The damned Russians turned out to be impossible to frighten

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ufologists all over the world unanimously assert that Rear Admiral Richard Bird in 1947 suffered significant losses from some mysterious "flying saucers" made by the Nazis using alien technology. Who did the Americans really face?

ADMIRAL BARD'S EXPEDITION

The prehistory of this story begins, so to speak, in "prehistoric" times. Many knowledgeable experts claim that some "ancient high cults" are directly involved here - in one word, magic, occultism and other palmistry.

More "down-to-earth" researchers start counting from later dates, specifically from the year 1945, when the captains of two Nazi submarines internees in Argentine ports informed the American special services that "accepted" them that at the end of the war they allegedly carried out some kind of special flights on supplying Hitler's Shangri-Ly - the mysterious Nazi base in Antarctica.

The American military leadership took this information so seriously that it decided to send an entire fleet headed by its most competent polar explorer, Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, in search of this very base, which the Germans themselves called "New Swabia".

This was the fourth Antarctic expedition of the famous admiral, but unlike the first three, it was entirely funded by the US Navy, which predetermined the absolute secrecy of its goals and results. The expedition consisted of the escort aircraft carrier "Casablanca", converted from a high-speed transport, and on which 18 aircraft and 7 helicopters were based (helicopters would not have turned my head - very imperfect aircraft with a limited range and extremely low survivability), and also 12 ships, which accommodated more than 4 thousand people.

The whole operation received the code name - "High Jump", which, according to the admiral's plan, was to symbolize the last, final blow to the unfinished Third Reich in the ice of Antarctica … (Official information about this expedition can be read in English at this address)

So, the 4th expedition of Admiral Byrd, covered by a fleet so impressive for a simple civilian expedition, landed in Antarctica in the area of Queen Maud Land on February 1, 1947 and began a detailed study of the territory adjacent to the ocean.

During the month, about 50 thousand photographs were taken, or rather 49563 (data taken from the geophysical yearbook Brooker Cast, Chicago). Aerial photography covered 60% of Byrd's interest, the researchers discovered and mapped several previously unknown mountain plateaus and founded the polar But after a while the work was suddenly stopped, and the expedition urgently returned to America.

For more than a year, no one had absolutely any idea about the true reasons for such a hasty "flight" of Richard Byrd from Antarctica, moreover, no one in the world then even suspected that at the very beginning of March 1947 the expedition had to engage in a real battle with the enemy, whose presence in the area of her research allegedly did not expect in any way.

Since its return to the United States, the expedition has been surrounded by such a dense curtain of secrecy that no other scientific expedition of this kind has been surrounded, but some of the most nosy newsmen still managed to find out that Byrd's squadron had returned far from full strength - it was allegedly off the coast of Antarctica. lost at least one ship, 13 planes and about forty people on hand … Sensation, in a word!

And this very sensation was duly "framed" and took its rightful place on the pages of the Belgian popular science magazine "Frey", and then was reprinted by the West German "Demestish" and found a new breath in the West German "Brizant".

A certain Karel Lagerfeld informed the public that, after returning from Antarctica, Admiral Byrd gave lengthy explanations at a secret meeting of the presidential special commission in Washington, and its summary was as follows: the ships and aircraft of the Fourth Antarctic Expedition were attacked by … strange "flying saucers" that "… emerged from under the water, and moving with great speed, caused significant damage to the expedition."

In the opinion of Admiral Byrd himself, these amazing aircraft were probably produced at the Nazi aircraft factories disguised in the thickness of the Antarctic ice, whose designers mastered some unknown energy used in the engines of these vehicles … Among other things, Byrd told high-ranking officials the following:

“The United States needs to take protective actions against enemy fighters flying from the polar regions as soon as possible. In the event of a new war, America could be attacked by an enemy capable of flying from one pole to another with incredible speed!"

So, we see perfectly well that "flying saucers" appeared for the first time in Antarctica, and here some documents that have nothing to do with UFO problems at all directly draw our attention to the fact that it was at the very time when the ships of Admiral Byrd dropped anchors in the Lazarev Sea off the coast of the icy Queen Maud Land, there were already … Soviet warships!

… In all domestic encyclopedias and reference books it is written that the capitalist countries began to divide Antarctica among themselves long before the Second World War. How successful they did it can be judged at least by the fact that the Soviet government, preoccupied with the agility of the British and Norwegians in the "study" of the southern circumpolar latitudes, in January 1939 declared an official protest to the governments of these countries in connection with the fact that their Antarctic expeditions "… engaged in an unreasonable division into sectors of the lands that were once discovered by Russian explorers and navigators …"

When the British and Norwegians, who soon got bogged down in the battles of World War II, had no time for Antarctica, such notes were sent to the United States and Japan, neutral for the time being, but no less aggressive, in his opinion.

A new turn of the devastating war, which soon engulfed half the world, temporarily put an end to these disputes. But only for a while. A year and a half after the end of hostilities in the Pacific Ocean, the Soviet military obtained the most detailed aerial photographs of the entire coast of Queen Maud Land, from Cape Tyuleny to Lutzov-Holm Bay - and this is no less than 3500 kilometers in a straight line! Few knowledgeable people still claim that the Russians simply took these data after the war from the Germans, who, as you know, a year before the Polish military campaign of 1939, carried out two large-scale Antarctic expeditions.

The Russians did not deny this, but they flatly refused to share their booty with other interested parties, citing “national interests.” beyond measure, America urgently began informal negotiations with the governments of Argentina, Chile, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and France.

Parallel to this, a cautious but persistent press campaign begins in the States themselves. In one of the central American magazines, Foreign Affers, the former US envoy to the USSR, George Kennan, who had recently left Moscow urgently "for consultations with his government", published an article in which he very unequivocally expressed his idea of "the need for an early organizing a rebuff to the excessively grown ambitions of the Soviets, which, after the successful end of the war with Germany and Japan, are in a hurry to use their military and political victories to plant harmful ideas of communism not only in Eastern Europe and China, but also in … distant Antarctica!"

In response to this statement, which seemed to be in the nature of the official policy of the White House, Stalin published his own memorandum on the political regime of Antarctica, where he spoke in a rather harsh form about the intentions of the US ruling elite “… to deprive the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of its legal right based on discoveries in this part of the world by Russian seafarers, made at the beginning of the 19th century …"

At the same time, some other measures were taken, symbolizing a protest against the American policy towards Antarctica, which was undesirable to Stalin. The nature and results of these measures can be judged at least by the fact that after a while Truman's Secretary of State, James Byrnes, who, as is known, always advocated the toughest sanctions against the USSR, unexpectedly for everyone, resigned early, clearly forced to do so. Truman. Byrnes' last words in office were:

The damned Russians turned out to be impossible to frighten. In this issue (meaning Antarctica) they won.

The hype around the Sixth Continent quickly died down after Argentina and France supported the USSR. Truman, after reflecting on the balance of power in this region, reluctantly, but nevertheless, expressed his consent to the participation of Stalin's representatives at the international conference on Antarctica, which was scheduled to be held in Washington, but stressed that if an agreement on the equal presence of all interested countries is signed, then it must certainly include such an important point as the demilitarization of Antarctica and the prohibition of any military activity on its territory, up to the storage of weapons, including nuclear weapons, at Antarctic bases, and the development of raw materials necessary for the creation of any weapons. should be banned too …

However, all these preliminary agreements are the obverse of the medal, its obverse, so to speak. Returning to the failed expedition of Admiral Byrd, it should be noted that as early as January 1947, the waters of the Lazarev Sea were officially plowed by a Soviet research vessel, which belonged, of course, to the Ministry of Defense, called "Slava".

However, at the disposal of some researchers were documents that very eloquently testify that in those years, which were harsh for the fate of the whole world, not only "Glory" was hanging around the coast of Queen Maud Land. At different times in history, we can reasonably assume that the squadron of Admiral Richard Byrd was opposed by a well-equipped and well-equipped polar admiral … The Antarctic Fleet of the USSR Navy!

"Flying Dutchmen" of the Soviet Navy

Oddly enough, but until very recently, for some reason, few people paid attention to the fact that the Soviet press practically did not pay attention to the development of Antarctica by our compatriots precisely in the 40s - early 50s. The quantity and quality of specific documents of that time, open to the outside public, also does not indulge in a special variety.

All information on this matter was limited to some general phrases such as: "Antarctica is a country of penguins and eternal ice, it certainly needs to be mastered and studied in order to understand many geophysical processes occurring in other parts of the globe", more similar to slogans than to messages.

It was written about the success of foreign states in the study of this very "country of penguins" as if they were at least the enterprises of the CIA or the Pentagon, in any case, exhaustive information from the open press to any interested independent specialist-enthusiast who was not invested with the highest confidence of the Soviet government, could not be obtained.

However, in the archives of the Western special services, with which many Soviet and Polish spies "worked" at one time, and who already in our time wished to write their own memoirs, documents were found that shed light on some moments of the first official (rather semi-official, disguised as the study of a fishing situation in Antarctica) of the Soviet Antarctic expedition of 1946-1947, which arrived to the shores of the Queen Maud Land on the diesel-electric ship "Slava".

Such famous names as Papanin, Krenkel, Fedorov, Vodopyanov, Mazuruk, Kamanin, Lyapidevsky suddenly surfaced, and the first of this seven is a rear admiral (almost a marshal!), And the last four are full generals, and the generals are not anyhow what ("courtiers", so to speak), but polar pilots who glorified themselves by specific deeds and beloved by all Soviet people.

Official historiography claims that the first Soviet Antarctic stations were founded only in the early 50s, but the CIA had completely different data, which for some reason have not been completely declassified to this day. And let ufologists all over the world unanimously repeat that Rear Admiral Richard Byrd in 1947 suffered tangible losses from some mysterious "flying saucers" made by the Nazis using the technology of mythical aliens, but we now have every reason to believe that that American aircraft were repulsed by exactly the same aircraft, manufactured using the same American technologies! But more on that later.

Studying some moments in the history of the Russian Navy, at some stage one may come across quite interesting things concerning some ships of the Soviet Navy, in particular - the Pacific Fleet, which, although they were included in the composition of this very fleet, however, since 1945 in the waters of the "metropolis" appeared so rarely that a completely legitimate question arose about the places of their true basing.

For the first time this issue was raised “on the shield” in 1996 in the anthology “Shipbuilding in the USSR” by the famous writer-marine painter from Sevastopol Arkady Zattets. It was about three Project 45 destroyers - "High", "Important" and "Impressive". The destroyers were built in 1945 using captured technologies used by the Japanese in the design of their Fubuki-class destroyers, intended to sail in the harsh conditions of the northern and arctic seas.

“… Above many facts from the very short life of these ships,” writes Zattets, “there has been an impenetrable curtain of silence for more than half a century. None of the connoisseurs of the history of the Russian fleet and none of the famous collectors of naval photography have a single (!) Photo or diagram where these ships would be depicted in the equipped version.

Moreover, the TsGA (Central State Archives) of the Navy does not have any documents (for example, an act of exclusion from the fleet) confirming the very fact of service. Meanwhile, in both domestic and foreign naval literature (both publicly available, that is, popular, and official), it is mentioned that these ships were enrolled in the Pacific Fleet …

The destroyers of Project 45, later named Vysoky, Vazhny and Impressive, were built in Komsomolsk-on-Amur at Plant 199, completed and tested at Plant 202 in Vladivostok. They entered the combat composition of the fleet in January-June 1945, but did not take part in the hostilities against Japan (in August of the same year). In December 1945, all three ships made short visits to Qingdao and Chifu (China) … And then solid mysteries begin.

Based on fragmentary data (requiring unconditional verification), we managed to find out the following. In February 1946, at factory 202, on three new destroyers, work began on re-equipment according to project 45-bis - strengthening the hull and installing additional equipment for sailing in difficult conditions of high latitudes.

On the destroyer Vysoky, the keel structures were altered in order to ensure increased stability, the bow towers were dismantled on Vostochny and a hangar for four seaplanes and a catapult were installed in their place. There is a version (which also needs to be verified) that the destroyer "Impressive" during the testing of the captured German missile system KR-1 (ship missile) sank an experimental target ship - the former captured Japanese destroyer "Suzuki" of the "Fubuki" class.

According to, again, unverified data, in June 1946, all three destroyers underwent minor repairs, but already in a completely different part of the world - at the Argentine naval base Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego. Then one of the destroyers, accompanied by a submarine (many researchers believe that it was K-103 under the command of the famous "submarine ace of the Northern Fleet" A. G. Cherkasov) was allegedly seen off the coast of the French island of Kerguelen, located in the southern part of the Indian Ocean …

Around the activities of these three destroyers circulated and are still circulating a wide variety of rumors, however, these rumors have always been only rumors and remained. As you can see, since the middle of 1945, everything connected with the history of this division of the "Flying Dutchmen" of the Soviet Navy is inaccurate, vague, indefinite …

There is not a single reliable image of any of these ships, although all of them were based on Vladivostok, where in all years (even those!) There was no shortage of people willing to capture the ship on film, but nevertheless realistic images of the "High", "Important" and we do not have "impressive".

In contrast to this fact, one can cite an example with the destroyers of project 46-bis (a modernized version of project 45) "Resistant" and "Brave", which were under construction and were enrolled in the Pacific Fleet almost simultaneously with the destroyers of project 45-bis, and soon after that were also photographed from different angles, and all the documentation on them has survived … according to the 45-bis project, there was complete silence and uncertainty, as if these ships had not existed since mid-1945.

Only 5 of the magazine "History of the Navy" for 1993 in a fairly good article by G. A. Barsov, dedicated to the post-war projects of Russian destroyers, in three lines (again - vague) mentions the mysterious trinity …

We hope that the veterans of these ships or the people who worked on them during the conversion and modernization work at the Vladivostok shipyard are still alive. And perhaps some of the connoisseurs and amateurs of the history of the fleet will be able to report something additional about the fate of the destroyers, thereby opening the curtain of silence, which suggests that this very curtain exists for a reason …"

More than five years have passed since the article appeared in the light of this article, but Arkady Zattets did not receive, contrary to expectations, a single message with the help of which he hoped to open the veil of secrecy over these "flying Dutchmen", as he put it, our navy …

But in his article he kept silent about the main thing - as he himself admitted when meeting with another connoisseur of the history of the Russian fleet - Vladimir Rybin (author of the anthology "Russian and Soviet Naval Forces in Combat"), he had long been visited by the idea of approaching this problem from a completely different sides: start by studying the so-called "Antarctic program" of the USSR leadership, which began to be implemented immediately after the end of the Second World War.

When Rybin showed Zattets some documents concerning the secret operations of the Stalinist fleet, he agreed with him that all three destroyers could well be part of the so-called 5th Fleet of the USSR Navy - Antarctic. And it was simply impossible for the smart Stalin to find a better candidate for the post of commander of this fleet than Rear Admiral (twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Doctor of Geographical Sciences, member of the Party Central Committee), Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin …

STATION "NOVOLAZAREVSKAYA"

Without dwelling on the biography of this famous (legendary) Soviet polar explorer, one should draw the attention of those interested in the important fact that all persons appearing in secret documents concerning the unofficial Soviet (Stalinist) expedition of 1946-47 that we are concerned about, received their generals shoulder straps exactly in 1946, just before the start of the transoceanic campaign to the South Pole (the exception was Vodopyanov, who was demoted from the generals back in 41 for the actual failure of the strategic bombing of Berlin, but received his full in five years) - this only emphasizes the importance of this expedition personally for Stalin.

WHAT Stalin needed in distant Antarctica in the early post-war years is another question, which we will soon begin to study, but surely these needs were no less significant than for American President Truman, who sent his own polar wolf on a similar campaign - Rear Admiral Richard Byrd.

If someone wants to believe that the American fleet was defeated in this campaign by some "unknown forces", then it is easiest to assume that these "unknown forces" were precisely Papanin's naval forces.

It is well known that the Lazarev research station on the coast of Queen Maud Land was founded by our polar explorers in 1951, but this is only an official point of view, and for a long time few people were supposed to know the truth.

In 1951, Papanin was already in Moscow, where he was awarded an important government award for what particular merit is unknown, and the honorary and responsible post of the head of one of the departments of the USSR Academy of Sciences - the Department of Marine Expeditionary Operations, and this position, by the way, is much more important than that, which Papanin held until 1946, being the head of the Glavsevmorput: it is perfectly understandable that in the new field, Ivan Dmitrievich had an excellent opportunity to compete with all intelligence agencies in the world - almost all the naval intelligence of the USSR was under his command.

Such a position could be “bought” only with such merits to the “party and people” that few could boast - Marshal Zhukov, for example. Meanwhile, he had a chance to win the only battle in history between the USSR Navy and the US Navy at the very beginning of the clearly outlined "cold war" and did not lead to a new world massacre.

And it happened precisely in the first days of March 1947, on the 70th parallel, near the Soviet naval base secretly founded by him, which later received the name "Lazarevskaya" and in all reference books of the world is designated as "research" …

Eight years ago, the Gidromet publishing house published the memoirs of a certain Vladimir Kuznetsov, one of the members of the first Soviet Antarctic inspection under the auspices of the USSR State Committee for Hydromet, which in 1990 carried out an inspection raid on all research Antarctic stations in order to verify compliance with the articles of the 7th International Antarctica Treaty. The chapter describing the visit to the Soviet station Novolazarevskaya (formerly Lazarevskaya) contains the following lines:

“… Oasis of Schirmakher, where Novolazarevskaya is located, is a narrow chain of icy hills, similar to camel humps. In the depressions between the hills, there are numerous small lakes, reflecting the seemingly serene Antarctic sky on a sunny day. Novolazarevskaya, I think, is the most comfortable and habitable of all our stations in Antarctica.

Solid stone buildings on concrete piles are picturesquely located on brown hills and delight the eye with their phantasmagoric coloring. The houses are very warm. In addition to diesel, energy is provided by numerous wind turbines. There are about four hundred winterers here, in summer there are up to a thousand or more, many with families. The station has a wonderful airfield - the oldest airfield in Antarctica and the only one with metal-coated strips and concrete hangar parking.

On a rocky hill located between two especially large lakes there is a polar explorers' cemetery. The long-decommissioned Penguin all-terrain vehicle, driven by a mischievous mechanic to the top of the hill, became a monument, which was even depicted on a postage stamp. I climbed the hill. In terms of memoriality, the cemetery is not inferior to many famous cemeteries in the world, Novodevichy, for example, or even Arlington.

I am surprised to see on the grave of the pilot Chilingarov a four-blade propeller poured into a concrete pedestal and the date of burial: March 1, 1947. But my questions remain unanswered - the current management of Novolazarevskaya has no idea about the station's activities in that distant year. This, as you can see, is already the business of historians …"

Kuznetsov, undoubtedly, was right - this is the business of historians. But his book was published more than ten years ago, and none of these same historians ever bothered to explain to the world what EXACTLY was doing at the very beginning of 1947 in Antarctica in Antarctica with a four-blade propeller, "which obviously belonged to a Soviet plane."

As it was later found out, the propeller, "which obviously belonged to a Soviet aircraft," was a product of the American company Bell. Along the way, it turned out that Captain A. V. Chilingarov during the Great Patriotic War served in the ferry division, which was engaged in the delivery of aircraft to the Soviet-German front, provided by the Americans under Lend-Lease.

The commander of this same division was the polar explorer already known to us - Air Force Colonel I. P. Mazuruk, and this division served the longest and heaviest air route in the world ALSIB (short for Alaska - Siberia).

P-63 "KINGKOBRA"

Of all the aviation equipment supplied during the war by the Americans in the USSR, only one type of aircraft was equipped with four-bladed Bell propellers - these were the P-63 Kingcobra fighters of the same company. and the less perfect "Airacobra", was produced by the Americans exclusively for the Soviet order and in accordance with Soviet technical requirements.

It is not surprising that the Americans themselves have always considered the P-63 a "Russian aircraft", since almost the entire "circulation" of this aircraft settled in the USSR (it was never adopted for service in America itself due to the presence of similar types of fighters in the US Air Force - "Mustang", "Corsair" and some others).

Possessing a very high speed, a long flight range and a decent practical ceiling, the P-63 was an excellent interceptor, but since the war was clearly coming to an end by the time the supply began, not a single vehicle of this type ever got to the front - Stalin took these fighters for other things. "Kingcobras", as one of the memoirists of that time put it, could become Stalin's Main Reserve in the event of an unpredictable change in the military-political situation and the outbreak of war by the United States.

They were equipped with all parts of the USSR air defense - of all the fighters in service in the Soviet Union, only the Kingcobra could “reach” the main strategic bomber of the United States, the B-29 Superfortress, in the sky. Thus, by 1947, all 2,500 P- 63, which fell into the hands of Stalin, were in full combat readiness.

Naturally, these aircraft took part in all overt and covert operations of the Soviet Air Force during that period, and one of them was the very first Soviet Antarctic expedition led by Admiral Papanin.

As anyone interested knows, "Kingcobra" was perfectly adapted to "work" in difficult and even very difficult weather conditions, including polar ones. During the war, absolutely all P-63s were overtaken on their own along ALSIBU (from the USA to the USSR), and on this whole complex route, more than five thousand kilometers long (excluding the flight to the Bering Strait over the territory of Alaska), out of 2500 surpassed in the fall of 1944 - in the spring of 1945, only 7 aircraft were lost by our pilots - an indicator is simply phenomenal, considering that incomparably more other types of aircraft were lost on the way to the front.

The difficulties the ferrymen had to face over the immense Siberian expanses, which looked more like the icy deserts of Antarctica at this time of the year, can be imagined from the memoirs of I. Mazuruk himself. Here are his words, taken from a book of memoirs published in 1976:

“In December 1944, the group of 15 Kingcobras I led, due to the fact that the destination Seimchan was closed by fog, had to be planted on the ice of the Kolyma River near the village of Zyryanka … The thermometer showed -53 * Celsius, and we have heaters, naturally did not have.

But in the morning the whole group safely took off thanks to the flight mechanic of the A-20 aircraft, Gennady Sultanov, who called for help from local residents. Throughout the night, the adult population of Zyryanka heated the iron stoves installed under the Kingcobras, covered with large pieces of tarpaulin, with wood.

By the way, the Americans never thought of this before. However, they had their own factory-made heaters, besides, for each of their aircraft, unlike us, there were literally ten technicians and mechanics, each of whom served a certain part of the equipment.

Almost all Kingcobras supplied to the USSR were equipped with a radio compass, which greatly facilitated navigation at night and in the clouds, and in 1945, variants equipped with search radar stations began to arrive, which made it possible not only to fly "blindly", but also to reach targets located in 50-70 kilometers over the horizon, as well as some devices signaling a surprise attack from behind.

The improved engine starting system significantly expanded the range of "operating temperatures", and the domestically produced KM-10 oxygen mask allowed the pilot to feel excellent at altitudes up to 16 km (16 km - theoretical ceiling, practical - 12 km, which was also fine in those conditions) …

So, we can definitely notice that the "Kingcobra", if not an ideal combat aircraft for the Antarctic theater of operations, then in any case the most adapted of many others that existed at that time throughout the world.

In any case, Stalin, according to the most informed historians, did not have a better one until the launch of the jet MiG-15. Considering the rich experience of the famous Mazuruk in polar affairs, in general, and the successful operation of the Kingcobra in the harshest conditions of Chukotka and Siberia in particular, we can safely assume that already in 1946 this "man and hero", having received general's shoulder straps from the hands of Joseph Vissarionovich, commanded a highly effective air defense system at the then military Antarctic Soviet base on Queen Maud Land.

Fragment of the book by Alexander Vladimirovich Biryuk "The Great Secret of Ufology"