Armageddon - Max Hastings [212]
Shortly before 1900, between broken snow showers, thirty-three-year-old Captain Third Class Alexandr Marinesko of the Soviet submarine S-13 sighted a large ship, which to his amazement—as a result of German negligence—was not zig-zagging and was showing lights. Even in a service notorious for heavy drinking and indiscipline, Marinesko had achieved a reputation for reckless behaviour ashore which had incurred the displeasure of the NKVD. He was suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies. He had been at sea for three weeks on his current patrol, without sighting a worthwhile target. Now, he exerted himself. S-13 began to stalk the Gustloff on the surface, taking up a position down-moon, between ship and shore. It took him two hours to overhaul the liner and turn into a firing position. At 2104, at point-blank range of less than a thousand yards, he fired a salvo of torpedoes, daubed with the usual slogans “For the Motherland,” “Stalingrad,” “For the Soviet People.” There were three devastating explosions. The Wilhelm Gustloff listed heavily, and began to sink.
Most of the girl naval auxiliaries were fortunate enough to die instantly, when a torpedo detonated below their living space. The old, the sick and wounded could not move, but perished more slowly. There were screams from those trapped behind watertight doors, which rolled down immediately after the attack. Some naval personnel fired rifles to control panic-stricken mobs of passengers surging up from the lower promenade deck. A waiter running through a cabin flat heard a gun go off and opened a door, to see a naval officer standing with a pistol over a dead woman and child, while another terrified child clung to his leg. “Get out!” shouted the officer, and the waiter did so, leaving the father to finish his business. Suicide seemed perfectly rational when just twelve of the ship’s twenty-four lifeboats were on board, those in the davits were not swung out and the mortal cold of the Baltic awaited.
Most of the crew behaved contemptibly. A lifeboat with capacity for fifty pulled away carrying only the captain and twelve sailors. Another was lowered so recklessly that its load of passengers was upended into the sea. Several boats were never launched at all. The ship was soon lying broadside to the sea. It finally disappeared seventy minutes after the attack. Some people tore off their clothes before leaping into the water, an absurdly rational gesture at a moment of catastrophe. Many never escaped from the passenger spaces. There was no dignity aboard the foundering ship, only the nightmarish sights and sounds that accompanied several thousand helpless people fighting in panic to save themselves, or choosing a swift death by gunshot. The Gustloff’s distress signal was heard by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, which was also sailing west that night with 1,377 refugees. As her course drove the cruiser past the grave of the liner, survivors struggling in the water waved frantically, clutching a moment of hope. The Hipper’s churning screws ended their suffering. The big warship could not risk heaving to, with a submarine close by. Alexandr Marinesko missed a far more useful target than the Gustloff that night. After his attack, he took S-13 as deep as the shallow Baltic would allow, to escape depth-charge attack. He never saw the Hipper.
The torpedo boat T-36 was the only vessel to render immediate assistance. It closed the scene in time to pick up 252 survivors. Many even among those who had found places in lifeboats froze to death before other rescuers arrived at daybreak. A naval petty officer who boarded one boat full of corpses next morning found an unidentified baby, blue with cold but still breathing. He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.
Alexandr Marinesko’s role in the Baltic