That was enervating. But not nearly as disturbing as the recurrent thought that a devastating knockout blow might be struck by the Luftwaffe at a time of the Germans’ choosing. The guns on the decks of the merchant ships and escorts, the gunfire coming from the American destroyers being particularly effective, had already batted away three tentative raids (see Note 7 for the American contribution).7 The first, on 2 July, which was made by around six torpedo carrying seaplanes, ended with their torpedoes being dropped miles away, no scalps for the Germans and the loss of one aircraft. 8 Admittedly the second attack during the early hours of 4 July had resulted in an American merchant ship being torpedoed. But it was a one-off strike by a single plane that had just got lucky – the plane had swooped down through a gap in the clouds taking the escorts by surprise – rather than a sign that the convoy’s defences were overwhelmed, leading to fears the torpedoing would be repeated.9

  The emotions that these attacks, and a third limp raid made during the afternoon of 4 July, induced were nothing compared with the fear tinged with excitement generated when the enemy finally appeared in force, or the blind panic demonstrated by at least some of the merchant seamen as they came face to face with the realization that they might be minutes away from annihilation.10

  Ensign Howard Carraway, a 24-year-old US Navy officer from South Carolina in charge of his ship’s armed guard, was well placed to view this and more from one of his gunners’ action stations in the rusty old Panamanian-flagged freighter SS Troubadour. She was chugging along at the back of the convoy’s second column (see PQ17’s formation in Appendix A).11 Afterwards he described the moment when he first appreciated that a large group of aircraft were advancing towards them in the following terms:

  ‘I was relieving half the gun crew… when the Carpenter, using a pair of glasses, called to me to look to the south: (he said) there was a plane headed straight in. I looked, and saw three. Big, black, fast, the noise of their… motors already audible. They were coming in on our starboard quarter.

  ‘ “Man your guns!” I yelled, and scampered for the bridge. Once there, I glanced over [to] the horizon with my glasses, and saw not three, nor six, but twelve of them…

  ‘I turned to look at the Commodore’s ship, ironically named the River Afton (after the peaceful Scottish stream in the famous Robert Burns poem “Afton Water”, as Carraway, who had studied English literature at university, had understood) and saw the dreaded JG signal hoisted. It was late, but it told us we were doing the proper thing. It… [was] code for “Prepare for instant action”.

  ‘I… told [the gunners]… to hold fire until they were in close, then to give ’im hell…’12

  0Hauptmann Bernd Eicke, commander of the 23 Heinkel 111 torpedo bombers from the 1st wing of Kampfgeschwader (KG) 26 which had all of a sudden appeared over the horizon, has also commented on his thoughts and fears at this pivotal moment. The German pilots had good reason to be anxious. They had been flying perilously close to the water in order to avoid detection, and they would have to continue on their low flight paths if the launching of their torpedoes was to be effective. The following extract from Hauptmann Eicke’s report highlights how this spelt danger for attacker and those targeted alike:

  ‘After the southernmost escort ship broadcast the alarm, I noticed what was lying straight ahead of us: the superstructures of an enormous convoy. A mass of funnels and hulls rose up out of the haze.

  ‘I gave the order to attack when we were around 10 kilometres away. The two waves flying behind me came up to the left and right of my wave. This created an open quarter circle, allowing us to make a kind of pincer attack.

  ‘[But] while still a long way from the target, we were greeted with murderous defensive gunfire. We had not only to contend with the ships’ flak; there were also huge pillars of water rising up from the sea towards us, created by the shells fired at us by the British… [warships]. Some were so close, one felt one could just reach out to touch them.’13

  That did not deter Leutnant Konrad Hennemann, the 22-year-old pilot of the first Heinkel to reach the merchant ships. After approaching PQ17 from the rear, he courageously flew up between the ships constituting the convoy’s 4th and 5th columns, whose masters like all the freighter captains had been instructed to stay some 600 yards away from the ships in the next columns. Then when just 200 yards from the starboard side of SS Navarino, the British merchant ship in the second row of the 4th column, his aircraft’s two torpedoes were released. This amounted to point blank range for such a well-trained crew.14

  ‘As the aircraft approached, I put the helm hard over to port in an effort to upset his attack,’ Navarino’s Captain Archibald Kelso reported afterwards. ‘As I was doing so, someone shouted ‘Torpedo!” I ran out and saw a torpedo approaching the ship 45 degrees abaft my beam. I was hoping that as the ship was swinging… the torpedo… might miss… but unfortunately she was not quick enough… and the torpedo… struck the ship amidships under the bridge.’15

  There was an explosion that threw up a fountain of water, and the ship ‘immediately took a list of 30 to 40 degrees [to port] so that the bilge keel came right out of the water on the starboard side,’ Kelso concluded. However according to Carraway, while observing this act of German heroism: ‘a yell [of jubilation] went up. A red glow was seen growing ever larger in [Hennemann’s]… forward hull. A trail of black smoke slid from it… He dove straight into the water [in front of the convoy], tracers from the forward ships’ guns still pouring into his flaming carcass.’16

  In the words of radio operator Robert Henderson, who was stationed in the American merchant ship SS Washington at the front of the convoy’s second column and observed the climactic end to Hennemann’s suicide mission at close quarters: the plane flew across the convoy ‘at an altitude of about seventy-five feet’, and after dropping its torpedoes, it ‘continued across our bow and was a blazing torch when it hit the water.’17

  The downing of the German plane elicited contrasting responses. Captain Willem Sissingh, the 48-year-old master of the SS Paulus Potter, the Dutch ship at the front of the convoy’s left column, was prompted by his crew’s reaction to this event to write in his after the action report: ‘War transforms every man into an animal… On the ship there was enthusiastic applause even as the men in the plane were burning alive.’18

  But that was afterwards. As the crews in the merchant ships were helping their gunners to reload their guns, there was no time for such fastidiousness. Carraway was so buoyed up by this early victory, the fact that three of the planes approaching his ship from behind the convoy had turned tail, and by the powerful booming sound made by the guns attached to two Russia-bound tanks on Troubadour’s deck which his gunners had commandeered, that he could not resist playing an active part in the defence of his ship. He fired his own relatively puny machine gun at another aircraft, ignoring for a moment the rabble that were effectively running amok all around him. He later reported how:

  ‘… all the crew, except a few of the faithful black gang slaving in the heat below, were running around the deck, yelling and screaming in all their forty tongues, looking like demons, as will men… [with] addled brains,… in their bundled arctic clothing, clumsy life jackets, [and] silly [anti-]shrapnel helmets.’19

  So preoccupied was he with the fast-moving plane in his sights that he was not even diverted from his shooting by what he referred to as another ‘loud tearing explosion’ which he later identified as the noise made by the torpedoing of the SS William Hooper, an American Liberty ship, at the back of the convoy’s first column, a few hundred yards away from his ship’s port side. ‘The torpedoes had hit her near the stern on the starboard side,’ he reported. ‘The whole after end of the ship was blown to hell. Some of her explosive cargo must have been hit.’

  His report continues: ‘[But] then my knees buckled, my heart crowded my tonsils, my blood turned to water, and fear gripped me. Headed straight for our side was… [another] torpedo… What chilled me so was the… [anticipated] point of contact, directly below me under the bridge to starboard. I… screamed…: “Torpedo on the starboard beam!”, hopped from the pill box and headed for the after tank… where two men were trapped if the torpedo went off. And it must go off!

  ‘I stuck my head into the wheel house and yelled “Hard a-port!” in an effort to turn the ship’s head away from the torpedo’s track. But I couldn’t stay to follow it up, for the two men aft in the tank were on my mind. I was scared stiff, but I ran, faster I think in all the heavy clothing and boots than I had ever run on a… track, (a judgement which really meant something, coming as it did from Carraway, a keen runner and before the war the sports editor on the local newspaper in his home town in South Carolina). On reaching the tank, I yelled to the boys there… to “get out, torpedo!” They didn’t hear me, and I started to climb the tank, but looked and saw the torpedo a scant fathom (two yards) from the ship’s hull. I dropped to my knees, grasped a nearby hatch cover and held on waiting for the explosion.

  ‘Kneeling thus, as if in prayer, for a few seconds, and hearing nothing, the unbelievable dawned on me. By some miracle, the thing had either missed the ship, or had failed to go off.

  ‘I leapt to my feet and scrambled back forward to my gun. When I got to the bridge deck, I saw the crew watching the port side blabbering crazily… The torpedo was now on the port side, travelling in an arc towards the ship’s side somewhere astern. A Portuguese and [a] Spaniard were standing at the rail, stark terror on their faces, waving the torpedo away, repeating some phrase in their native tongues that could only mean “Go away!” It was pitiful, their terror, but the sincerity of their pleas was touching – and [in retrospect at least] funny.

  ‘When I saw what was happening, I felt a swell of pride. Bill Lawson, a big blond kid from Virginia… was keeping the torpedo away from the ship by the simple method of firing burst after burst of machine gun fire just ahead of it as it turned towards the ship, deflecting it away.

  ‘Up atop the bridge, the Captain was helping by yelling orders to his helmsman, manoeuvring the ship away from the deadly little iron fish. Both of them were cool, collected, logical. The only two such on the ship.’ This was praise indeed, given that in his diary before setting off from Iceland, Carraway had written off Troubadour’s 34-year-old master George Salvesen as a dull ‘squarehead’, a man who ‘is 100% Norwegian… and is scornful of America and Americans, as well as any other nationality except Norwegians.’ But Carraway would not be the first to revise his first impressions of a fellow human being in a life and death situation. That was certainly how Carraway regarded it, as is made clear by the next words in his account.

  ‘I was desperate… This was one of those torpedoes designed to travel in a 100 yard circle and it must be avoided. Back on the bridge I manned my gun and waited. In a few moments I saw the track cross our stern and head for me again. I sighted my gun on it and let fly… at its nose, hoping to set it off, or sink it before it could reach us again. Before the pan was fired out, I saw her nose turn up and vanish. She was sunk. The Troubadour was saved. It was hard to believe, but there it was.’

  Carraway’s was far from the only account by men in the Allies’ merchant ships which described their witnessing a near miss.20 Nor were the escorts immune. HMS Keppel’s Commander Jack Broome reported how his destroyer ‘under full helm, avoided a torpedo by inches.’21 But perhaps the most remarkable survival story on the side of the Allies that day occurred after a torpedo was fired at the starboard side of the Soviet tanker Azerbaijan, the 4th vessel in the convoy’s 6th column. In the words of her captain, Vladimir Nikolaevich Izotov, as the missile hit, ‘our ship shuddered violently, a loud explosion was heard, and the whole stern of the ship… was hidden behind a mass of [linseed] oil and diesel fuel thrown upwards into a huge column that was higher than the mast and which was blazing at the top. The ship abruptly veered to the left, and then leant over to her right.’ 22

  Yet rather than panicking and immediately ordering his men to abandon ship, which might well have been the reaction of the majority of masters in the convoy had they seen such a terrifying sight from the bridges of their ships, Izotov coolly waited to see whether the situation really was irrecoverable. He was rewarded for his bravery when within minutes, the column of oil and scalding steam subsided. Then he set about issuing the orders that would enable the vessel to continue on her journey.

  One group of men was ordered to move the content of one of Azerbaijan’s starboard holds to the port side in order to counteract the list. The engineer repaired one of the engines that had been damaged by the explosion, and the men who had fallen into the sea when their lifeboat had been lowered prematurely and clumsily, were picked up. At around 8.45 p.m., about half an hour after sustaining what at first appeared to be catastrophic damage, Izotov was in a position to order his engineers to go full steam ahead so that they could start the long haul that was designed to see them catch up with the convoy.

  Some of the German Heinkel crews survived in spite of living through equally dangerous circumstances. Eicke, whose plane had reached the back of the convoy, had been so impressed by the clouds of steam and smoke, and the huge fireball, issuing forth out of William Hooper as he had pulled his plane up to avoid the ship’s mast that he temporarily dropped his guard. Seconds later he had been brought back to his senses when his radio operator reported that some of the smoke he could see was being made by his own plane. Thick white smoke was billowing out of his right engine which was on fire. ‘I glanced at the instruments,’ Eicke reported later. ‘The oil pressure was dropping. The temperature was rising.’

  There was nothing for it but to break off the attack immediately. He eventually switched off the burning motor, and he and his crew only made it back to the base at Bardufoss after dropping out of the plane the ammunition drum, and even its armour-plated panels to lighten the plane’s load.23

  Given the intensity of the defensive fire emanating out of the Allies’ ships’ guns, it was not surprising that some of the other German pilots also came to grief. The 32-year-old Roger Hill, the lieutenant commander in charge of the British destroyer HMS Ledbury, which formed part of the protection force on the convoy’s starboard side, later wrote: ‘Up to this time of the war, I had never seen such a barrage put up against an air attack. The whole sky round the convoy was a mass of bursting shells, with the black bursts remaining in the sky. Tracers were going in all directions, and the sea [was] boiling with the falling shrapnel. The noise of the gunfire was continuous, and in the centre [of the convoy there was a]… great pall of black smoke, slowly rising where a ship loaded with arms and ammunition had been hit.’ 24

  The confusion – and cruelty – of war was highlighted by the following extract from the report by the 32-year-old actor Douglas Fairbanks Junior, who in his capacity as aide to the commander of USS Wichita, one of four cruisers in the 1st Cruiser Squadron that was shadowing the convoy, was looking on from five miles away: ‘A plane is falling in flames. It crashes. Great blinding flash of fire hundreds of feet high, then black smoke. Big cheer from Wichita. Like being in the bleachers at a ball game: “Go get the bastards!” Now we hear the explosion and the sickening whoosh of the fire. Looks like a ship is hit badly. Fat smoke curling upwards. Yes, it is a ship. Now another plane dives in flames: another Nazi bites the dust.’25

  No-one has better described what it was like to be on the receiving end of all this shelling and flak when flying at just 20 to 25 metres above the sea than the 27-year-old Leutnant Georg Kanmayer. In his account he related what occurred when he recklessly flew his plane too close to the American destroyer USS Wainwright which was located on the convoy’s starboard bow between 3,000 and 4,000 yards away from the nearest merchant ship: ‘[As soon as] I came within the range of the destroyer Wainwright, I was surrounded by pillars of water. My aircraft swayed as if drunk because of the shells exploding near me, [and] my radio stopped working after being hit.

  ‘When I was close enough, I dropped one of my torpedoes [and] I can still recall how at that point someone in the plane remarked that we were doing OK. It was at that precise moment that I heard a terrible noise, and for a few seconds I was unable to see anything except splinters and dirt.

  ‘When I could see again, I noticed that my aircraft was flying straight at the destroyer. The plane’s left engine and the hydraulic oil that had leaked into the cockpit were on fire, and my body was also being burned by the flames. All the windows and instruments in the aircraft had been shattered.

  ‘Our mechanic… came to my aid. I indicated with my head that I was still conscious. On seeing this, he ran to the back of the plane to fetch the fire extinguisher which I used to put out the flames on me. I realized at that point the index finger on my left hand was in a terrible state, and was only connected to my hand by a piece of skin.

  ‘While I pulled the plane up to the right in a steep curve, my observer shot at the destroyer with the 2 cm cannon, and it was then that the aircraft was hit in its oil tank.

  ‘In the meantime my mechanic had dropped the second torpedo as an emergency measure, but I could not extinguish the fire as the air rushing into the plane directed the flames into the middle of the plane…’

  In the end Kanmayer decided there was no option but to turn off his left engine and endeavour to crash land his plane in the sea. This he managed to do after bouncing a few times, no mean feat given that when he hit the water, he was still travelling at around 125 miles per hour.