into the sea. As for the Germans, convoy crews were surprised by the irresolution of some Luftwaffe pilots, who failed to press attacks through heavy barrages. The German navy, meanwhile, was hamstrung by Berlin’s insistence on making all decisions about when and whether to deploy capital ships. Again and again, disgusted Kriegsmarine officers were ordered to break off action and scuttle for the safety of Norwegian fjords.
As the convoy battles of 1942 became progressively harder and more costly, merchant service officers voiced dismay about their treatment by the navy. They resented the fact that its big cruisers turned back at Bear Island because the air threat further east was deemed unacceptable. They complained that escorts often abandoned their charges to hunt U-boats. They found it incomprehensible that, when cargoes were thought so precious, little air cover was provided. Above all, they protested about the fact that they were expected to sail day after day through the most perilous waters in the world, knowing nothing of what was happening save what they could see from their ice-encrusted upper decks. ‘One of the things about being in the Merchant Navy was that you were treated like children,’ said one ship’s master later. ‘We were kept in the dark. It was most unsettling.’
Merchantmen crawled across the chill sea more slowly than a running man, exposed to bomb and torpedo assaults more deadly than those of the Atlantic campaign. A cruiser senior officer warned the Admiralty in May: ‘We in the navy are paid to do this sort of job. But it is beginning to ask too much of the men of the Merchant Navy. We may be able to avoid bombs and torpedoes with our speed – a six-or eight-knot ship has not this advantage.’ Some Americans recoiled from the hazards of the Russian voyage: there was a mutiny aboard the aged tramp steamer Troubadour when twenty men refused to sail, suppressed by the ship’s Norwegian captain with the aid of a US Navy armed guard. Those responsible, ‘an unhappy, polyglot mixture of sea-going drifters and extravagantly paid American seamen earning danger money on top of their wages’, were committed to a Russian jail on arrival at Murmansk.
Yet Churchill angrily rejected the Royal Navy’s urgings to suspend convoy operations during the perpetual daylight of Arctic summer. ‘The Russians are in heavy action and will expect us to run the risk and pay the price entailed by our contribution,’ he wrote. ‘The operation is justified if half gets through. Failure on our part to make the attempt would weaken our influence with both our major allies.’ The experience of PQ16 seemed to vindicate his determination. Thirty-six ships sailed from Iceland on 21 May; Luftwaffe attacks were frequent but often half-hearted. Despite many U-boat alarms, on the 26th only one ship was sunk. A destroyer dropped its doctor in a small boat to board a damaged Russian ship and take off three badly wounded men, on whom he later operated. The Ocean Voice was hit by a bomb which blew a huge hole in her side. Yet in calm seas, she was able to keep station and at last reached Russia ‘with God’s help’, in the words of a sailor.
Some ships ran out of anti-aircraft gun ammunition, but many attacks were beaten off. Men on the upper decks of the Polish destroyer Garland suffered shocking casualties from bomb near-misses. At Murmansk, the words ‘LONG LIVE POLAND’ were found scrawled on the ship’s upperworks in its crew’s blood; ‘They were hard men,’ a Merchant Navy officer said respectfully. All but seven ships of the convoy got through, and some 371 crewmen and gunners from lost vessels were rescued by extraordinary feats of courage and skill. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C of the Home Fleet, whose caution Churchill deplored, asserted that ‘the strategical situation was wholly favourable to the enemy’, but acknowledged that PQ16’s success was ‘beyond expectations’.
Yet the following month witnessed the most discreditable episode of the Royal Navy’s war. PQ17, comprising thirty-six ships, most of which were American, sailed from Iceland on 27 June, carrying 594 tanks, 4,246 vehicles, 297 aircraft and over 150,000 tons of military and general stores. The British knew from Ultra that the Germans planned a major effort against the convoy, including a sortie by capital ships codenamed Rosselsprung – ‘Knight’s Move’. Hitler had declared that ‘Anglo-American intentions…depend on sustaining Russia’s ability to hold out by maximum deliveries of war materials.’ At last, he recognised the importance of the Arctic convoys. The Admiralty assumed operational direction of PQ17 and its supporting units, because it had access to the latest Ultra intelligence, and experience showed that Tovey, at sea in his flagship, could not effectively control a large and widely dispersed force maintaining wireless silence.
Early skirmishes were of a familiar character. A Luftwaffe Condor took up station off Jan Mayen island on 1 July. He115 torpedo-carrying seaplanes made an unconvincing and unsuccessful attack, during which the US destroyer Wainwright charged headlong towards the attacking aircraft, firing everything it had. Yet on 3 July, the Admiralty ordered the convoy’s cruiser screen to turn away west, towards the German capital ships which it now believed were at sea. Next day three merchantmen were sunk. That evening, a disbelieving Captain ‘Jackie’ Broome, commanding the close escort, received a signal from London: ‘Secret and immediate. Owing to threat from surface ships convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports.’ Thirteen minutes later, a further brief signal confirmed: ‘Convoy is to scatter.’ After reluctantly passing the order to his charges, Broome closed a merchantman and addressed its master through a loud-hailer: ‘Sorry to leave you like this, goodbye and good luck. It looks like a bloody business.’
Tirpitz indeed sortied briefly on 6 July, only to be ordered to return to Norway, to the disgust of its crew and escorts. A German destroyer captain wrote that day: ‘The mood is bitter enough. Soon one will feel ashamed to be on the active list…watching other parts of the armed forces fighting while we, “the core of the fleet” just sit in harbour.’ But the Germans had no need to risk their big ships: the Luftwaffe and U-boats sank twenty-four of PQ17’s merchantmen, struggling unprotected on lonely courses to Russia. Among their civilian crews, 153 men perished while British warships lost none. The shame of the Royal Navy was plain to behold, as were the disgust of the Americans and contempt of the Russians. It is indeed possible that PQ17 would have been destroyed by Tirpitz. But the navy’s response of ‘every man for himself’, the abandonment of the convoy by its escort, breached the tradition of centuries and inspired lasting mistrust within the merchant service, at a time when its morale was anyway precarious.
The decision resulted from a personal intervention by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. Pound already commanded scant confidence among his peers, and was in failing health. It is extraordinary that he was not sacked, but Churchill found him sympathetic, and thus he retained his post until shortly before his death in October 1943. A government minister, Philip Noel-Baker, was sent to Glasgow to address returning PQ17 survivors at St Andrew’s Hall. ‘We know what the convoy cost us,’ he told them. ‘But I want to tell you that whatever the cost, it was well worth it.’ He was howled down by embittered men. The government threw a censorship blanket over the entire episode, suppressing an eyewitness account by correspondent Godfrey Winn, who had sailed with the convoy. Only after the war was the magnitude of the Admiralty’s blunder revealed to the public.
PQ18 did not sail until September 1942, when it lost thirteen ships out of forty, ten of them to air attack. Among naval ratings and merchant seamen alike, it was now agreed that the Arctic passage represented the worst ordeal of the war at sea. Winn questioned Commander Robert Sherbrooke, recovering from severe wounds received when he won a VC for his part in one of the battles, about the loss of Bramble, in which the correspondent had sailed with PQ17. Sherbrooke said: ‘There was just a sudden flash of light on the horizon and that was all.’ Thus did nemesis strike many ships. A seaman described meeting survivors of the cruiser Edinburgh and finding them ‘rather sad and twitchy chaps’. Some men who served on the convoys remained afterwards traumatised by their experiences.
In the winter of 1942 another reckless Admiralty decision was made: to run some single merchantmen to Russia unescorted, manned by volunteer crews lured by cash bonuses of £100 an officer, £50 a man. Five out of thirteen such ships arrived. Of the remainder, one ran aground on Spitzbergen where its survivors suffered weeks of appalling privation – most died of gangrene following frostbite, before a handful were rescued by a passing
