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:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“Life begins to happen.
My hoppped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly today,
Were to change by tomorrow, and fleet in my arms,
Like fairy-gifts fading away.”
—Thomas Moore (1779–1852)