Swedes fighting alongside Royal Tank Corps

[Nick Balmer]

Hello Stellan,

Thank you very much indeed for the excellent photos of Paul Dukes. I have a couple of him, but certainly not so good as those. The certificates and documents are entirely new to me.

He was an extraordinary man to have survived. The Cheka official tasked with tracking him down found him in a doctors surgery, but Dukes put on such a good act of his having a fit that the official decided that he could not possibly be Duke's and left the "ill man" there. Eventually after Agar had tried to rescue Duke's by CMB, and failed because the rowing boat that Duke's was trying to go out in to reach the CMB sprung a leak, causing Duke's to have to swim ashore in Kronstadt harbour, he walked out to Estonia.

At this time there were an incredible set of spies operating in Russia with Crombie, Dukes, and Herbert.

Do you know anything about the history of John Pitka, the commander of the Estonian navy, who with a trawler boarded and captured two Bolshevik destroyers?

Later he became Sir John Pitka.

The following site has quite a lot about the CMB's including pictures of the Duxford CMB.

http://apma.org.au/reference/ships/cmb/cmb.html

This site has photos of CNB's and the other Royal Navy ships active off Murmansk.

http://www.naval-history.net/WW1z05NorthRussia.htm

This site is a modern Russian one with fantastic pictures of some of the Baltic forts. About midway down the page is a section called "Marine Fortresses, Forts and Batteries".

It has pictures of the Krasnaya Gora and Kronstadt forts.

There is a huge Vickers railgun preserved in the Krasnaya Gora fort.

Regards

Nick Balmer

http://www.nortfort.ru/index_e.html