The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [208]
The sinking of the Bismarck – although of course it cost the Hood – saw the last of the German surface-fleet raiders threatening the Atlantic sea-lanes, and in that sense marked a major turning point in the battle. Bismarck’s and Prinz Eugen’s supply ships were immediately targeted, using the German Home Waters key of the naval Enigma code called Dolphin, and hardly any made it back to port.46 That meant that the Germans had henceforth to rely on underwater tankers and supply carriers, which had much smaller capacities and slower speeds.47 Although there were other major battles to be fought against vessels such as the battle cruiser Scharnhorst (sunk off the Northern Cape of Norway on 26 December 1943), Bismarck’s sister ship the Tirpitz (sunk by Lancaster bombers with 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs on 12 November 1944), the battle cruiser Gneisenau (scuttled at Gotenhafen on 28 March 1945) and the Prinz Eugen (which ended her days as a nuclear-test target in the Pacific), none of these ships posed the same level of danger during the battle of the Atlantic.
Tirpitz did, however, play a major – if not actually operational – part in the tragedy that overtook Convoy PQ-17 in July 1942. The Arctic convoys had started very soon after Operation Barbarossa. On 12 August 1941, even while Churchill and Roosevelt were still meeting at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland discussing how to help Russia, two squadrons of British fighters comprising forty aircraft left Britain on board HMS Argus bound for Murmansk, the first of the supplies shipped to Russia by the Arctic route. Under the command of a New Zealander, Wing Commander Ramsbottom-Isherwood, they reached the Soviet naval base at Polyarnoe, near Murmansk, which was to become a huge receiving depot for Allied supplies over the next four years. Although the RAF needed every aircraft it could get for home defences and North African operations in the summer of 1941, nonetheless it transported planes to help the USSR in its hour of trial.
The first regular convoys, which all had the codename PQ followed by a consecutive number, started out from Iceland to Murmansk and Archangel via Bear Island. On 28 September, PQ-1 set out packed with military supplies and large quantities of the vital raw materials that Stalin had asked for personally, including rubber, copper and aluminium. Soon afterwards, Churchill announced that Britain’s entire tank production for the month of September was going to be despatched to Russia. The tanks were badly needed, for on 2 October the Nazis launched Operation Typhoon on Moscow. The horrific winter of 1941/2, which did so much to destroy Hitler’s dreams of turning European Russia into an Aryan colony, also badly affected the Arctic convoys. The route taken was a hazardous one that comprised seventeen nerve-wracking days sailing around the Northern Cape above Norway and Finland, through the potentially lethal ice-floes, through German air strikes, U-boat attacks, marauding surface ships and the constant freezing Arctic storms. Monsarrat wrote: ‘One of the seamen, who’d taken off his gauntlets to open an ammunition locker, had torn off the whole of the skin of one palm and left it stuck to the locker like half a bloody glove, with him staring at it as if it were something hanging up in a shop. But that wasn’t as bad as what happened to the poor bastards that got dropped into the drink.’48 They froze to death within three minutes. By 1942, after three years of war, Monsarrat recalled how the sailors of the Royal Navy had:
developed – they had to develop – a professional inhumanity towards their job, a lack of