The 900 Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

crews stood at their posts.
    Tributs himself and his staff had left the Old City and moved into their war command post, an underground shelter outside Tallinn. Tributs got one more alarming report. This came from a sentry ship, the submarine M-96 , on duty near the entrance of the Gulf of Finland. Captain A. I. Marinesko reported sighting a convoy of thirty-two transports, many under the German flag, near the Bengtsher lighthouse around 4 A.M. , June 21.
    That evening Tributs was in constant touch with Admiral Kuznetsov in Moscow. The Naval Commissar was an experienced military man. He had served in the navy since boyhood, and in the mid-1930’s he went to Spain to advise the Spanish Navy in the Civil War. He shared Tributs’ alarm but felt powerless to act in absence of instructions from the Supreme Command. He had put the fleets on the No. 2 Alert on his own responsibility, technically calling it a “training” maneuver. In fact, it was a precaution against sudden war.
    Tributs and Kuznetsov conferred after the evening situation report by Deputy Naval Chief of Staff V. A. Alafuzov (Chief of Staff Admiral I. S. Isakov had gone to Sevastopol for the Black Sea maneuvers).
    Tributs told Kuznetsov he considered the situation so grave he and his staff proposed to stay at their command post through the night. Kuznetsov repeated that his hands were tied as far as further action was concerned. The two officers concluded their talk in a mood of frustration.
    Kuznetsov’s worry grew during the evening as he talked with the Black Sea Command at Sevastopol and the Northern Command at Polyarny, and he, too, decided to stay at his post all night. Again he telephoned the fleet commanders, cautioning them to be on the alert.
    “At the High Command until late in the evening of June 21,” Kuznetsov noted in his memoirs, “all was quiet. No one called me and no one expressed any interest in the preparedness of the fleet.”
    Sometime between 10:30 and 11 P.M. Kuznetsov got a call from Marshal Semyon K. Timoshenko, the Defense Commissar, who said: “I have some very important information. Come over here.” 5
    Together with his deputy, Alafuzov (who was considerably worried because his uniform was badly rumpled and there was no time to change), Kuznetsov hurried out of his office. The Defense Command was just down Frunze Street from naval headquarters, and the two men walked to Timo-shenko’s office, located in a small building across from entrance No. 5 of the Defense Commissariat.
    “After a muggy hot day,” Kuznetsov recalls, “there had been a short brisk shower and now it was a bit fresher.”
    Young couples were strolling, two by two, on the boulevard, and somewhere nearby a dance was in progress. The sound of a phonograph came from an open window.
    The two men bounded up the staircase to the second floor of the Defense Commissariat. A breeze rustled the heavy magenta curtains, but it was so stifling that Kuznetsov unbuttoned his jacket as he strode into Timoshenko’s office. At the table sat General Georgi K. Zhukov, Chief of the General Staff. Marshal Timoshenko was dictating a telegram and Zhukov was filling out a telegraph blank. He had a pad of blanks in front of him and had already used up more than half of them. Obviously, the two had been at work for some hours.
    “It is possible that the Germans will attack, and it is necessary that the fleet be in readiness,” Timoshenko said.
    “I was alarmed by the words,” Kuznetsov recalls, “but they were not in any way unexpected. I reported that the fleet was already in a state of the highest military readiness and awaited further orders. I stayed for some minutes to get the situation precisely, but Alafuzov ran back to his office in order to send urgent radiograms to the fleet.
    “Only let them be on time, I thought, as I returned to my quarters.”
    Kuznetsov immediately telephoned Tributs.
    “Not more than three minutes passed,” Kuznetsov writes, “when I heard