“Vironia”:
Short-lived Estonian steamer

	ILLUSTRATION: HÅKAN SJÖSTRÖM

”One of the bombs detonated close to us in the water, damaging the steering gear and the main steam pipe. The vessel went off course and turned starboard. The steam rushed out from the boilers with an infernal noise, drowning all other sounds. People jumped overboard and soon a mine exploded, and the “Vironia” went down.”
   This is how Pjotr Makejev from St Petersburg describes his own memories from that night in August 1941, when the Estonian passenger steamer “Vironia” sank. He was in charge of the first transport convoy from Tallinn to Leningrad, in which “Vironia” was included.
   “Vironia” flew the flag of the independent Estonia for just over a year. In April 1940, she was requisitioned by the Soviet forces invading Estonia.
When it was the Russians’ turn to be driven out of the country by the Germans, “Vironia” was engaged in the Soviet withdrawal from Tallinn to Kronstadt and Leningrad.

Estonian research
The Estonian Maritime Museum is interested in documentation of the “Vironia”.
– We know the location of “Vironia”, and we are planning to take her as our next target in our underwater research, says marine archaeologist Vello Mäss from the Estonian Maritime Museum in Tallinn.
   “Vironia” was a sister vessel to “Dronning Maud”. She was built in 1906 in Copenhagen as “Kong Haakon” for Det Forenede Dampskibs Selskab’s traffic between Stettin (Szczecin), Copenhagen and Christiania (Oslo). When built, she was 74 m long and had accommodation for 200 passengers in cabins, and a further 134 on deck.
   During World War I, she was mostly laid up in Copenhagen. In November 1918 she was chartered by the British government for 16 voyages carrying British prisoners of war from Germany to England. Later she transported Russian prisoners of war from Copenhagen and Århus to Hangö and Åbo.
   After being rebuilt in Kiel the vessel was mainly employed on the liner services Esbjerg–Harwich and Copenhagen–Oslo.
   In 1938, she had become old and was sold for 18,000 GBP to the Estonian shipping company Pärnu Laeva A/S in Pärnu for service between Stockholm and Tallinn.

Transport fleet
When the Germans closed in on Tallinn in August 1941, the Russians gathered a transport fleet for evacuation of the city. Pjotr Makejev participated in the flight from Tallinn, which led to one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the Baltic area. A string of shipwrecks at the bottom of Gulf of Finland along the route from Tallinn to Leningrad still reminds us of this. How much loss of human life occurred we may perhaps never know.
   The Russians wanted to leave Tallinn earlier, but a storm delayed their departure to August 28. Part of the Russian command had boarded “Vironia” together with, among others, the office of the shipping magazine “Baltiskiy Flot”. The first convoy consisted of six transport vessels, with “Vironia” among them, a supply ship, a training vessel and three submarines, all escorted by two destroyers and 15 other vessels. The transport vessels probably had some 4,600 people on board, in addition to their own crews.
   By noon on August 28, 1941, the vessels had left Tallinn and the first German plane was sighted as early as 2 p.m. Shortly after 6 p.m., one of the transport vessels struck a mine and sank. Some ten German planes attacked simultaneously, and Vironia was one of their main targets.
   “The master of Vironia manoeuvred skilfully, but other large transport vessels were hit and a dense, dark smoke arose against the horizon.”
   At 6.30 p.m., the Latvian icebreaker “Valdemars” was sunk by a mine. She was also commandeered by the Soviets. After a while, the bombers returned. Four bombs detonated so close to the “Vironia”, that the vessel was damaged and straggled behind the others.
   Smokescreens were laid to mislead the bombers and when “Vironia” turned hard at the same time, many panicked and jumped into the sea. Others boarded the lifeboats, which were swung outside, with disastrous consequences: the crowded boats crashed into the sea.
   “Vironia” was still floating but she had now stopped. A small patrol boat started towing “Vironia” but hit a mine and sank at 10 pm. Soon afterwards, “Vironia” met the same fate. In all, 34 transport vessels of 87 were lost. According to Makejev, some 15,000 people lost their lives. In hiss opinion, the main reason for the disaster was that the intended route had never been properly swept and that the Soviet intelligence had never figured out the exact locations of the mine fields which had been laid by German and Finnish minelayers, operating from Helsinki.
//Thure Malmberg