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Special Units · Invasion of Poland, 1939
The Crew of ORP Orzeł
Interned in a neutral port and stripped of their charts, the crew of Poland’s newest submarine broke out under fire, crossed the Baltic and the Danish straits with charts drawn from memory and reached Scotland.
- Polish Navy
- Tallinn to Rosyth
- 14 September – 14 October 1939
A new boat
Orzeł (“Eagle”) was the newest and largest boat in the Polish fleet. Built by De Schelde at Vlissingen in the Netherlands, launched in January 1938 and commissioned on 2 February 1939, she was 84 meters long, displaced 1,110 tons surfaced and 1,473 submerged, and carried 12 torpedo tubes, 20 torpedoes and a 105 mm deck gun. Her crew numbered about 60 (Wikipedia, “ORP Orzeł”).
In September 1939 the Polish submarines stayed in the Baltic under a plan called Worek, “the sack.” The five boats were to wait submerged around the Gulf of Danzig and attack any German force that tried to land on the coast or bombard Hel. Orzeł, under Lt. Cdr. Henryk Kłoczkowski, had the innermost sector, from Jastarnia to the mouth of the Vistula, and was to attack the battleship Schleswig-Holstein if she left Danzig. The plan rested on a false premise. The Germans never meant to land; they took the coast from the landward side. Crowded into shallow water and hunted by aircraft and minesweepers, the submarines found few targets (Chapter 7).
Orzeł left Gdynia at 6:30 on 1 September. On 4 September the German minesweepers M3 and M4 attacked and damaged her, and she withdrew toward Gotland to make repairs. Kłoczkowski fell ill, and by 8 September he was seriously unwell. On 10 September he reported his illness to the Fleet commander, who advised landing him in a neutral port or approaching Hel. Kłoczkowski chose Tallinn, the capital of neutral Estonia (Santi Odnaleźć Orła; Wikipedia, “Orzeł incident”).
Interned at Tallinn
Orzeł entered the roads of Tallinn at about 21:30 on 14 September, leaking oil and with a failed compressor. Under the Hague Convention of 1907 a belligerent warship could stay in a neutral port for 24 hours. But a German merchant ship, the Thalatta, was in port, and the Estonians ruled that the Polish boat could not leave until 24 hours after her. On 15 September Kłoczkowski was taken to hospital, and that afternoon, under German pressure, the Estonian authorities declared the submarine and her crew interned. They took her logbook and charts. On 16 and 17 September they removed the breechblocks of her guns, her ammunition and small arms, and began hoisting out her torpedoes (Santi Odnaleźć Orła).
Command passed to the first officer, Jan Grudziński, aged 31. He and his officers decided to escape. The torpedo hoist cable parted before the Estonians had removed all the torpedoes, and the accounts agree that the crew had arranged it; five or six torpedoes remained aboard, depending on the source. Boatswain Władysław Narkiewicz, posing as a fisherman, sounded the depth of the harbor exit.
The breakout
The breakout came in the early hours of 18 September, about midnight by some accounts and about 3:00 by the timeline compiled from the crew’s reports. The harbor lights failed, apparently with help from the crew. The two Estonian guards on board were overpowered without violence. The crew cut the telephone and electrical cables, cut the mooring lines with an axe and started the engines. Estonian searchlights, machine guns and light artillery opened fire, and the conning tower was hit. At the harbor mouth the boat struck an obstacle and stuck. Grudziński blew the tanks, got her off and dived. She lay on the bottom of the Gulf of Finland until dark, then surfaced and headed west (Wikipedia; Santi Odnaleźć Orła).
The boat had no charts. Her navigator, 2nd Lt. Marian Mokrski, drew charts of the Baltic and the Danish straits from memory, and the crew had a Swedish list of lighthouses. For about three weeks Orzeł patrolled the Baltic, hoping to find a German merchant ship to attack or to take charts from, and found none. On 21 September, near Gotland, the crew put the two Estonian guards ashore in a dinghy with food, clothing and, by most accounts, 50 U.S. dollars each. German and Estonian propaganda had already reported that the Poles had murdered them.
Through the straits
The radio news of the submarine Wilk’s arrival in Britain on 20 September persuaded Orzeł’s officers that they too could make it. On 7 October Grudziński decided to try. The boat passed the Falsterbo light at the southern tip of Sweden on 8 October and slipped through the Drogden channel of the Øresund, the shallow and closely watched passage between Copenhagen and Malmö, partly on the surface at night, with Swedish and German patrols nearby. On 9 October she passed Helsingør and Helsingborg, on 10 October the Kattegat, and on 11 October the Skagerrak (Santi Odnaleźć Orła).
Her radio had been damaged at Tallinn and she could not identify herself. At 6:00 on 14 October, off the coast of Scotland, she transmitted a recognition signal and her position in English. About five hours later, some 30 nautical miles from the Isle of May, the destroyer HMS Valorous met her and led her into Rosyth. She had been at sea for six weeks since leaving Gdynia. The Polish naval command praised Grudziński and his men in an order of 21 October 1939, and on 11 December the British awarded him the Distinguished Service Order; Poland gave him the Virtuti Militari (uboat.net; Chapter 7).
What the escape cost Estonia
For Estonia the escape was a disaster. The commander of the Estonian naval forces and his chief of staff were dismissed the next day. On 19 September Foreign Minister Molotov summoned the Estonian envoy in Moscow, accused the Estonian leadership of sympathy for Poland and announced that the Soviet navy would search for the submarine near Tallinn. Soviet ships and aircraft began to violate Estonian waters and air space. On 26 September the Soviets announced that the tanker Metallist had been sunk in Narva Bay by an unknown submarine, by implication the Polish one. No Polish submarine was anywhere near, and historians regard the incident as a Soviet provocation. On 28 September Estonia signed a pact allowing Soviet bases on its territory. Stalin’s demands followed from the secret protocol of 23 August, not from the escape, but Orzeł gave Moscow a pretext at the moment it wanted one (ERR; Wikipedia).
The last patrol
Operating with the Royal Navy’s 2nd Submarine Flotilla, Orzeł sank the German transport Rio de Janeiro, 5,261 GRT, off Lillesand in southern Norway on 8 April 1940, the day before the German invasion of Norway. Norwegian rescuers who picked up German soldiers in uniform gave one of the first warnings of the invasion, though it was not acted on in time (Peszke; Chapter 9).
Grudziński was promoted on 3 May 1940. Three weeks later, on 23 May, Orzeł left Rosyth on patrol in the North Sea and never returned. She was declared lost on 8 June, most likely to a mine, with all hands. Grudziński was 32. Searches since 2008 have not found her. Kłoczkowski, her first captain, reached Britain in 1942, was tried by a Polish naval court for leaving his ship and was reduced to the ranks and dismissed. He emigrated to the United States and died in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1962 (uboat.net).
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem.
Timeline
- Orzeł is commissioned.
- She leaves Gdynia for her Worek sector.
- Damaged by the minesweepers M3 and M4, she withdraws toward Gotland.
- Orzeł enters the roads of Tallinn with a sick captain.
- Interned; Grudziński takes command.
- The crew breaks out of Tallinn under fire.
- The two Estonian guards are put ashore near Gotland.
- Orzeł passes the Øresund through the Drogden channel.
- HMS Valorous meets her off Scotland and leads her into Rosyth.
- She sinks the transport Rio de Janeiro off Lillesand, Norway.
- Orzeł sails on her last patrol; declared lost on 8 June.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 7: The Coast and the Navy: Gdynia, Oksywie, Hel and the Escape of the Orzeł
- Chapter 9: Occupation, Exile and Memory
- The Invasion of Poland collection and atlas
By the numbers
ORP Orzeł by the numbers
Six weeks at sea, stage by stage
Days spent in each stage of the voyage, 1 September – 14 October 1939 (approximate; dates from the crew-report timeline)
Source: Santi Odnaleźć Orła, crew-report timeline; uboat.net; Chapter 7
Where the Polish fleet’s warships went, September 1939
Destroyers, the minelayer Gryf and the five Worek submarines, by fate
Source: Michael A. Peszke, Poland’s Navy, 1918–1945 (1999); Chapter 7
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Santi Odnaleźć Orła (search expedition for ORP Orzeł), “Time line,” compiled from the crew’s reports.
- uboat.net: “Jan Grudziński” and “Henryk Kłoczkowski.”
- ERR (Estonian Public Broadcasting), “Karl Soonpää päevik 19. septembril 1939. aastal,” with commentary by Küllo Arjakas, in Estonian.
- Michael Alfred Peszke, Poland’s Navy, 1918–1945 (Hippocrene, 1999).
- Wikipedia: “ORP Orzeł (1938),” “Orzeł incident,” “Worek Plan,” “Jan Grudziński,” “ORP Wilk.”