Ice Cruise of the Baltic Fleet (Russian: Ледовый поход Балтийского флота) was an operation which transferred the ships of the Baltic Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy from their bases at Tallinn and Helsinki to Kronstadt in 1918, caused by the possible threat to those bases from the final German offensives against Russia during World War I.
When on 25 February 1918 the German troops entered Revel, a significant part of the ships escorted by the icebreakers had already been moved. On 5 March, all ships except one submarine—crushed by ice—reached Helsinki. The Baltic fleet was commanded by Alexei Schastnyy.
On 12 March, another group of ships with the icebreakers Yermak and Volynets had done 330 km (180 nmi; 210 mi) through the heavy ice, and after five days reached Kronstadt. In all, six battleships, five cruisers, 59 destroyers and torpedo boats, 12 submarines and several other ships were moved to Kronstadt.
In Finland, Russian sailors scuttled four submarines in the harbor of Hanko on 3 April, just before the 10,000-strong German Baltic Sea Division landed in support of the White side in the Finnish Civil War. The 335 t (330 long tons) submarines—AG 11, AG 12, AG 15 and AG 16—were made by Electric Boat Co. in the United States.
See also: British submarine flotilla in the BalticFamous quotes containing the words ice, cruise and/or fleet:
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“They ... fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)