All Hell Let Loose (49 page)

Churchill remained implacable: he insisted that the navy must brave the passage, whatever its perils, carrying to Russia such weapons and supplies as Britain and America could spare. He was undeterred by the prospect of battle. In 1941–42 one of his foremost objectives was to exploit opportunities to engage German forces; he thus demanded the establishment of a continuous cycle of Arctic convoys. The few merchantmen which Britain sent to Russia in late 1941 arrived unscathed, carrying small quantities of tanks, aircraft and rubber. The Germans barely noticed their passage.

In 1942, however, as the British began to transport substantial shipments eastwards, Hitler’s forces intervened with mounting vigour. 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 dockers, especially in Glasgow, gained a deplorable reputation for carelessness in cargo stowage which contrasted with painstaking American practice. Not only did much materiel 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, 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 sea water flooded into her gashed hull, the captain stopped the ship to prevent her from driving under. Somehow the damage was contained.
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 lifejackets, 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 up by the hair. I flopped on the deck … and then the numbness started wearing off and the cold hit me. I have never before or since felt anything like the pain that wracked my body.’

PQ11 in February 1942 was the last convoy to enjoy a relatively easy passage. Its successor encountered severe early difficulties in pack ice. Thereafter, PQ12 played blind man’s buff with the
Tirpitz
, which intelligence reported at sea. Ships’ masters vented their rage when a BBC news bulletin announced that ‘a valuable cargo is on its way to Russia’. As so often in the war, the demands of propaganda clashed with those of operational secrecy. In March, the Royal Navy had its best chance of the year to sink the German battleship, when Albacore torpedo-bombers intercepted and attacked it at sea; two planes were lost, but no hits scored. Churchill angrily contrasted the Fleet Air Arm’s failure with the achievement of Japanese aircraft three months earlier in sinking two British capital ships. The most plausible explanation was that the Japanese off Malaya were highly trained and experienced fliers, while most of the Albacore crews were relative novices.

A quarter of PQ13’s twenty-one merchantmen, 30,000 tons of shipping, were lost to U-boats and bomber attacks after the convoy became badly scattered in a storm. A torpedo malfunction caused the cruiser
Trinidad
to inflict crippling damage on itself while attempting to sink a damaged German destroyer. As for merchant ship survivors, the experience of those from the
Induna
, sunk by a U-boat on 30 March, was not untypical. Two lifeboats got away in the darkness, carrying many badly burned or scalded men. Hypothermia quickly killed the injured – seven died on the first night. The boats’ fresh water froze solid. A lifeboat was eventually found occupied by nine men of whom only one, a Canadian fireman, remained alive. Of
Induna
’s crew of sixty-four, twenty-four were rescued, among whom all but six lost limbs to frostbite.

Because of the
Tirpitz
threat, each convoy required the protection of almost as many warships as there were merchantmen. Destroyers provided close protection against U-boats. Merchantmen were fitted with AA guns, and the assembled ships could mount a formidable barrage against attacking Heinkels. Cruisers offered cover against German destroyers as far east as Bear Island, to the north of Norway –
Edinburgh
fought off such an assault on PQ14. Over the horizon lurked big ships of the Home Fleet, hoping to intervene if German capital units sortied.

Two days east of the Icelandic assembly point, a German long-range aircraft – usually a Focke-Wulfe Condor – approached the convoy and thereafter circled just out of gun range, transmitting position signals to the Luftwaffe in Norway. Sailors hated the taunting menace of ‘Snoopy Joe’, harbinger of almost continuous air and U-boat attacks for days thereafter. The slow stammer of ships’ automatic weapons, the black puffs of exploding shells filling the sky, pillars of water from near-misses and detonating torpedoes, the roar of low-flying aircraft and dull explosions of bombs bursting below decks imposed themselves on a seascape made by waves, ice and ‘Arctic smoke’ – a layer of mist that often overlay the freezing water.

Primitive air cover was introduced in April 1942 with the first CAM ship – a merchantman fitted with a catapult Hurricane, whose pilot was expected to parachute into the sea after completing his only sortie. The CAM ships’ planes seldom achieved success – they were usually launched too late – and demanded suicidal courage from aircrew, who had at best an even chance of being snatched from the sea before they froze. Each convoy experienced its own variation of tragedy. Six homeward-bound ships of QP13 were lost after straying into a British minefield off Iceland. When PQ 14’s commodore’s ship was torpedoed, the engine-room staff were immediately blown to fragments as its cargo of ammunition exploded. Forty others survived to jump into the sea, where all but nine died from blast injuries inflicted when a trawler attempted to depth-charge the attacking 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, on whom he later operated. The
Ocean Voice
was hit by a bomb which blew a huge hole in her side. Yet in calm seas, she was able to keep station and at last reached Russia ‘with God’s help’, in the words of a sailor.

Some ships ran out of anti-aircraft gun ammunition, but many attacks were beaten off. Men on the upper decks of the Polish destroyer
Garland
suffered shocking casualties from bomb near-misses. At Murmansk, the words ‘LONG LIVE POLAND’ were found scrawled on the ship’s upperworks in its crew’s blood; ‘They were hard men,’ a Merchant Navy officer said respectfully. All but seven ships of the convoy got through, and some 371 crewmen and gunners from lost vessels were rescued by extraordinary feats of courage and skill. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C of the Home Fleet, whose caution Churchill deplored, asserted that ‘the strategical situation was wholly favourable to the enemy’, but acknowledged that PQ16’s success was ‘beyond expectations’.

Yet the following month witnessed the most discreditable episode of the Royal Navy’s war. PQ17, comprising thirty-six ships, most of which were American, sailed from Iceland on 27 June, carrying 594 tanks, 4,246 vehicles, 297 aircraft and over 150,000 tons of military and general stores. The British knew from Ultra that the Germans planned a major effort against the convoy, including a sortie by capital ships codenamed
Rosselsprung
– ‘Knight’s Move’. Hitler had declared that ‘Anglo-American intentions … depend on sustaining Russia’s ability to hold out by maximum deliveries of war materials.’ At last, he recognised the importance of the Arctic convoys. The Admiralty assumed operational direction of PQ17 and its supporting units, because it had access to the latest Ultra intelligence, and experience showed that Tovey, at sea in his flagship, could not effectively control a large and widely dispersed force maintaining wireless silence.