ORP Orzeł (1938)
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ORP Orzeł was an Orzeł class submarine of the Polish Navy that served during WWII.
ORP Orzeł arrives in the port of Gdynia
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History | |
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Poland | |
Name | ORP Orzeł |
Namesake | Eagle |
Builder | De Schelde, Netherlands |
Laid down | 14 August 1936 |
Launched | 15 January 1938 |
Commissioned | 2 February 1939 |
Decommissioned | 11 June 1940 |
Fate | Missing, presumed sunk |
General characteristics | |
Class and type | Orzeł-class submarine |
Displacement |
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Length | 84.00 m (275 ft 7 in) |
Beam | 6.7 m (22 ft 0 in) |
Draught | 4.17 m (13 ft 8 in) |
Speed |
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Complement | 60 |
Armament |
Construction
Orzeł was laid down 14 August 1936 at the Dutch shipyard De Schelde, as the Job No. 205; launched on 15 January 1938, and commissioned on 2 February 1939. She was a modern design (designed by the joint venture of Polish and Dutch engineers), albeit quite large for the shallow waters of the Baltic Sea.[citation needed]
World War II
Polish Campaign
At the beginning of the
Escape to Britain
Orzel's crew decided to head to
The crew of Orzeł conspired to carry out a daring escape. Around midnight on 18 September, the submarine's Estonian guards were overpowered, the mooring lines were cut, and Orzeł got under way. The alarm was raised, and her conning tower was peppered by machine-gun fire. Running half-submerged, Orzeł ran aground on a bar at the harbour mouth, where artillery fire damaged her wireless equipment. Grudzinski managed to get the boat off the bar by blowing her tanks, and she proceeded out of the Gulf of Finland, intending to sail for a British port, the crew having heard a radio report that the Polish submarine Wilk had been welcomed in Britain.
Orzel escaped from Tallinn with two Estonian guards on board as hostages. The Estonian and German press covering the Orzeł incident declared the two captured guards missing at sea. Grudzinski set them ashore in Sweden, providing them with clothing, money, and food for their safe return to homeland. The Polish crew believed that "those returning from the underworld deserve to travel first class only". The escape of the submarine Orzeł was used by the Soviet Union and Germany to challenge Estonian neutrality.
Since Orzeł's navigational charts had all been removed by the Estonian authorities, Captain Grudzinski resolved to stop a German ship and take her charts. However, the only German vessels encountered were warships rather than merchantmen. The submarine's sole remaining navigational aid was a list of lighthouses, and using these as a reference, Orzeł followed a course along the Baltic coast, around Denmark, and out into the North Sea, where she came under attack by British as well as German forces, since without her wireless equipment she had no means of identifying herself.
Forty days after she had originally sailed from Gdynia, Orzeł made landfall, off the east coast of Scotland. She lay on the bottom until emergency repairs were made to the radio, then surfaced to transmit a message in English. A Royal Navy destroyer then came out and escorted her into port, to the surprise of the British who had thought her sunk already weeks earlier.
Orzeł sank no enemy vessels during her journey from Estonia to Britain, but Soviet authorities blamed her for sinking the Soviet tanker Metallist in Narva Bay on 26 September, and used the incident as a pretext for the Soviet invasion of Estonia.[2]
Norwegian Campaign
After a refit, Orzeł was assigned to the Royal Navy's 2nd Submarine Flotilla and was assigned to patrol missions. Shortly after noon on 8 April 1940 she sank the 5,261
Loss
On 23 May 1940, Orzeł departed on its seventh patrol in the central North Sea. On 1 and 2 June, radio messages were transmitted from the
Search for the wreck
Between 2008 and 2017 a number of Polish expeditions, both private and public-funded, searched the region of North Sea where she went missing with the hope of finding her final resting place. Wrecks of various other ships have been located, but Orzeł has not been among them, and the fate of the ship remains unknown.
In June 2013 the Polish Navy, following reports of a wreck of an unknown large submarine found in the North Sea, conducted one more expedition to check whether the ship could be Orzeł. The wreck was surveyed and identified as HMS J6.[7] In 2017 another private expedition found a previously unknown wreck which they identified to be most likely HMS Narwhal based on sonar data.[6]
On May 23, 2020, 80 years after Orzeł left on its final patrol, the Shipwreck Expeditions Association announced a partnership to search for the wreck in conjunction with the Maritime University of Szczecin with the assistance from the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland and the Ministry of Maritime Economy and Inland Navigation.[8] The search is currently entering the logistics and preparations phase for the first expedition.[9]
See also
References
- ^ The Avalon Project – Laws of War : Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War (Hague XIII); October 18, 1907
- ISBN 978-0-87021-570-4.
- ^ Losses of the German merchant navy on Rio de Janeiro Archived 2003-02-24 at the Wayback Machine (in German)
- ^ Norwegian Defence Force website on the sinking of Rio de Janeiro (in Norwegian)
- ISBN 978-1135273705.
- ^ a b "EKSPEDYCJA "SANTI ODNALEŹĆ ORŁA" 2017 ZAKOŃCZONA". Fundacja "Odnaleźć Orła" (in Polish). 2017-06-09. Retrieved 2017-06-09.
- ^ Zalesiński, Łukasz (18 October 2013). "Polacy odkryli brytyjski okręt [The Poles discovered a British ship]". Polska Zbrojna (in Polish). Retrieved 5 February 2014.
- ^ "80 Years have passed since the last voyage of the Eagle The Search for the Legendary Ship Begins". WENY News. 22 May 2020. Retrieved 3 June 2020.
- ^ Gibas, Grzegorz (26 May 2020). "Chcą odnaleźć okręt podwodny ORP Orzeł". Radio Szczecin. Retrieved 3 June 2020.
External links
- http://crolick.website.pl/orporzel/ Archived 2017-02-25 at the Wayback Machine (in English)
- Association of the "ORZEŁ" submarine search group (in Polish, English, and German)
- Uboat.net on Orzeł
- ORP Orzel, a concept album from Cold Fusion
- Shipwreck Expeditions Association (in Polish and English)