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Searching for the lost legendary WW2 submarine ORP Orzeł

PR dla Zagranicy
Roberto Galea 24.05.2016 15:10
  • Searching for the lost legendary WW2 submarine ORP Orzeł
ORP Orzeł (“Eagle”) was a submarine commissioned for Poland in 1939, and sunk in 1940.
The ORP Orzeł. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe ORP Orzeł. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In the early days of WW2 she took part in the defence of the Polish coast. Interned in Tallin, "Orzeł" became a legend when she escaped, virtually blind, sailing without maps and navigation aids confiscated by Estonian military authorities, and with communications damaged by artillery fire.

A plaque to her memory now hangs at the door of the Maritime Museum in Tallin. ORP Orzeł made it to Britain, where she was assigned to the Royal Navy's Second Submarine flotilla.

In service she sank a German troop transporter on its way to Norway.

In June 1940, with her crew of 60, ORP Orzeł left on a patrol mission in the North Sea and disappeared.

“There's a hypothesis that when on 26 May, 1940, the German e-boot S13 sank an unidentified submarine, a life raft came up marked with O21 – a Dutch submarine which was safe in port in Scotland on that day, but we found out that a week earlier, the two submarines had stood next to each other and we decided it's possible that Orzeł borrowed the raft from O21,” says Tomasz Stachura who heads the expedition.

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