The second unofficial spokesman for the PQ13 survivors was Induna’s engineer officer Bill Short, whose testimony about the sinking of the ship and the subsequent journey in one of her lifeboats was also featured in the previous two chapters. Included in one of his post-war interviews is the following account of what he termed the very ‘basic’ treatment he received at the hospital for his frostbitten limbs:

  ‘They had to take me down to a makeshift operating theatre when they discovered the gangrene… It was a large classroom… There were six tables [in it]… I was placed on [one of these tables]… and there was a white cloth placed in front of me… [Then] someone said in broken English: “We’re going to take your legs off.” So they went ahead and took my legs off. I’d no general anaesthetic. I’ve only a vivid recollection of… an excruciating pain… [before] I passed out…

  ‘They had literally chopped my legs off as if you’d cut a piece of meat right through. And the bones and everything else were sticking out… They’d cut channels in my legs to let the gangrene poison seep out.

  ‘The only answer the Russians had for gangrene was “Chop it off”. And that’s what they did.’11

  But the amputation was just the preamble to something which in the short term was much worse. After their operations, both Short and Mills were regularly subjected to the agonizing removal of their dressings, which were fabricated out of what Mills described as ‘a stiff paper like material’.12 ‘There is only one way to describe the dressings,’ Short reported. ‘They were pure hell. It was like taking paper off of raw meat… When they took them off, I used to yell. You could not stop yourself.’13

  According to Mills, ‘it normally took three nurses to change the dressing, one to hold you down, one to hold the stump in a vice-like grip, and the other nurse to swab and pick away at the stump’. If the nurse doing the holding was not being attentive, there could be consequences that would have been unthinkable in a Western hospital. In the following extract from his memoirs, Mills described what occurred when the nurse doing the picking touched a sensitive nerve, causing his stump to twitch so violently that it thumped against the underside of a nearby trolley, sending the instruments that had been on it crashing all over the room:

  ‘The Army Doctor in attendance came rushing over… Fumbling under his white coat, he withdrew an enormous service pistol, pointing [it] with a trembling hand straight between my eyes, screaming a torrent of abuse. I tried to shut my eyes to blot out the spectre of having my brains blown out, but could not [drag]… my… gaze away from the trembling finger curled around the trigger… Then, regaining some semblance of control, he stormed out of the room.’14 The dressing procedure was then resumed as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place.

  The gun-pointing was just the most extreme of a number of acts by the hospital staff that the merchant seamen would probably never have encountered had they been cared for in London. The Russian nurses were particularly partial to pushing a rubber pipe down the throats of anyone who had frostbite so that tepid water poured into the top end could defrost any ice that had formed in the patient’s stomach. Then there was the Russians’ use of burning hot goose grease in a jar that was placed upside down on the patient’s chest, which was believed to be another way to heat up the inner organs after a man had been frozen.

  The Russian nurses also liked to treat their patients with enemas. This was resisted by some of the British contingent. In one of his interviews, Austin Byrne recalled how in a desperate attempt to avoid having a tube inserted up his anus following his arrival in the hospital, when he saw what the nurses were inflicting on the other men in the assembly hall, he fled to the toilet, and would not allow it to be flushed until the nurses had inspected the faeces which, notwithstanding the near starvation diet in the boat, he somehow forced out.

  It has to be said that it was not just the patients who were appalled by their treatment in the hospital. No-one was more critical than John Ballantyne, the destroyer Ashanti’s 27-year-old surgeon lieutenant, who for a short period during June 1942 was the acting Base Medical Officer in the Kola Inlet.15 The official report he wrote contained the following damning indictment: ‘No words of mine can [adequately] describe the deplorable conditions under which the patients [in this hospital] were treated. “Bloody awful” in its literal sense is the nearest I can get!’16

  When assessing the treatment of frostbite, and surgical procedures following gangrene or sepsis, one of the hospital’s main tasks in relation to the PQ13 survivors rescued from the lifeboats, he wrote: ‘The Russian doctors seem to lack the very fundamentals of medical and surgical practice.’ He complained that when carrying out amputations, the Russians liked to make their cut through the line of demarcation, the infected area between the gangrenous and healthy tissue, a practice which was likely to result in more infection, requiring another amputation later.

  He was equally scathing about the Russian post-operative dressing procedure so hated by Mills and Short, which he branded ‘medieval’. It was done, he said, ‘without anaesthesia on the ground floor of the hospital (two floors down from the ward housing the PQ convoys survivors) under conditions vaguely simulating a dungeon where no screams could be heard’.17

  Probably because of shortages, pain relief was regarded as a luxury. Another British surgeon lieutenant, writing in May 1942, pointed out that: ‘In cases where the duration of the operation exceeds that of the [local] anaesthetic, re-injection… is rarely seen. The patient feels progressively more pain but the operation proceeds, the patient being held if necessary.’18

  It should be stated however that there was no suggestion by any of the surgeons quoted that the Russians gave their own men preferential treatment. Ballantyne was of the opinion that ‘the low standard of medical practice… [is] due to the fact that they assess the value of human life at a lower value than we do. They therefore hold the view that if a man becomes a casualty, he is no longer of use to his country, and a minimum of time and expense is wasted upon the patient.’

  This analysis was backed up by the treatment of a Russian soldier that was observed by Mills. The man he said ‘had an evil sack of pus hanging from his stomach wound. The woman army doctor ordered him to stand to attention. Then taking up a surgical knife slit the stomach releasing the stinking pus to run down his leg. The man swayed but pulled himself together when the doctor snarled at him. A rough dressing was applied and he was dismissed.’

  Those were just the complaints about the hospital’s medical care. Ballantyne also lambasted the shortage of nurses, which meant that patients often had to make do without the level of support they needed: According to Ballantyne: ‘If a patient wished to open his bowels at a mealtime, then he did so, without screens around his bed.’

  Not that anyone in his senses would voluntarily eat the food. Ballantyne described it as ‘nauseating, a type of gelatinous bread, rice and yak,’ adding, ‘its poorness in quality and the unappetising way in which it was served defy all description’.19

  And that was without asking how patients could be expected to eat when there was a foul odour pervading the air as a result of the primitive sanitary arrangements, and when ‘overriding all was the fearful stench of sepsis’.20

  As if the jeopardy arising from the Russian medical and administrative shortcomings were not sufficient, an extra dimension was tacked on as a result of the frequent bombing raids. ‘This hospital… stands on a hill dominating the town,’ wrote Ballantyne, ‘its vast white walls making an obvious landmark… No visible red crosses were shown on its roof.’ Because of this, it was almost inevitable that it would sooner or later become a target. Even before this happened, the explosions made by the bombs which were being dropped during what Ballantyne referred to as the ‘frequent raids’ literally made the hospital rock.

  ‘Naturally… [the patients] were terror stricken,’ wrote Ballantyne, ‘to such an extent that absence of arms and legs proved no hindrance to their diving under their beds, as a result of which as often as not they injured and hurt themselves, and would have to have their wounds redressed,’ with all the agony that entailed.21

  Mills in his memoirs recorded how the medical staff would run for the air raid shelters when the German aircraft attacked, leaving the patients to fend for themselves, adding: ‘One night [when this occurred], a Polish seaman with terrible stomach wounds fell out of bed and lay writhing… on the floor, his life blood spreading an obscene stain… We shouted, screamed, bang[ed] objects on the floor, to no avail. He took an incredibly long time to die, ranting and raving… In the morning the nurses came and took the body away.’22 Nobody asked any questions.

  Mills and Short appear to be the only amputees whose detailed accounts of their treatment in Murmansk in the immediate aftermath of PQ13 are freely available to the public. But a document to be found in the National Archives in Maryland, America contains a list of nine other Allied seamen who thanks to their service during PQ13 and subsequent amputations in Russia almost certainly endured similar hardships.23 Ballot’s 45-year-old bosun Peter Hyde, who was excluded from the list, possibly because he ‘only’ had his ten toes amputated, was subsequently quoted in The Boston Globe in the USA, saying, ‘Thank God I still have my hands. You should see some of the other fellows.’24

  This comment was probably a veiled reference to among others, Carlos Luz, a Portuguese seaman, who like Hyde had transferred from Ballot to Induna via Silja before making it into Induna’s starboard lifeboat. The National Archives Maryland list reveals that because of frostbite, his hands were amputated as well as his legs. But Short has reported that he was nevertheless ‘an inspiration to us all. That man used to walk around on his knees.’25 Notwithstanding his disability, he somehow managed to entertain the other patients in the Russian hospitals where he was cared for by playing a harmonica. Such snapshots put a positive gloss on his true feelings. According to Geoff Jelbart, another patient who was in hospital with him, ‘during the day he was the happiest fellow in the ward… but at night when I couldn’t sleep, I would hear his broken-hearted sobbing. I believe he had a wife and several children in Portugal’.26

  After the first frenetic rush to save the rescued seamen from the ravages of gangrene, the tension in the assembly hall dropped. This gave the young men in the hospital the opportunity to joke and misbehave like rowdy schoolboys. Some of their ribaldry was in the worst possible taste. It sometimes amounted to iniquitous racism and bullying. Because their diet – which almost invariably consisted of rice and bread, with yak thrown in only occasionally – was so monotonous, a lot of their joking revolved around food. Short recalls how when told meat was on the menu, one of them would quip: ‘Someone is going to have an amputation today.’27

  Jimmy Campbell, Induna’s 15-year-old cabin boy, who had part of his right leg and his left foot amputated, and who, as already mentioned in Chapter 7 lost four fingers of his left hand, as well as losing the ability to bend the fingers of his right hand, later remembered the larking around that occurred after a nurse in the hospital found the time to put him into a hot bath, with his bandaged hands and what remained of his two heavily bandaged legs hanging over the side:

  ‘I was lying there with my mind miles away, when I became conscious of a lot of giggling, and the nurse talking to someone behind me. She must have been telling them who I was and why I was there, because the next minute, I was surrounded by about twenty naked women. I… had never seen a naked woman. My eyes were popping out of my head, and because I couldn’t get my bandages wet, I couldn’t cover myself. The girls obviously noticed [my excitement] because they started laughing and giggling, and were talking nine to the dozen [until] my nurse said something to them, and they all returned to their showers.’ He was later told they were Red Army girls who defended the surrounding area with ack-ack (anti-aircraft) guns.28

  Thus these mutilated sailors, who for a time had feared they would never experience normal life again, discovered that there was something to live for after all. And rather than wishing they could be allowed to die without ever seeing their families and loved ones again, they began to wonder when it would be their turn to go home.

  9 Saved by the Bell

  Main Actions: 11 and 16 April 1942

  Sinking of Empire Cowper and Empire Howard, QP10 and PQ14

  (See Map 1)

  At the British Chiefs of Staff meeting on 1 April 1942, while some of PQ13’s seamen in their lifeboats were still counting the cost of participating in the so-called Murmansk Run, the First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound noted the ‘increased difficulties of running convoys to Northern Russia.’ This he said was because: ‘The German Air Force had been considerably strengthened in Norway. There were also the German Naval units based in Norwegian waters and in addition some 10 U-boats…’ Taking into account the threat posed by these German forces, he concluded: ‘The present month was the most difficult due to the inability to take the more northerly route until the ice melted.’1

  The ice could certainly be correctly regarded as the convoys’ enemy number 2, if not number 1. Within days of the next convoy, PQ14 (around 25 merchant ships) setting out from Hvalfjord, Iceland, on 8 April 1942, a combination of damage caused by the nine-foot-deep ice encountered, the failure by the crews of some ships to see a change of direction signal made by the commodore, and the difficulty in following the other ships in front because of fog had whittled down the convoy to a rump of just eight merchant ships.2 The damaged and the lost returned to Iceland whereas the intrepid eight carried on. They were protected by the light cruiser Edinburgh, the ship in which the 18th Cruiser Squadron’s Rear Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter flew his flag, six destroyers, four corvettes and two armed trawlers.3

  It was this group of vessels which was sighted south-west of Bear Island by the crew in a German Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane on 15 April.4

  U-boats were soon on the convoy’s tail, the bearings of their signals first being registered on the escorts’ high frequency direction finding (HF/DF) equipment during the early hours of 16 April.5 The escorts’ commanders’ reaction did not always receive the approbation of the merchant ship crews. Concern was raised in the commodore’s ship Empire Howard at the way two of the destroyers had at 2.20 p.m. that day turned away from their positions in the escort screen protecting the PQ14 freighters to stage a counter-attack.

  ‘The Commodore (Eric Rees) said to me at the time that he hoped the destroyers were not being decoyed away from the convoy,’ Captain John Downie, Empire Howard’s 36-year-old master, recalled later, in his report. He evidently took what the commodore said seriously. Who would not have, after hearing it spoken by a man with Eric Rees’ experience? As well as spending a lifetime at sea, the 55-year-old commodore had achieved renown for having been on duty in the liner Carpathia when on 15 April 1912 her crew had rescued the survivors from the sunk Titanic, almost exactly 30 years to the day before Rees’ most recent warning was voiced.

  Rees was right to be worried. Half an hour later, when the convoy, by now formed up into four columns of two ships, was a short distance to the south-east of Bear Island, that is well inside what the destroyer Bulldog’s Commander Maxwell Richmond referred to as ‘the U-boat danger area’, Downie felt the ship – the leader of the 3rd column from the left – shudder three times (see Note 6 for location).6 His report confirms: ‘We were struck by a torpedo in the boiler room on the starboard side, followed by a second torpedo seconds later which struck the ship in the engine room, followed 10 seconds later by a third torpedo which struck the ship between No. 4 and 5 holds.

  ‘The first torpedo burst the boilers and the ship became enveloped in steam and smoke. The second torpedo shattered the engines, whilst the third torpedo caused the magazine to explode and completely shattered the after part of the vessel.’

  It was clear that the ship’s crew were going to have to swim for it since she was going down fast, and as Downie stated, ‘the explosion had blown all the boats back on board in pieces’.

  ‘I stepped into the water from the lower bridge, and scrambled as far away from the ship as I was able,’ Downie reported. ‘I had not got very far before the bow of the ship reared up and the ship slid under rapidly stern first.’7

  It is likely that Downie, like most men who served in the Arctic, had been told ad nauseam that it was impossible to survive more than a few minutes in icy water. In his report he specified that the water temperature was 29 °F (about -1.6 °C). But he was of the opinion that it was not the cold which did for many of the crew (see Note 8 for casualty statistics).8 ‘Whilst we were swimming about, the escorting destroyers were dropping depth charges amongst us,’ he wrote. ‘I think the concussion from them was directly responsible for the deaths of many of the men as several of the men were [subsequently] picked up with broken necks.’

  He believed that might have explained why the commodore did not survive: ‘Commodore Rees… was spoken to in the water by my Second Officer soon after the ship sank. He was trying to smoke a cheroot… and appeared to be perfectly all right when last seen. Shortly after this, the destroyers were dropping the depth charges and it may be possible that he was [also] killed by concussion.’

  Downie’s report goes on to state that he believed the death toll was tragically increased still further because of what happened after he and the other ‘survivors’ were rescued by the crews of the trawlers Northern Wave and Lord Middleton : ‘We were all given a small amount of spirits on board the trawlers… One man on board the Northern Wave and eight of the men on the Lord Middleton… went to sleep and did not wake up again. A signal from a medical officer of an escort vessel warning the officers of both trawlers against giving spirits to the survivors was received too late, as the spirits had already been given when it was received.’9