A Living History

Estonia has vast open fields stretching out to the horizon, it's a country that makes it impossible not to relive the history that passed this way. As the snow turns this country white, laying a meter deep in places and temperatures dropping to minus fifteen it was so easy to imagine Hitler's and Napoleon's troops retreating this way.


With their animals and trucks collapsing, their weapons seizing and their armies just lying down and succumbing to the cold. Okay, so Napoleon didn't exactly pass through Estonia, but rather a couple of hundred miles to the south in Latvia, but you know what I mean.

Well today I went to the Maritime museum and clambered aboard the Estonian World War II Submarine Lembit and this history was literally all around me. The closest I've gotten to a submarine before today was watching one pass by a cross channel ferry many many years ago. But today was something completely different, although it was free of diesel fumes, the pounding sounds of its engines or the voices of its crew, this was the real thing. I could picture the submariners standing where I now stood beside the torpedo tubes preparing to fire or crouching as depth charges exploded all around them. Yet the cramped working conditions, bunks resting above torpedoes, small compartment doors and the famous periscope, these were all still here.

This particular submarine had quite a history. Built in Scotland for the briefly independent nation of Estonia, it was then taken over by the Soviet Union in 1941 when they occupied the country while the majority of its officers were "Removed for being untrustworthy". This last comment usually meant that they were put against a wall and shot, for believing that Estonia had any rights to be a free state. It actual war record is still something of a secret.

For a bit more info on all this, click on the link.
http://www.meremuuseum.ee/?op=body&id=45