among firemen – the sweepings of Scotland’s notorious Barlinnie jail – who gained access to rum intended for Archangel. Two sailors were stabbed before discipline was restored.
Even when ships reached Russia, they found little to cheer them. ‘The arrival in Kola Inlet was eerie,’ wrote one sailor. ‘It was December and pretty dark. There were great swirls of fog, black water and white snow-covered ice. The bare rocks on either side of the inlet were menacing and silence was broken only by constant sounding of mournful fog-horns of various pitches…I felt that if Hell were to be cold, this would be a foretaste of it.’ At Murmansk they remained subject to almost daily Luftwaffe attack. A bomb fell into the bunker of the freighter Dover Hill, where it lodged unexploded beneath twenty feet of coal. Her captain and crew laboured for two days and nights, removing coal in buckets, before with infinite caution they were able to hoist the bomb to the deck for defusing. Ashore, Russian hospitality was frigid, facilities negligible. Some British seamen arrived proclaiming an enthusiasm for their Soviet comrades-in-arms, which vanished amid the bleak reception. American sailors, denied every comfort to which they were accustomed, recoiled in disgust. The Allies were permitted to harbour no delusions that Western assistance merited Soviet gratitude. In the words of a Russian after the war, ‘God knows we paid them back in full – in Russian lives.’ Which was true.
The turn of the year proved the critical landmark of the campaign. Weather and the enemy – especially U-boats armed with acoustic homing torpedoes – ensured that service on Arctic convoys never became less than a miserable and alarming experience, but losses fell dramatically. In 1943 the Royal Navy was at last able to deploy escort carriers and powerful antisubmarine and anti-aircraft defences. The Germans, hard-pressed in Russia and the Mediterranean, were obliged to divert much of their air and U-boat strength from Norway. Hitler refused to sanction major warship attacks on convoys until an ill-judged sortie was attempted by Scharnhorst in December 1943, which resulted in its sinking off the North Cape by a British fleet led by the battleship Duke of York.
The US began to move massive supplies by other routes: half of all wartime American shipments reached Russia through its Pacific ports, a quarter through Persia, and only a quarter – 4.43 million tons – via Archangel and Murmansk. The human cost of the PQs was astonishingly small by the standards of other battlefields: though eighteen warships and eighty-seven merchantmen were lost, only 1,944 naval personnel and 829 merchant seamen died serving on Arctic convoys between 1941 and 1945. The Germans lost a battleship, three destroyers, thirty-two U-boats and unnumbered aircraft. Given their extraordinary opportunities for strategic dominance of the Arctic in 1942, what is remarkable is not how many Allied ships they sank, but how few.
The Royal Navy accounted the Russian convoys among its most formidable wartime challenges. It was the service’s misfortune that the professionalism and courage which characterised its performance were tarnished by the memory of PQ17. The Fleet Air Arm never distinguished itself in the north, partly for lack of good aircraft. Some of the navy’s most senior officers failed to display imagination to match the courage and seamanship of their subordinates. They refused to acknowledge, as Churchill and Roosevelt always acknowledged, that at any cost aid must be seen to be sent to Russia. If the supplies shipped in 1941–42 were of greater symbolic than material importance to the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front, they were a vital earnest of Western Allied support for the decisive campaign to destroy Hitler.
3 THE ORDEAL OF PEDESTAL
Between 1940 and 1943, the Mediterranean witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the Royal Navy’s war. British submarines, based on Malta when conditions there allowed, attacked Axis supply lines to North Africa with some success. Battle squadrons sought to assert themselves in the face of the Italian navy, U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham inflicted severe damage on the Italian fleet in his November 1940 carrier air strike against Taranto, and in the surface action off Cape Matapan on 28–29 March 1941. But every capital ship sortie into open waters within range of the enemy was a perilous venture, which took a harrowing toll. The carrier Illustrious was badly damaged by German bombing in January 1941. On 25 November that year, the battleship Barham blew up, with the loss of most of its crew, after being torpedoed by a German submarine. The battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant rested for seven months on the floor of Alexandria harbour after falling victim to an attack by courageous Italian human-torpedo crews on 19 December 1941. The Royal Navy, having lost five capital ships in a month, was for a time obliged to cede the central Mediterranean to the Axis. There was a steady drain of British cruiser and destroyer losses to mines, bombs and torpedoes. For some months in 1941, the navy suffered severely while holding open a sea link to besieged Tobruk, which was deemed symbolically if not militarily important.
The pervasive strategic reality was that the Royal Navy remained vulnerable in the Mediterranean until the British Army could gain control of the North African littoral, providing the RAF with bases. In 1942, the hazards were increased by German deployment of U-boat reinforcements. But Winston Churchill conducted the war effort on the basis that Britain must be seen to challenge the enemy at every opportunity, especially when the army accomplished so little for so long. Malta, within easy range of Axis Sicilian air bases, suffered almost three years of intermittent bombardment. In March and April 1942 the little island received twice the bomb tonnage dropped on London during the entire blitz; its people almost starved, and its resident submarine flotilla had to be withdrawn. The requirement to sustain Malta became a priority for the Royal Navy, and every supply ship had to be fought through in the face of air, U-boat and surface attack. Each convoy demanded a supporting fleet operation: there must be battleships in case Italian heavy units sortied, carriers to provide air cover, and cruiser and destroyer escorts. Each venture precipitated an epic battle. The most famous, or notorious, took place in August 1942, when Malta’s shortages of oil, aircraft and food attained desperate proportions: Operation Pedestal was launched to bring succour.
Vice-Admiral Edward Syfret took command of the battlefleet that sailed from the Clyde on 3 August, escorting fourteen merchantmen. Several of these were chartered American ships, notably the tanker Ohio, provided with British crews. All had been fitted with anti-aircraft armament manned by soldiers, and on the passage to Gibraltar the convoy intensively exercised both gunnery and manoeuvre. The ships that set forth on 10 August to make the Malta passage formed a mighty array: the battleships Nelson and Rodney; fleet carriers Victorious, Indomitable and Eagle; the old carrier Furious, ferrying Spitfires to reinforce the island as soon as the range narrowed sufficiently to fly them off; six cruisers; twenty-four destroyers and a flotilla of smaller craft. To one cadet aboard a merchantman it was ‘a fantastically wonderful sight’.
Only weeks had elapsed since the Royal Navy’s Arctic humiliation, and the service felt on its mettle: a destroyer captain, Lt. Cmdr. David Hill, said: ‘There was a strong touch of desperation and bloody-mindedness following PQ17.’ One of the Pedestal destroyer flotillas, led by ‘Jackie’ Broome, had endured that ghastly experience. A host of German and Italian eyes, watching Gibraltar from Spain and North Africa, saw the fleet sail. Axis commanders were undeceived by a feint convoy which sailed simultaneously from Alexandria, trailing its coat in the eastern Mediterranean. ‘I felt indeed that some of our party were entering the narrow seas on a desperate venture,’ wrote George Blundell of the battleship Nelson, ‘and prayed to the Ruler of Destiny for his favour.’
On the 11th, amid a still, azure sea Furious began flying off its Spitfires, which set course for Malta, 550 miles distant, where most arrived safely. But now the first disaster struck. In the western Mediterranean, Asdic was confused by freak underwater conditions created by the confluence of warm seas with colder Atlantic currents: ships were thus acutely vulnerable to submarine attack. Even as the fighters were being launched, a salvo of torpedoes fired by U-73 struck Eagle, which sank in eight minutes with the loss of 260 of her complement of 1,160 men. ‘She presented a terrible sight as she heeled over, turned bottom up and sank with horrible speed,’ wrote an awestruck witness. ‘Men and aircraft could be seen falling off her flight deck as she capsized…It makes one tremble. If anyone took a good film of it, it should be shown throughout the country…I remember thinking
