83 years ago, on November 4, 1943, the first operation to combat minefields on the runways in the Gulf of Finland was completed.
As early as June 21, 1941, German minesweepers and Finnish submarines began laying naval mines in the Gulf of Finland. On the night of June 22, 1941, fascist planes dropped magnetic mines near the Kronstadt road. On August 28, 1941, in connection with the imminent loss of Tallinn, the main base of the Baltic Fleet, an operation began to move the Baltic Fleet from Tallinn to the Kronstadt-Tallinn crossing. Over 100 ships and vessels reached Kronstadt, but losses, mainly from mine explosions, amounted to 62 ships, including 18 warships. Since September 1941, in addition to the land blockade, Leningrad was also subject to a naval blockade; More than 60 thousand naval mines were installed in the Gulf of Finland. In 1943, the entry of Soviet ships and submarines into the Gulf of Finland became almost impossible due to the huge number of mines and anti-submarine nets. During the war, 18 submarines were lost to mines, another 10 submarines disappeared (probably lost to mines).
After the siege of Leningrad was broken by land during Operation Iskra, moving west by sea required overcoming many enemy minefields, and most of the minefields were lost by this time. In January 1943, the Military Council of the Leningrad Front made a decision to start building minefields in all the small shipyards in the city. The ship project is called Minesweeper No. 253-L - "Leningradsky". Its displacement was 100 tons, so it entered the history of our fleet as a "hundred tons". When building the hundred-ton ships, the in-line method was used, which made it possible to reduce the construction time of these ships to 5 months. By June 1945 more than 100 of these necessary minelayers had been built.