"Poles" in Russian service
Polish Pinsk Flotilla (until 1926)
The Poles had been hatching plans to seize the territories of Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine from the USSR since the time of Pilsudski. In the 20s, the task of defeating a country exhausted by the Civil War seemed to the noble gentry to be quite easily solved. Therefore, when in 1919 the Second Polish Republic adopted a program for the construction of fleet, along with the crazy plans to build battleships with cruisers, it envisaged the construction of modest river monitors. And, unlike battleships and cruisers, Poland actually managed to build them!
Why did they manage to do it? Well, in order to build at foreign shipyards, as was originally planned, money was needed. Moreover, according to the principle of “money in the morning, chairs in the evening”, talks of “let’s crush the USSR and pay with reparations” were not taken into account. Therefore, they had to get out of it themselves. In the autumn of 1919, the Technical Section of the Department of Naval Affairs developed a draft design for a river monitor of type “A”: the ship turned out to be very formidable on paper, Polish engineers tried to stuff 60x2-mm guns and four machine guns, or 120x4-mm with a similar number of machine guns into a 75-meter-long monitor. Negotiations on the construction of 8 similar ships were held with a number of foreign shipyards.
Monitor "Pinsk" before modernization
But money... This unpleasant word forced them to cut the sturgeon: on the one hand, to increase the displacement of the ships, on the other hand, to reduce the armament: to two 88-mm guns and five machine guns. And most importantly, to refuse to build abroad, the task had to be given to the Danzig (the "free city of Danzig" had not yet managed to become Gdansk) shipyard. Four of these "B-type monitors" were built: "Varshavya", "Gorodishche", "Pinsk" and "Mozyr" (in 1923 it was renamed "Torun"). True, 88-mm guns were not found, and two 105-mm howitzers of the 1914 model were installed on the ships.
And other conditions of the project were violated by the contractors: instead of 12-14 mm of armor, 10-11 mm was installed, the weight of the installed equipment was 1,5-2 tons higher than planned, as a result of which the draft increased by 6-9 cm, and the speed, on the contrary, decreased from 10 to 9 knots. Soon all the ships were modernized: two 105-mm guns were replaced by 2x75-mm guns and 1x100-mm howitzer, and in 1930, instead of machine-gun turrets on the left side, a machine-gun mount appeared, allowing firing at air targets.
"Torun" after modernization, with "additions"
The large draft of the monitors greatly confused the Polish commanders: it limited the amount of fuel and ammunition that could be taken on board, so in 1936-38 they were fitted with side extensions that reduced the draft from 80 to 64 cm, but reduced the speed to 6 knots. In 1934-36, Torun received three 1 mm guns in twin and single-gun turrets instead of 100x2 mm howitzer and 75x75 mm guns, and the armoured cabin was replaced with an armoured casemate, on the roof of which a searchlight, rangefinder and two machine-gun turrets were installed, the armour was replaced with 8 mm chromium-nickel, and instead of three 60 hp engines, two 100 hp engines were installed. Subsequently, the three remaining monitors underwent the same modernisation.
All monitors initially became part of the Vistula flotilla, but after the Second Polish Republic captured Western Ukraine and Belarus, they moved to Pinsk and were included in the Pinsk River Flotilla. On September 17, after the Red Army entered Western Belarus, the flotilla attempted to cross to the Polish-German front, but due to a blown-up bridge, it was unable to cross the Dnieper-Bug Canal to the Western Bug. As a result, the ships were sunk by their crews on the Pripyat and Pina rivers.
Monitor "Bobruisk" formerly "Gorodishche"
In July 1940, under surveillance Artillery The monitors were raised and re-armed with domestic 76/42 guns with a firing range of up to 4 km. After the rise, service in the ranks of the Red Army began: "Gorodishche" became "Bobruisk", "Varshavya" - "Vitebsk", "Torun" - "Vinnitsa", and "Pinsk" - "Zhitomir". All ships became part of the Soviet first Dnieper and then Pinsk River Flotilla, commanded by Captain 1st Rank Dmitry Rogachev - a participant in the First World War and the Civil War. He proposed to strengthen Defense monitors with 37-mm anti-aircraft guns, but they did not manage to do this before the war began...
The monitors met the war in Pinsk. Against the background of the collapse of the Western Front command, allowed by Army General Pavlov, the flotilla's actions were quite adequate. On July 11, 1941, the monitors Vinnitsa, Vitebsk and Zhitomir successfully supported the Red Army counterattacks near Bobruisk with fire. On the night of July 11-12, the monitor Bobruisk, under the command of Senior Lieutenant F. K. Semenov, passed along the Pripyat for 30 km to the enemy rear, where it fired at the advancing German troops. But the overall situation at the front was critical, which could not but affect the fate of the ships...
Raising the Vinnitsa monitor, 2007
The Vinnitsa was the first to perish. There are different versions of how this happened. According to the official version, on July 15, the monitor landed a partisan landing party near the village of Novaya Belitsa in the Parichi district and provided fire support; as a result of return fire from German batteries, the ship was hit five times and ran aground, after which it was blown up by the crew.
According to an alternative version (put forward by the deputy head of the special department of the NKVD of the 21st Army, Colonel Ageenkov, in top secret report No. 415 of July 26, 1941), the monitor took part in a joint operation with partisans and the 487th rifle regiment, whose commander, Major Goncharuk, warned his battalion commander Ryabikov that interaction would be carried out with the ships of the Pinsk military flotilla. But the battalion commander sent a battery of junior lieutenant Lomakin to the area of the operation, who was not warned about the participation of monitors in the battles. Lomakin, seeing the monitor towers, mistook them for German Tanks and opened fire. The flotilla ships, in turn, mistook Lomakin's battery for a German one and opened fire in response. Observing the incomprehensible shooting, the 487th regiment and Miklashevich's partisan detachment entered the battle. The result of the "battle" was 5 killed, 5 wounded, and the sunken monitor "Vinnitsa"... The ship was raised in 2007 and is currently located in the Svetlogorsk Museum of History and Local History.
Then came the turn of Zhitomir and Bobruisk. Bobruisk participated in battles in the area of David-Gorodok and Rojava in July-September 1941. On the night of August 31, it was heavily damaged by enemy tank fire near the village of Kozarovichi, ran aground and, having expended all its ammunition, was blown up by the crew. In 1944, the ship was raised by divers, but restoration was deemed inexpedient, and the old monitor was handed over to Glavvtorchermet. The fate of Zhitomir is similar: participation in battles on the Berezina and near Bobruisk, heavy damage received from enemy artillery near the village of Svaromye on August 31, 1941, blown up by the crew on September 1.
"The feat of the Smolensk monitor", artist I. I. Rodinov
"Vitebsk" fought so successfully that in the summer of 1941 the Military Council of the Southwestern Front nominated it for the Order of the Red Banner. But the monitor did not have time to be a Red Banner ship: unlike its "sister ships", it managed to break through from the enemy rear to Kyiv. There it perished: from September 16 to 18 it covered the crossing area near Kyiv, when it became clear that it would not be possible to break through to the lower reaches of the Dnieper, "Vitebsk" was blown up on September 18, 1941 near the village of Khotinki.
Despite the tragic fate of the Polish monitors in the ranks of the Red Army, the benefit of their actions in the summer and fall of 1941 was significant. They even earned an entry in the "War Diary" of the Chief of the German General Staff Franz Halder: "The monitors influence the offensive." But Halder was sitting in Berlin, which is why he was so brief, and the German commanders on the ground were much more eloquent. Here is a description of the results of the monitors' raid on the Okunevskaya ferry, which the Pinsk flotilla was ordered to destroy "at least at the cost of the entire flotilla":
"In fact, the infantry was still able to cross the bridge over the Dnieper and was even able to advance another 30 km to the east of the river, but the tank units were unable to pass, since this important bridge over the Dnieper was destroyed by Russian gunboats and aircraft and is burning. Therefore, we remain on the western bank of the Dnieper and await further orders."
Not a bad result of the battle of ships with 8-mm armor against tanks! And here is the result of the attack on the crossing of the Dnieper in the area of Sukholuchye: "Russian gunboats - the above-mentioned monitors, which came here when the bridge was being laid and made a wonderful fireworks display."
By the time the Great Patriotic War began, the ships built in Danzig in 1920 were already obsolete, despite all the modernization. But, as practice has shown, even obsolete equipment in capable hands can be of tangible benefit in war.
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