U-475 Black Widow
 U-475 at its present berth near Rochesterbrige
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U-475 Black Widow is a former submarine of the Soviet Navy , which today in English is privately owned.
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The boat belongs to the so-called Foxtrot class . This is the ( NATO ) name for a series of Soviet diesel-electric submarines . Not least because of the particular reliability of the class, Project 641 , as it was called in the USSR, became an export hit and sold to some countries outside the Soviet Union.
history
The Black Widow was built - under the actual name B-49 - in the Leningrad Sudomekh shipyard and put into service in 1967. Until 1974 the boat was part of the Northern Fleet . From 1974 it was stationed in Riga and served (under captain Vitalij Burda) in the Baltic fleet before it acted as a training ship for foreign crews who wanted to acquire the boats of the Foxtrot class for their navy.
In 1994, the B-49 was decommissioned and sold to an English businessman for $ 100,000.
Museum ship
After the ship came into private hands, it was moored under the name "U-475 Black Widow " at Long's Wharf near the Thames Barrier , where it was opened to the public as a museum ship . In 1998 it was moved to Folkestone and served the same purpose there. In 2004 it was relocated again, this time to its current position on the River Medway between Strood and Rochester in Kent. The condition of the submarine is desolate, it lies crooked in the water and has visible open spots in the rusty cladding. It has been planned to be restored since the transfer.
Film set
In 2014 the film Black Sea (director: Kevin Macdonald ) was shot with Jude Law in the lead role, a fictional drama about a (unsuccessful) recovery of Nazi gold with the help of a submarine. The interior shots (and a long shot from the outside) were taken on U-475.
Naming
The original designation of this boat was B-49. The B stands for Bolshaya ( Russian for: large). The new owner randomly christened it "Foxtrot B-39 U-475 Black Widow". The first part was supposed to remind of the importance of the warship in the Cold War , but was not mentioned in later names. A Foxtrot-class submarine with the designation B-39 actually exists and is a museum ship in San Diego ( USA ). The name "U-475 Black Widow", however, is an idea of the English buyer, since Soviet underwater units of the Foxtrot class neither had a U-numbering nor a number -475, as well as proper names.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c to AB Shirokorad : Soviet post-war submarine structures. P. 68 and J. Apalkow: Корабли ВМФ СССР. Многоцелевые ПЛ и ПЛ спецназначания. P. 41.
- ^ "Project 641" ( Memento from August 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), russian-ships.info.com. accessed on April 11, 2018
- ↑ "Director Kevin Macdonald On Making Black Sea ..." Fast Company from January 23, 2015
- ↑ Black Widow (on a private historian website ) ( Memento from April 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
Web links
- Black Widow , old museum website from 2002 (before moving to the current anchorage)
Coordinates: 51 ° 23 '44 " N , 0 ° 30' 13.2" E