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By Root 1082 0

U-boat. Far to westward, a destroyer was cut in half when it crossed the bows of the battleship King George V, which itself became a dockyard case as a result of damage inflicted by detonation of the stricken destroyer’s depth-charges. The cruisers Trinidad and Edinburgh were sunk after bitter engagements and noble damage-control efforts. An engineer officer of the mortally injured Trinidad refused to abandon his stokers, almost invariably doomed men when ships sank. Though concussed by bomb blast, he was last seen crawling to try to free them from beneath jammed hatches, even as the cruiser foundered. His name should be known to posterity: Lt. John Boddy.

Not all those engaged in the Arctic battles displayed such heroism. On the Allied side, while some merchant navy personnel showed remarkable spirit, others too readily fled damaged vessels, like the American crew of the Christopher Newport, who boarded a rescue ship jauntily dressed in their best suits and carrying baggage, abandoning 10,000 tons of munitions. Panic-stricken British sailors on several occasions lowered lifeboats so clumsily that their occupants were tipped 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,