops set foot in German territory, we found ourselves with the opportunity to meet with those German specialists who developed the mines and torpedoes. We learned from them that during the development of any mine, it was mandatory that a method for countering it would also have to be worked out. A mine was adopted into service only when they had also elaborated a means to defeat it. This was all connected with the enemy high command’s certainty of Germany’s full and final victory, and the subsequent need to provide safe navigation for their ships. For example, we were told that some mines that had undergone development were not accepted because no means of countering them was worked out.
All of this was confirmed by the enemy’s well-developed instructions in sweeping for their own mines, and it was of the utmost importance to get our hands on these instructions. This could make it possible for us to learn about those mines with which we were still unfamiliar, and to cross-reference the methods we’d been using to counter the methods developed by the enemy. If nothing else, we could make corrections to our own instructions on post-war sweeping for German mines.
Yet all of our efforts to find this instruction in the territory our troops were now occupying yielded no results. The primary mine-torpedo documentation of the Germans wound up in Kiel, and fell into British hands. One could assume that instructions could be found there that would be of interest to us.
In September 1945, our command approached the British to ask them to receive our officers visiting Kiel to acquaint themselves with the conditions of post-war minesweeping. We received permission, and in early February 1946, a group of officers, headed by Deputy Chief of the Navy’s Mine-Torpedo Directorate, Captain 1 Rank B.D. Kostygov, departed for Kiel. And I was part of this group.
Our arrival in Kiel happened to coincide with a time of a sharp chill in diplomatic relations between England and our country after Churchill’s well-known Fulton [“Iron Curtain”] speech. This made itself immediately apparent with the very cold reception that was bestowed upon us. Moreover, giving permission for our visit, the British presumed that fairly low-ranking officers would be arriving, and that they would basically educate on how to handle this or that minesweeper. When we asked for the their documentation that the Germans had, we were refused; they responded that no such instruction existed. And yet we were ultimately given permission to read several pages which, as we later learned, was from this instruction, but we weren’t allowed to remove them from the confines of the ship where we were being received. This was one of the Germans’ partially constructed ships that was being serviced by the former German soldiers who had already dispensed with their uniform. Having learned that we were Soviet Navy officers, one of the German sailors waiting on us revealed a good deal of interest in our country and living conditions. We often chatted with him in quite friendly terms. He served in the German Navy and we asked him about the instruction that we had been interested in all this time. He said nothing, being under observation of the British.
But one evening, B.D. Kostygov and I were walking along the streets of Kiel, rather dark at the time. All of a sudden we were approached by the same German sailor who had been near us on the ship, and he quietly asked me, in German, to step aside with him. From under his coat he pulled a bundle of papers, thrust it into my hands, and said, “Tuck this away. This is what you’re looking for.” And he left. I returned to Kostygov, and back home, when we unrolled the bundle, we found that this was the main instruction on minesweeping that we had been seeking for so long.
The question arose as to why the German sailor had handed us the instruction. Taking into account his interest in our country and the general nature of the conversations that took place, one could presume that this man was simply sympathetic toward us. In any event, he did us an immense favor and for obvious reasons didn’t identify himself. From his hands we obtained the most valuable material, and it was all done absolutely unselfishly. We didn’t even get to thank this man.
The question also arose as to where the classified instruction had come from to wind up with this German sailor. there was no information with which to answer this question, but taking into account that the Germans, of course, didn’t make a habit of handing over classified documents, one could presume that this instruction – otherwise unaccounted for – was with our gift-giver for official purposes during the war, and was still with him when Germany surrendered.
The British attitude toward us was also reflected in how our departure from Kiel took place. One day, arriving at our hotel, each of Kostygov’s group members found a note on my desk, notifying us that our Kiel residence permit would lapse on 28 February 1946, and it was recommended we leave our rooms or obtain new permission. This meant that we would have to leave, and so we did. We returned to Berlin in vehicles that were escorted to the border between the British and Russian occupied zones by British officers to make sure we didn’t “lose our way”.
Some time had past when the British learned that we not had the German instruction for post-war minesweeping, and at that time they sent the same instruction to the Soviet Administration in Germany. That was only when we already know everything we needed to know about sweeping for German mines.
In this entire affair one has to bear in mind that here, we’re not talking about military operations, but about a universal compassionate act. When a war is over, the seas have to be cleared of lethal mines for the free navigation of ships of all countries and peoples.
Translating History 