The Gratitude of Estonia to the Royal Navy

A good friend of mine, with whom I served in submarines, has recently returned from a break in Estonia. Whilst in the capital Tallinn (formerly called Reval), he was struck by how warmly the Estonian people still remember the Royal Navy’s WW1 Baltic Submarine Flotilla and yet barely anybody in this country will have even heard of it.

The flotilla comprised six E-class and five C-class submarines. It was despatched to the Baltic and attached to the Russian Baltic Fleet to prevent Germany importing iron ore from Sweden. It was enormously successful in doing so, but its operations were hampered severely by the Russian revolutions of 1917 and Russia’s subsequent withdrawal from the war. It is an amazing and fascinating story that I relate in my novel, Where the Baltic Ice is Thin.

The flotilla was based in Reval, then a part of Russia, and commanded by Commander Francis Cromie RN. He learned Russian during his time in the Baltic and, such was his flotilla’s prestige with the Russians, the Tsar personally bestowed on him the Russian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Initially, he followed the lifestyle of a fairy tale, with troika rides in the snow, glittering balls and a romance with a Russian aristocrat, but then revolution and mutiny spread. Amongst the chaos came retribution and disorder, and Cromie’s men often had to intervene to save the lives of innocent civilians. Cromie was to be nicknamed, ‘The Blue Pimpernel’. Following the revolutions, he then not only took command of the Russian submarine flotilla, but persuaded the Bolsheviks to spare the lives of several of their officers. Sadly, once the Russian Navy ceased operations and he was cut off from British logistics support, Cromie had to lay up his flotilla for the winter of 1917/18 and send his men back home. However, MI6 asked him to remain in Russia as Britain’s acting Naval Attaché and to establish an intelligence and propaganda network in Bolshevik Russia. Needless to say, this brought him to the attention of the Russian Secret Police, the dreaded Cheka!

In the wake of the end of WW1, a Royal Navy flotilla was again sent to the Baltic, this time with the task of preventing both the Bolsheviks and the Germans from occupying the newly independent countries of Estonia and Latvia. Admiral Walter Cowan was in command of the flotilla from January 1919. I will be describing the tale in the final book of my WW1 ‘For Those in Peril’ series. Without communications with London, he trod the tightrope of deterring Bolshevik naval aggression by force and German operations in the Baltic through forceful diplomacy. It is his flotilla’s success on both counts to maintain the independence of the new Baltic states that is still remembered by the Estonians today. The Estonian Navy even named one of their minehunters as ‘The Sir Walter Cowan’.