To the 40th anniversary of the Great Victory
During the Great Patriotic War, the Northern Sea Route was an important transport communication through which military and national economic transportation was carried out. There are two groups of messages identified here: external, through which cargo was delivered from England and the USA to the USSR, and internal. The Soviet transport fleet transported about 2 million tons of cargo via internal communications .1 This sea route was divided into western and eastern sectors. The boundary of the western one was a conditional line from the Barents Sea to the port of Tiksi, and the eastern one - from Tiksi to the Pacific Ocean. Timber was exported from Onega and Igarka, and coal was exported from Naryan - Mar and Dudinka. In each sector, the navigation of ships was regulated by the headquarters of naval operations. In the difficult conditions of the North, the icebreaker fleet carried out the Arctic transport wiring. Navigation lasted from July to October. The White Sea Military Flotilla 2 defended the communications .
One of the brightest pages in the history of naval operations at that time is the withdrawal of icebreakers from the Arctic in 1943 as part of convoy AB-55 (i.e., Arctic - White Sea, convoy No. 55). The nature of the activity of these icebreakers was determined by the seasonality of navigation in the Arctic. During the summer navigation, they went out on the highway to assist transports, in the fall they returned to the White Sea, where they were engaged in winter transport wiring of ships. German submarines and aircraft persistently hunted for our icebreakers. Attacks by enemy planes and submarines followed one after another. However, all attempts of the Nazis to disable the icebreakers were unsuccessful. This applies not only to the Arctic convoys of 1941-1944, but also to the Allied convoys of 1941-1945, which included British, American and Soviet ships from the Atlantic to the USSR and back. During the war ...
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