In the first half of the last century, the Finnish naval forces were armed with the battleship Väinämöinen, with a displacement of almost four thousand tons and a length of more than one hundred meters - the country's largest warship.
In early October 1932, while the Väinämöinen was stationed in the port of Gurku, the watchman Pertunnen was attracted by a pale blue shimmer among the waves, which intensified and eventually loomed into a boat, and on it stood a gray-haired old man with flowing hair. The fairy boat, along with the old man, was surrounded by a blue halo. The watchman was simply numb from what he saw, especially since he was a descendant of the famous Karelian storyteller of the nineteenth century Arkhip Pertunnen, and therefore immediately realized that he was a sorcerer and singer of runes Väinämöinen. He woke up only when the boat with the sorcerer disappeared behind the side of the ship.
Pertunnen wrote about what he saw in the logbook, but the authorities did not pay any attention to this entry, believing that the sailor was simply tired and dreamed of, God knows what. However, after this meeting with the sorcerer, the battleship Väinämöinen suddenly became invulnerable to enemy attacks, that is, conspired.
In 1939, when the war between Finland and the USSR began, the famous warship immediately fell into the field of vision of the Soviet aviation, which set the task to destroy the enemy battleship at all costs. Yes, it was not so …
Enchanted battleship is not taken by bombs
Initially, Väinämöinen was attacked by three bombers near the Hanko base - not a single bomb reached its target. The planes soon returned with a new supply of bombs, but then an impenetrable fog thickened, and when it dissipated, the ship seemed to disappear. Intelligence found him near the port of Turku, and nineteen planes with the best Soviet pilots were sent there. Having lost two aircraft, these aces were never able to hit the target. Therefore, three days later, thirty aircraft set off to sink the enchanted Finnish battleship. However, they could not do anything either - all the bombs for some reason flew not at the target, but into the water.
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This so angered the commander of the Baltic Fleet Air Force, General Ermachenkov, that he organized a new, large-scale operation, and a carefully prepared one, in which twenty-eight bombers and nineteen fighters participated. Behind their controls was the color of Soviet aviation, and therefore the Finnish ship, it seemed, did not have a single chance to survive. And this time he got out of the water dry, not one of the 56 bombs even lay next to the conspiratorial battleship.
Soon the Great Patriotic War began, during which it became a matter of honor for the Soviet army to destroy an unsinkable enemy ship. In order to destroy it, a well-planned (with rehearsals and numerous tests) company was organized, and then a whole armada of aircraft was sent, which were controlled by one hundred and thirty-two aces. Almost thirty bombs, each weighing a ton, were dropped on "Väinämöinen", after which the ship, finally, could not stand it, went on board and … went to the bottom. This was observed by almost all Soviet military pilots who took part in that grandiose operation. Many of them were awarded medals for this feat …
The enchanted battleship was never hit by a single bomb
However, soon the air reconnaissance of the USSR reported that the Väinämöinen remained unharmed, and the cruiser Niobe was destroyed instead. We must pay tribute to the persistence of the Soviet command, which made several more attempts to destroy the enchanted Finnish battleship, but everything was in vain: the ship invariably left without the slightest damage. All this looked like a fantasy, since from eyewitness accounts it followed that the bombs deflected in flight, disappeared (melted) in the air, and sometimes even passed through the battleship itself, since it became translucent for a moment and passed them through itself. And the weather conditions seemed to take special care of the safety of Väinämöinen, presenting some fabulous fogs that seemed to come from nowhere at the most critical moments of the ship's bombing.
Only after the war, already in 1947, did the Soviet leadership persuade Finland to sell them the conspired Väinämöinen, after which it became a Soviet battleship under the name Vyborg. Even after that, the battleship did not have any troubles and accidents, reached the level of "deep austerity" and was decommissioned, without showing anything unusual and mysterious, although some expected this …