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By Root 1081 0

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 Cmdr. Robert Sherbrooke, recovering from severe wounds received when he won a VC for his part in one of the battles, about the loss of the 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 Norwegian ski patrol. On another ship, the Empire Archer, there was a riot 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 antiaircraft 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