Naval Base

4 hrs. 7 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Anatoly Azolsky

Narrator Lyudmila Larionova

Description

“At an October noon, the destroyer ‘Merciless,’ which during exercises had been pretending to be a detachment of light forces ‘the Reds’ and had been hanging miles away from the main squadron, suddenly began closing in on it—as if signaled by the flagship. The seasoned staff officers immediately understood what kind of folly had prompted the destroyer, and at whose intention it trampled on their plans. They glanced at the already visible ship with malicious satisfaction, because they had long been sharpening knives for the willful commander of ‘Merciless’.

The destroyer was ordered to take up the end position in the line of wake columns, and to make sure the evidence was unmistakable, they instructed it to provide coordinates for 12:00.

And what did the destroyer do? It raised flag combinations on its masts, indicating latitude and longitude. It turned out they were 23 miles from the flagship! The mistake was one typical of inexperienced navigators who had just finished training—not of hardened seafarers with years of experience and excessive self-importance. The entire Black Sea area is divided on charts into grids of different scales—different, and yet, when switching from one chart to another, the destroyer’s navigator forgot to take that into account.”