Torpedo Building in Babie Doły

About 300 m off the beach at Babie Doły in Gdynia, a concrete ruin rises from the waters of the Gulf of Gdańsk like a ship run aground. This is the torpedo building – a torpedo assembly and test hall built by the Germans during the Second World War on caissons sunk into the sea. No one has been allowed inside for years, yet it has become one of the most recognisable sights on the Gdynia coast.

History: a Luftwaffe torpedo range

Occupied Gdynia (Gotenhafen) had two German torpedo research establishments. At Oksywie stood the Torpedo Versuchsanstalt Oxhöft, run by the Kriegsmarine, and at Babie Doły (Hexengrund) the Luftwaffe's Torpedowaffenplatz Hexengrund, formally opened on 4 July 1942. The Babie Doły centre worked mainly on aerial torpedoes, the one at Oksywie on acoustic ones. They were linked by a narrow-gauge railway along the beach, which the Germans themselves mockingly nicknamed the "Kashubian Express". According to a researcher at the Polish Naval Academy, about 2,500 people worked in the workshops, assembly halls and on the range, and every day more than 200 aerial torpedoes on average were fired from the torpedo building or dropped from aircraft taking off from Babie Doły airfield.

How the torpedo building worked

The building combined an assembly hall with technical rooms and an observation tower used to track the path of each torpedo. A pier connected it to the shore, and a narrow-gauge railway brought components along it for final assembly. Test torpedoes were then recovered by ships, and the workshops analysed the results. The two establishments shared a range in the Gulf of Gdańsk off Jastarnia, about 12 km from Babie Doły. The twin torpedo building at Oksywie, nicknamed "Formosa", is still used by the Polish Navy.

Did you know?

After the war most of the equipment was taken by the Red Army and shipped to the USSR. The building was never repaired and the harbour basin silted up. Until the 1980s military divers used the pier and building for training. After harsh winters at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s the front wall collapsed, and in the mid-1990s the remains of the pier were blown up. The ruin appears on screen: in the "Brzeg morza" episode of the series "Four Tank-Men and a Dog", in the series "1983", in "Kryminalni" and in the feature film "Superwizja".

Tripto tips

The torpedo building cannot be visited – it is closed to the public and separated from land by several hundred metres of water. It is best seen from the beach at Babie Doły in good visibility and calm seas; you can only get close by boat. An hour is enough for a beach walk with views of the ruin. Do not try to swim out to it – it is a damaged, unsecured structure.