Now the military will have to assess the possibilities for the restoration of airfields and the creation of a base for the Pacific Fleet. Andrey Ivlev about the sensational findings of the expedition.
The uninhabited island is now inhabited. Scientists, members of the Russian Geographical Society, together with the military, are trying to unravel its secrets and in the literal sense of the word to get to the bottom of the truths that have been hidden for so long. There is constant bustle in the campground. They work here from sunrise to sunset. Lunch is strictly scheduled. To this unique expedition the participants prepared thoroughly. The researchers are armed with the most modern technology. With the help of it, you can carry out work of any complexity. Accuracy and care is the key to the success of the operation. The traces of World War II are everywhere on Matua Island.
Andrey Ryabukhin, Deputy Commander of the Russian Pacific Fleet:“When our search parties are working, they find a lot, a lot of ammunition, small arms, hand grenades, including those with fuses left behind. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly conduct engineering reconnaissance and neutralize the found ammunition on the spot. "
During the Second World War Kurile Islands were a strategic barrier for Japanese armed forces to exit Sea of Okhotsk to the Pacific Ocean. Matua was used as a springboard in case of offensive actions of the enemy.
A powerful defense system was located on the neighboring island of Iturup, five hundred kilometers away. Evidence of the presence of the Japanese military in one of the most picturesque corners of the planet can be found today.
Here is a fortification - the so-called bunker - a firing point of the Second World War. More than 70 years ago, the naval base of the Japanese armed forces was located here. It was an impregnable fortress with many secret passages, bunkers ... After Japan surrendered in August 1945, surrendering to the Soviet military, Matua island became Russian.
Before sending the expedition, the board of the commander of the troops of the Eastern Military District, Sergei Surovikin, flew to Matua. The island was examined in detail in the fall of last year, and even then its potential for deploying troops was assessed. A large-scale expedition of the Ministry of Defense and the Russian Geographical Society started in May this year. Six ships and vessels of the Pacific Fleet headed for Matua. A week later, we reached our goal.
To get to the island by air is only possible with a transfer. From Khabarovsk to Iturup. Further, in good weather - by helicopter. The water route is longer, but reliable. Everything will change after the commissioning of a new airfield on the island of Matua. Now it is being restored by the Russian military.
Vitaly Kanevsky, Deputy Commander for Logistics of the 303th Mixed Aviation Division of the 11th Army of the Russian Aerospace Forces:“The concrete is 12 centimeters thick. The concrete is in satisfactory condition. In terms of its carrying capacity, it allows for takeoff and landing of Mi-8 and KA 27 helicopters. "
Complex research work on Matua had never been held before precisely because of its strong remoteness. The main success of the current expedition is found here underground city... Scientists have yet to uncover its secrets.
The mysterious island of Matua is located in the very center Kuril ridge... 11 kilometers long and almost 6.5 kilometers wide. The Sarychev volcano is located here. Winters are very snowy, in summer it is rainy. The average annual temperature is minus three degrees.
From the west - the Sea of Okhotsk. From the east - the Pacific Ocean. Obviously, rebuilding the infrastructure of a distant and long uninhabited island is a minimum task. In the future, they plan to create a new base for the Russian Pacific Fleet.
The other day on a tiny desert island Matua Kurilskaya The second expedition of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation began work on the ridge (area of about 52 square kilometers). An impressive detachment of warships and ships under the command of Deputy Commander of the Pacific Fleet Vice Admiral Andrey Ryabukhin... The detachment of the large landing craft "Admiral Nevelskoy", the killer KIL-168 and the rescue tug SB-522. On their sides there are about a hundred researchers and 30 pieces of engineering equipment to support various works.
Exactly a year ago, the first such expedition on the same "Admiral Nevelskoy" already visited Matua. And Vice-Admiral Ryabukhin was also in charge of it. Specialists have carried out more than 1000 laboratory studies on physical, chemical and biological indicators, made more than 200 measurements of the external environment, carried out radiation and chemical reconnaissance. Divers examined both tiny bays of this piece of land - Ainu (maximum depths up to 25 meters) and Yamato (depths up to 9 meters). During the Second World War, it was through them that the seven thousandth Japanese garrison on Matua was supplied, on which the largest and well-equipped military base of the imperial army was located. Most of its defenses were carved into the surrounding rocks and served as a reliable shelter for personnel and ammunition.
But the main thing on the island were not numerous artillery pillboxes and underground tunnels... The largest military airfield at that time was of primary importance, allowing the Japanese from these places to control a vast part of the The Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as most of the islands of the Kuril ridge. Three runways, each 1200 meters long, concreted and heated by underground thermal springs, made the airfield practically all-weather. Nevertheless, in 1945, the Japanese 41st separate mixed regiment, which was defending here (numbering three thousand soldiers and officers, the rest of the garrison had already been evacuated by that time) surrendered to the Soviet paratroopers without a single shot.
Despite the fact that after the Second World War the island remained practically deserted and was almost never used by the Soviet authorities, as it turned out, that airfield is still in good condition today. In any case, Russian military helicopters have been landing on it since the summer of 2016. Is the island's airfield capable of receiving airplanes after minor restoration work? And if so, what types? This was also found out last year by the expedition of Vice Admiral Ryabukhin.
The purpose of such an unprecedented activity of Far Eastern sailors is not a secret. For the first time, it was announced in May 2016 at the military council of the Eastern Military District Colonel General Sergei Surovikin: the possibility of placing a new base of the Pacific Fleet on the island is being studied. Moreover, on June 29, when the work of the first expedition was still in full swing, an unnamed source in the RF Ministry of Defense told RIA Novosti that construction of facilities of the base on Matua will start at a frantic pace - by the end of 2016. However, contrary to these plans, so far nothing is happening there. Why?
It is known about at least one unexpected problem faced by the Pacific Fleet command: fresh water. When the Japanese garrison was stationed here, there was clearly plenty of water on Matua. This is evidenced by the huge concrete tanks preserved in the rocks. And also an extensive network of ceramic pipes, which stretches from them to the defensive structures. While the pipes are, of course, empty. To this day, our engineers have not figured out how to refill the ingenious Japanese plumbing. According to Vice Admiral Ryabukhin, "we still do not understand exactly what and where flowed in and from where it flowed out." In the meantime, this is a secret, construction on Matua cannot be started. Tankers and Aquarius ships cannot satisfy her needs for life-giving moisture.
But all this, apparently, is temporary difficulties and our fleet will get a new base on this island someday. It seems important to try to understand why we need it? And in general, what kind of base will it be?
What can be said for sure already today - for warships and auxiliary vessels there may only be temporary berths. The reasons are not only that the bays of Ainu and Yamato are too open by nature and insufficiently protected from ocean winds and storms. Although in the sailing directions they are indicated as possible anchorage sites.
The main problem for creating a full-fledged ship-based point is obviously active on Matua volcano Sarychev 1446 meters high. Its strong eruptions over the past century happened four times, in 1928, 1930, 1946, 1976, one eruption occurred in 2009. Then two streams of hot lava slid into the ocean, froze and increased the area of the island by one and a half square kilometers at once. Not without reason in the language of the Ainu people who once lived in these parts of Matua is “a small burning bay”.
But the volcano is not the only problem for Matua. This is an area of high seismic activity. Regular mighty earthquakes cause devastating tsunamis... For example, the Simushir earthquake, the most powerful in the history of the modern Kuriles, which happened on November 15, 2006, hit the island with a gigantic wave, reaching a height of 20 meters in places. Which, apparently, is comparable to the consequences of a close underwater nuclear explosion... What would be left in this case from the berths and our ships on Matua?
Thus, we are unlikely to build a new ship-based point of the Pacific Fleet on Matua. Then what is the fuss in the name of? Will we rebuild a military airfield? Given the three remarkable runways built by the Japanese, bringing them back to life will obviously not take a lot of effort. But the length of each, as it was said, is 1200 meters, the width is 80 meters. This is more than enough to land even a helicopter regiment. For fighters such as Su-27, Su-35 and MiG-29, too. But, for example, it will not be enough for Tu-22M3 heavy bombers, the strips will have to be lengthened almost twice. But after all, it is in the landing here of Russian Long-Range Aviation that most Russian military experts see the main meaning of the new military base on Matua. Because in this case, the Pacific coast of the United States will be within the reach of our heavy bombers. This means that not only the "strategists" Tu-95MS and Tu-160 will be able to fly out to patrol the "US" borders. The range of potential threats to the Americans from Russia will be much wider.
On this score is full of optimism former commander-in-chief Air Force Russian Army General Pyotr Deinekin: “As for the airfield at Matua, at the present time it is too small to support the flights of heavy aircraft. But in the future, everything will be done to turn this airfield into an air base ”.
The only question is whether the terrain will allow it? After all, at least one strip for the Tu-22M3 will have to be lengthened more than twice - up to 3-3.5 km. With a maximum island length of 11 kilometers and a width of 6.4 kilometers, this can be a problem. Especially when you consider that a significant part of the territory is occupied by the Sarychev volcano. Surely, the expedition of Vice Admiral Ryabukhin is also struggling to solve this problem today.
Meanwhile, even if it is not possible to "plant" Russian Long-Range Aviation on Matua and the matter is limited only to fighters, there will still be a lot of sense in the new island base. Because the boundaries of our ability to provide air cover for the base of strategic nuclear submarine missile cruisers, including the new Boreyevs, in Vilyuchinsk (Kamchatka) will also decently expand.
After all, today the task of fighter cover for Kamchatka is entrusted mainly to the 865th separate air regiment, which flies on MiG-31 interceptors. The regiment is based at the Elizovo airfield near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. And Matua is about 700 kilometers south-west of the aircraft parking areas of the 865th separate regiment. Accordingly, in this direction to the center of the Pacific Ocean, the far border of the potential interception of enemy air attack assets will be shifted by the same amount. The gain in time and space for us in the event of a surprise attack is more than impressive.
Needless to say, the same thing on Matua will probably be done with anti-ship winged missiles "Bastion", "Ball", as well as anti-aircraft missile systems S-400 "Triumph"... Since last year, such weapons have already been deployed in Kamchatka, which immediately caused an understandable sharp reaction in the United States and Japan. There they started talking with concern that on the peninsula Russia is creating another "access restriction zone A2 / AD", as such areas are called in the Pentagon.
Until now, it was believed that we have already created "A2 / AD zones" in Kaliningrad, Crimea, near St. Petersburg, Murmansk, Yerevan and Syrian Tartus. But all this is in the northwest, west and southwest directions. Now it's the turn of the Russian Far East. Kamchatka has to be added to the previous list of overseas strategists. However, if we can quickly turn the island of Matua into a fortress, even the defense of the base of the Russian nuclear missile cruisers will become deeply echeloned. And getting close to the peninsula with impunity will not work.
In May of this year, the uninhabited island of Matua suddenly acquired strategic status. The Ministry of Defense sent a powerful expedition to him - with equipment, professional search engines, doctors, biologists ... Officially, there are two goals. The first is to understand how the island is suitable for basing units of the Pacific Fleet. The second is the revision of the inheritance left by the previous owners. After all, 70 years ago, Matua was also a strategic point - Japan. Between the lines, of course, one can read the third goal of Russia: to designate its presence on the Pacific frontiers ... Beach and trenches
We waited for the weather on Iturup Island for almost a week. The sky was cloudy with milky fog, and we read all about the few post-war expeditions to Matua. There were many questions. What did the Japanese do on this small volcanic island? Why did they surrender it to the Soviet troops without a fight? Where did their weapons and equipment go? Why did the island, which was not of key importance, submit directly to the imperial rate in Hokkaido? The Japanese are silent. Garrison commander Matua died without leaving behind any memoirs, unlike his colleagues ...
And here we are in a helicopter. The pilot opened the cockpit door so that we could see the majestic Sarychev volcano drifting onto the helicopter. The island is small - only 11 kilometers long and 6.5 wide. Below flashed rocky beach, went zigzags of trenches in full growth, caponiers of coastal batteries and, finally, the gray concrete of the takeoff of the Japanese airfield.
The secret of fresh water
One of the discoverers of the island of Matua, the Cossack centurion Ivan Cherny, wrote that the island did not interest him in any way. There were no sources of fresh water on Matua - only streams with thawed water. Mice and foxes - all animal world... And there were few people - the Ainu tribe was teetering on the brink of extinction. But in the late 1930s, the Japanese military decided to turn the island into a fortress. Construction works walked around the clock for about three years. The northern part, occupied by the volcano, defended itself with the most complex relief. The rest of the Japanese engineering services turned inside out.
“I was shown American aerial photographs of 1943,” the commander of the expedition, Vice-Admiral Andrei Ryabukhin, tells us. - The shooting was done in winter, there is a fairly high snow cover. And I noticed that all the white snow is in black dots. These were the holes from the stoves in the dugouts that melted! 
The volume of fortification works shocked military historians of the XXI century. Behind the obsessive diligence of the Japanese, they saw some kind of super-purpose and mystery. The surrender of the island without resistance only blew fog. In late August 1945, the Matua garrison surrendered to the Soviet paratroopers without a fight. In the middle of the 20th century, a part of the air defense station stood on Matua, then there was a frontier post - it was removed in 2001, and the island again became uninhabited for 15 years. But the story of the if not mysterious, then the strange island of Matua has not yet been written to the end. It is on these days that blank spots are filled with new data, and fantasies are refuted or received a logical explanation. We wander along the coast to where several dozen fighters bite into the fat coastal land. The expedition is trying to find answers to the most important questions: how did the Matua garrison get fuel and water? The dominance of barrels on the island is a legacy of the Soviet period. There are also German barrels with the inscription "Wehrmacht". Some researchers have built dizzying theories about the cooperation of the Third Reich and Japan. But in fact, after the war, there were several million such barrels left, they were used in national economy THE USSR. And the Japanese garrison, most likely, supplied fuel by pumping it from tankers. The secret of fresh water has not yet been unraveled. Concrete tanks and a network of ceramic pipes, valves, and pumps have been preserved along the coast. Each unit has Japanese hieroglyphic markings. How did the Japanese solve the water problem? As Andrei Ryabukhin put it, "we still do not understand exactly what and where flowed in and from where it came out."
Biologists confirm: there is a problem of water supply
“We found only three suitable sources,” Vadim Simakov, the head of the sanitary-epidemiological group, told us. - And two have already been exhausted. The water is, in principle, clean, but it needs additional mineralization. Basically flood, due to melted snow. The military brought a whole laboratory to the island. And for good reason.
- According to the prisoners of war Japanese soldiers it was possible to judge the presence of biological weapons here, - says Igor Volkov, a bacteriologist at the main center of sanitary and epidemiological surveillance of the Ministry of Defense. - There were prerequisites. During the war, Japan actively worked with biological weapons. The famous Detachment 731 tested it on Soviet and Chinese prisoners of war. In Manchuria, they used many pathogens, but without much success. And on Matua, according to legend, there was either a warehouse of this detachment, or some kind of laboratory. But so far, traces of neither one nor the other have been found.
"Fox holes"
Almost before our very eyes, an excavator and a bulldozer are cutting off the slope of the Kruglaya hill. On satellite imagery it really looks perfectly round. On the Internet, you can find a lot of "evidence" that 54 floors of secret communications are hidden inside the hill. This is, of course, a myth. But a powerful power cable really leads up the hill, which means that there is still something inside. 
The hill is surrounded by trenches. The Japanese dug them around special regulations: those that are designed for one soldier should be 120 cm deep. And if for two, then 150 cm - the soldiers who met in the trench crawled over each other. The Japanese covered these ditches with branches and camouflage nets, and the soldiers remained invisible to the enemy. ... The bucket rakes up cubic meters of earth until a crevice is shown.
It is immediately clear from the wooden spacers that the hole in the rock is the work of human hands. The entrance was blown up by the Japanese, through a narrow gap a flashlight snatches out a long corridor carved into the mountain.
The first to inspect the dungeon were officers of radiochemical protection, taking air samples. The scouts and I were waiting in the street, cautiously looking at the vertical section of the hill. At first glance, the adit was ennobled - the ceiling was supported by the miner's support, the logs were fastened with standard forged brackets. But the tree oozed with water, although the drift itself was completely dry.
The chemists stayed inside the hill for about ten minutes and reported - everything was clean. And reconnaissance crept into the dungeon. The drift a dozen meters from the entrance turned to the left, and everyone hoped that it would end much further. One of the scouts came back for us:
- We walk quietly, we talk in a whisper. Don't look at the ceiling, your appetite will disappear ... On the ceiling of the drift, underground trolls played Tetris, folding the crumbled stone into sloppy heaps that hung over their heads. And two cables snaked underfoot - a telephone and a power cable in an armored braid, designed, judging by the cross-section, for voltages up to 3000 volts. Porcelain electrical insulators, coconut copra ropes, cans, chunks of cartridge zinc, and sheets of black paper were scattered throughout the driveway.
A dozen meters from the blown-up entrance, the drift turned out to be intact, the support was vertical, and the ceiling was without cracks - we went out into a small hall in which the porches intersected. We came one by one, and the other two, after a hundred meters, ran into landslides.
“Most likely, they were also blown up,” says Vice Admiral Andrei Ryabukhin. “These drifts were ammunition dumps. The standard fortification of the Japanese was used by them on many islands.
In a dead-end tunnel, where a trace of the last blow with a Japanese digger's pick remained on the vertical wall, scouts were squatting and looking at something. In the oblong object, the cult Japanese thing, the katana, was not immediately guessed. The sword was just leaning against the wall. The wooden scabbard was peeled off, but the blade survived. The wooden handle also survived. Japanese swords are easy to date, on the shank of the blade, under the handle, the master usually put his trademark, wrote the name or year of manufacture. We did not remove the pen in the dungeon - this is the task of the museum workers. The only thing we saw in the bright light of the lanterns was the remnants of the stingray skin on the scabbard and handle. 
Perhaps the officer who left this katana hoped ... last days Defense of Matua: Japanese officer leaves the family katana to return. Sappers lay their charges, and hundreds of people descend from the hill to the coast, where Soviet troops are waiting for the island to officially surrender. VERBATIMFrom the interrogation protocol of the commander of the 91st Infantry Division, Lieutenant General Tsutsumi Fusaki:“... Of the other islands of the Kuril ridge, Fr. Matsuwa, located in the center of the Kuril ridge and serving as an intermediate air base, as well as a base for anchorage of ships. With the capture of this island can be created good base for actions against Hokkaido, and communications with northern islands... The Americans were interested in this island, so Japan kept a lot of forces there and built a good defense. This island was defended by the 41st separate mixed regiment, which was directly subordinate to the headquarters of the 5th front and had no connection with the 91st Infantry Division. "
According to Far Eastern historians, on this small island of the Kuril ridge during the Second World War, units of the 42nd Infantry Division of the Japanese Army and the Third Naval Brigade were located. In total, the island's garrison numbered about ten thousand people.
On the eve of World War II, the Japanese turned Matua - by the way, in Japanese the island sounds like Matsua-to - into a powerful fortress. A large airfield with several long runways was located here, allowing aircraft to be lifted in almost any wind direction. The runways were heated by thermal waters, and therefore could be used year-round. From this point, Japanese aircraft could control the entire northwest of the Pacific Ocean.
Not only is the island reliably protected by impregnable rocks and high shores, a whole network of various fortifications was additionally built on it. Fearing bombing and shelling from the sea, the Japanese dug deeper and deeper into the ground, and by the summer of 1945 there was no free space from all kinds of defensive fortifications in the form of ditches, trenches, trenches, dugouts, pillboxes and bunkers, lunettes, underground shelters and underground galleries.
The Americans have repeatedly tried to destroy the airfield and island facilities, having lost a dozen aircraft in battles, but everything was useless. The garrison of the island-fortress of Matua laid down their arms in front of our troops on August 26 and 27, 1945. Since then, the island has become Russian, but to this day it continues to keep many Japanese secrets. Surprisingly, judging by the inventory of weapons and equipment captured on the island, the Soviet paratroopers did not find a single aircraft, tank or weapon on Matua. The Japanese command transferred to the Soviet units only small arms and supplies of food and ammunition.
There were no heavy weapons in the pillboxes and caponiers. Where it disappeared is still a mystery. According to the VGTRK TV company, there may still be three 150-millimeter guns hidden in underground structures on the island. The foundations of Japanese barracks and even cast-iron stoves have survived to this day. Concrete pillboxes and trenches carved into the rocks survived. The Japanese are reminded of a two-story pillbox on the shore, a beach littered with wreckage of ships and equipment, the remains of a pier and the skeleton of the Roye-maru transport sunk in the strait. Somewhere at the bottom of the coastal waters lie other Japanese transports - "Iwaki-maru" and "Hiburi-maru", torpedoed by the American submarine SS-233 "Herring".
In Soviet times, three servicemen went missing in the underground catacombs, who tried to independently investigate them. People also died from natural disasters. In 1952, 16 people fell asleep in an avalanche. The last time flowers were laid at the mass grave 40 years ago, when the island was still inhabited. The members of the expedition restored the monument and renewed the interrupted tradition.
Unfortunately, the Russian military does not have up-to-date accurate maps of the island, although there was a border outpost here during the Soviet era, and therefore one of the most important tasks of the expedition is to inspect the entire territory and make a mapping of the area.
Since the territory of the island is "rich" in military artifacts, in addition to surveyors, engineers, military historians, specialists in chemical and radiation protection and a doctor must be included in the research group. Each with its own equipment. The results of the work are encouraging.
"A survey of the runway was carried out, ready for operation, deployed mobile airfield complexes and flight support equipment, cleared the drainage system of the airfield, completed equipment of the landing area for helicopters of all types. The airfield has two runways more than 1200 meters long and 80 meters wide with concrete and asphalt pavement, "the Defense Ministry said in an official statement.
In addition, engineering work is underway in Dvoinaya Bay. There, the military wants to prepare the coastal section of the island for the approach of a large landing ship to the coast in a "point-blank" manner for loading equipment and materiel. Recall that the expedition led by Deputy Commander of the Pacific Fleet Vice Admiral Andrey Ryabukhin has been working on Matua since May 14. More than 200 people take part in it - servicemen and specialists of the Russian Geographical Society. Six ships and vessels of the Pacific Fleet are involved.
Help "RG"
Matua Island is relatively small - 11 kilometers long and 6.5 kilometers wide. Height highest point- Sarychev peak (Fuyo volcano) is 1485 meters. The island is located in the central part of the Kuril ridge, therefore, it is significantly removed from the populated areas of Sakhalin and Kamchatka. The first mention of the island of Matua was found by the traveler Ivan Kozyrevsky and dates back to 1711. Before the outbreak of World War II, there was an Ainu settlement on the island.
