Soviet Navy

Beyond, behind a grating, another corpse frozen in a decomposed pressure suit, hands splayed at the bolts inside the door.

Eyes gone, sockets black, Soviet Navy uniform remnants.

On the glass, a frantic message scratched in reverse.

It's in the iron, no way out.

As the war concluded, her fight turned to rebuilding a life from war's ashes.

From 1945 to 1953, she worked as a research assistant at Soviet Navy headquarters, a quiet, methodical job worlds away from the harsh battlefields she once endured.

It was the intellectual book-driven life she'd once dreamed of leading before the war.

Were her later years spent happily? It's unclear, but one can assume she achieved a kind of hard-won purposeful peace rather than simple contentment.

And here's how John starts his story, John Donegan.

He writes, "...for 22 years, the Scorpion patrolled the Pacific as an attack submarine of the Soviet Navy.

For 17 years, it stood guard beside the Queen Mary, welcoming aboard visitors eager to learn about the hidden world of undersea warfare.

Among those thousands of visitors was one Will Swain." Now the sub may be facing its final mission, a one-way trip to the scrapyard.

Now, his kids, I thought this was notable.

Delio, his oldest son, joined the Soviet Navy during World War II, became a colonel and was a ballistics teacher that was widely regarded.

And Giuliano would become a clarinet player and teacher of the Italian language in the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation.

He didn't die until 2007, and he actually named his son Antonio, who I believe is still alive.

For over 100 years, presidents have known the strategic importance of Greenland, but none of them were able to do anything about it.

except keep the Nazis out in World War II, to operate bombers and fighters over Greenland every damn day, to literally keep the Soviet Navy blocked up in this thing called the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap.

Shit, I remember seeing that shit back in 1981 when I was a young whippersnapper.

Greenland was like...

Um, and, but even though he was solo, sorry, I shouldn't be laughing.

Even though he was kind of like very much lower on the totem pole of the, the civil service, um, He was able to provide details of naval technology that were crucial to modernizing the Soviet Navy.

So he did a lot of damage.

All right.

The Red Army had close to 150,000 artillery pieces.

The Red Navy, including a substantial fleet of surface ships of varying types, they had close to 300 submarines and submarines are expressly offensive there are no defensive submarines and this meant as hoffman raises in his book the soviets not only had a larger fleet of submarines than any other country in the world but they outnumbered the royal navy more than fourfold in terms of their number of subs I mean, this is the most powerful offensive military element the world has ever seen.

So Stalin was essentially fearless and viewed himself as the imminent master of this planet.

In geostrategic terms, as of Barbarossa, as well as in ideological ones, and we're going to get into that too, something essential to understand about the Soviet culture is Stalin was keenly aware of what had befallen the Jacobin Revolution.

Probably about half of those had night fighting capability.

The Red Army had close to 150,000 field artillery pieces and heavy mortars.

The Red Navy had over 200 submarines, which I can't remember if I mentioned or not.

But obviously, submarines are expressly offensive.

Remember 1988, so Ukraine was a Soviet republic at that point.

So in Black Sea, USS New York Town and USS Caron was doing their own dadagiri, and that's when two Soviet Navy ships, that is Bezzavetny, I hope I pronounce it right, Bezzavetny with a double B like Zelensky, and SKR-6, these two came.

Bezzavetny rammed into New York Town, and SKR-6, that pushed Caron, and both were pushed away from Soviet territorial waters.

After that, the two countries decided to talk, and in 1991 they signed an agreement.