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By Root 1282 0

The experiences of the “PQ” convoys, as they were designated, and of the return “QP” series, became one of the war’s naval epics. Even before the Germans entered the story, Arctic weather was a terrible foe. Ships often found themselves ploughing through mountainous seas, forty feet from trough to wave crest, while laden with a topweight of hundreds of tons of ice. More than a few men were lost overboard, and a monstrous wave once stripped the armoured roof from the cruiser Sheffield’s forward turret; the merchantman J.L.M. Curry sprang its plates and foundered in a storm. On the Murmansk passage, almost every ship suffered weather damage, to which even the greatest ships were vulnerable. Midshipman Charles Friend served aboard a carrier: “I remember looking out from a furiously rolling and pitching Victorious to see King George V, nearly eight hundred feet long, climbing up the slope of a wave … These waves were moving mountains … the billows a thousand feet from crest to trough … even Victorious’s high freeboard did not always prevent her from taking it green, the bow driving through the crest of a wave which crashed down on her flight deck … One banged down so hard the forward aircraft lift was put out of action … The sea had bent the four-inch armour.”

British dockworkers, especially in Glasgow, gained a deplorable reputation for carelessness in cargo stowage which contrasted with painstaking American practice. Not only did much matériel arrive damaged at Murmansk, but ships’ very survival was threatened by loads breaking loose. On 10 December 1941, for instance, crewmen on the 5,395-ton tramp steamer Harmatis opened a hatch after noticing smoke rising, to discover a flaming lorry careering about the hold, smashing crates and igniting bales. A mate wearing the ship’s only smoke hood descended into the fiery shambles, playing a hose until he was overcome. The captain relieved him, and eventually suppressed the flames so that the ship could limp back to the Clyde.

Crews were obliged to labour relentlessly, hacking dangerous weights of ice from upperworks and guns, testing weapons on which lubricants froze. Men moved sluggishly in heavy layers of clothing which never sufficed to exclude the cold. Alec Dennis, the first lieutenant of a destroyer, tried to nap on deck because he knew that if he took to his bunk he would be pitched out: “While one could keep one’s body reasonably warm, I found it impossible to keep my feet warm in spite of fur-lined boots.” He spent the first hour of every four off watch thawing his frozen feet sufficiently to be able to sleep. Crews subsisted on a diet of “kye”—cocoa—and corned-beef sandwiches served at action stations, snatching sleep during brief intervals between German attacks. They hated the darkness of Arctic winter, but unbroken summer daylight was worse. The beauty of the Northern Lights mocked the terrible vulnerability of ships beneath their glow. The unlucky Harmatis experienced another drama on 17 January 1942: she was struck by two U-boat torpedoes, one of which blasted open a hatch, strewing the rigging with clothing blown loose from the cargo. As seawater flooded into her gashed hull, the captain stopped the ship to prevent her from driving under. Somehow the damage was contained. The Harmatis was towed into Murmansk by tugs, amid further attacks by Luftwaffe Heinkels.

Others were less fortunate: when a torpedo detonated in the magazine of the destroyer Matabele, only two survivors were rescued. The sea was dotted with corpses in life jackets, men who froze to death before help could reach them, for the cold killed within minutes. George Charlton, serving in a destroyer sunk by gunfire when the heavy cruiser Hipper attacked a convoy in the last days of December 1942, described the horror of attempting to climb the scrambling net of a rescuing trawler: “I waited for the swell to take me up to the net and then I just [pushed] my arms and legs through the mesh and I was left hanging there until two ratings came down over the side and pulled me aboard, with a third helping me