The Long Search: Hunting the Grom's Ghost

 

Eighty Years of Secrecy in the Arctic Depths

By Richard Hardenburg
British Salmoa Times Correspondent, aboard USCGC Healy, Arctic Ocean

For decades, the Northern Fleet sought the ill-fated K-88, lost in the final days of October 1943. Their search intensified after the Second Great War as the new balance of power demanded a clearer understanding of what had vanished beneath the Arctic ice. According to recently declassified Navy documents, the Arctic was carved into an immense search matrix—one that extended even into Canadian and American coastal waters. Whether the Soviet, and later Russian, Navy actually surveyed those extraterritorial zones remains unknown. If they did, the records are likely secured deep within naval archives.

The documents reveal the creation of two specialized search battalions. The 42nd Separate Scientific-Research Radiological-Chemical Battalion conducted chemical analyses with advanced instrumentation, hunting for anomalies in radionuclide concentrations—particularly alpha and beta emitters.

The second unit, the 15th Separate Special Purpose Underwater Monitoring Detachment, deployed towed sensor arrays capable of detecting neutron and gamma emissions, as well as alpha and beta sources.

Across decades, these units collected vast quantities of data. Their measurements revealed a persistent radiological peak near the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. The K-88 was last reported near the state of Valkaria, far to the south. But investigators, using the precedent of inexplicable radiation detected during the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident in the Ural Mountains, began searching for the same markers in ocean samples. By their reasoning—however strained—the submarine must somehow have been carried north by powerful underwater currents.

What most disturbed Soviet and Russian investigators was the implication that the K-88 had not merely drifted, but had been placed near the remote shores of the archipelago. As with the Dyatlov mystery, the presence of radiation could not be explained. And so, by that same logic, neither could the submarine’s ultimate location.

The explanation for how the Grom reached the ocean floor lies in a recently declassified trove at the Northern Fleet Library in Severomorsk. Among these documents are a hastily written log entry and the Court Martial depositions of surviving sailors and officers—most notably Senior Lieutenant Vasily Andreyevich Kuznetsov, Executive Officer and second-in-command. Together, they form a stark and unsettling record of K-88’s final hours and the first known encounter with the force we now call The Anomaly.