According to Harold Charlton, River Afton’s 30-year-old Geordie master, the starboard lifeboat was ‘rushed by the sailors,… firemen and gunners without orders’ with disastrous consequences. He went on to describe how as it was being lowered to the water, ‘a second torpedo struck the ship on the starboard side… blowing the stern portion off and sending the 4-inch gun into the air… The blast overturned the boat, throwing the occupants into the water, the majority of whom lost their lives.’4

  ‘I saw the starboard [life]boat turned in the air,’ wrote George Jamieson, another witness. ‘It got chucked about 30 or 40 feet. There were [about] 14 of them in that boat. I saw some of them fall [out] as the boat was turning over. All that came up… were [about] four.’5

  As River Afton’s stern slowly settled deeper into the water, the ship’s port jolly boat was successfully lowered following Charlton’s order to abandon ship, only for a second calamity to occur after Charlton became the last of the 14 men to board it. ‘The ship had still about two knots way on her,’ Charlton reported, ‘and as the fore part of the boat was being dragged under and taking water, the painters had to be cut, but the boat caught the wreckage of the port motor lifeboat throwing the occupants into the water…

  ‘I heard the Chief Officer shouting for help but could do nothing for him as it was an effort for me to keep afloat and swim in the cold water… My wet coat and briefcase on my back were weighing me under. AB Hanford attempted to rescue him, but had to give up in order to save himself.

  ‘I managed to swim to the upturned boat, and got on to the keel… Lieutenant Cook (a Royal Navy passenger)… also got on to the [bottom of the] boat. “See if we can right it,” I said. We rocked the boat, [and] the rock gathered momentum. Suddenly the boat righted. We clambered in over the stern… But the gunwale was well below [the surface of] the water…

  ‘The bailer I knew was fastened to the keelson. I submerged to try and find it but the cold was too intense… However by standing in the forepart of the boat, about five feet of the after end came out… and my ship’s papers were lost in… [the successful] endeavour to use the case as a bailer.’ Eventually the jolly boat was bailed out sufficiently for another man to be hauled on board.6

  Charlton may have saved one member of his crew, but it had only been achieved by his failing to comply with the rule that requires the master to remain on his ship until everyone else has left it. He had abandoned River Afton while there was still a chance of saving John Wood, the 47-year-old second engineer who had been wounded in the engine room.

  Fortunately, the commodore John Dowding had remained behind to marshal what forces were left on deck. They included Thomas Waller, the 19-year-old second cook, who in spite of the prospect that the U-boat would torpedo the ship again, descended into the shattered engine room so that he could tie a rope around the injured man. After much huffing and puffing, both men were then extracted through the engine room skylight, and the injured man laid out on a stretcher on a small raft on the ship’s deck.

  It was not a moment too soon. Shortly afterwards River Afton was hit amidships on her starboard side by what U-703’s Kapitänleutnant Bielfeld would refer to as the ‘coup de grâce’ torpedo.7 This exploded the ammunition in No. 3 hold. ‘There was a violent explosion,’ Charlton reported. ‘This explosion caused a terrific flash. Clouds of smoke and debris blotted the ship from view. When cleared, I saw the ship had broken in two.’8 Dowding has described how within two minutes of this third strike what remained of ‘the ship rolled over to starboard and then sank vertically’.

  However, a lot happened in that two minutes. According to Dowding, the raft on the upper deck with the wounded engineer on it, ‘was carried across the ship, fouled the derricks and the hatches which were blown off by air below, and was capsized by the mast as the ship sank’.

  ‘I swam to it,’ wrote Dowding, ‘and picked up the wounded engineer who was close to, and two young cooks.’9

  Percy Grey, the 31-year-old chief steward has described how he and another man, who like him had also remained on board River Afton until the last minute to assist Dowding, had an even luckier escape: ‘The vessel sank so quickly, we had no time to do anything, and were dragged under the water with the suction caused by the sinking. It seemed an eternity before I stopped going down, and it was only by struggling furiously that I finally reached the surface.’

  Benjamin Coffey, the 24-year-old first cook, another man who had participated in the rescue of the engineer, was also dragged down. ‘My lungs felt as though they were bursting,’ he complained afterwards. ‘I thought I was going to lose consciousness, but the boilers exploded and this helped me reach the surface again.’

  Both men ended up on rafts that had survived the sinking.10

  ‘Shortly after the ship sank, the submarine surfaced and closed a raft,’ Dowding’s account continues. After going through the usual routine, first seen following the sinking of Empire Byron that morning, a member of the U-boat crew advised the survivors to steer east towards Novaya Zemlya. Given that when the U-boat departed there were just four paddles split between five rafts and a dinghy, such impracticality prompted Dowding to remark drily in his report: ‘Without any paddles [on some of the rafts] this would have been a difficult job!’11

  Charlton was equally pessimistic about their chances: ‘Having about 200 miles to go to make land, and no lifeboats, the position was rather grim,’ he stated afterwards.12 ‘I think we knew that we could not last much longer in the intense cold… Frostbite was setting in. Our clothes were hard with ice. We sat huddled… It was strangely peaceful. No one seemed to fear death. The sea remained calm; God was being good. There were no complaints. No demand for food and water.’13

  At least he and his men were spared the torment of having to witness prolonged suffering by the two members of the crew with the most severe wounds. Trapped as most of them were on rafts, without doctors or medication. there was not much that could be done for them. According to Charlton, the 36-year-old ship’s fireman John Breene had sustained a head injury that was so extreme ‘his brain protruded’. Charlton’s account describes how in an attempt to stop him freezing to death, one of his shipmates ‘held the poor man’s frozen feet inside his shirt under the warmth of his armpits’. But it was to be all in vain; it was not long before he passed away. ‘We laid him to rest… [in] the sea,’ Charlton reported. ‘We let him float [away] in [his] orange life jacket… [Then] we sang “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” ’14

  The second engineer, who remained on the raft occupied by Dowding, also died. As for Thomas Waller, the heroic cook, he never made it onto the rafts or into Charlton’s dingy. ‘The last I saw of him was when he was standing near the point where the third torpedo hit us,’ Percy Grey reported. ‘I think he must have been killed by the explosion.’15

  It was with their hopes fading fast that one last attempt to attract rescuers was essayed. Some smoke flares found on the rafts were lit. They did not look very promising to the demoralized soaking wet survivors whose extremities were already numb from the cold. ‘The… thick reddish… smoke from these flares… never rose more than six feet above the water,’ Dowding wrote in his report, although he added, ‘It behoves one to try everything once.’16

  How right he was. However unimpressive they seemed from close up, their apparent height from afar was enhanced as a result of the elevated mirage effect resulting from temperature inversion that often occurs in freezing cold Arctic conditions: unlike the normal situation in warmer climes, where the higher you get from the earth’s surface, the colder it becomes, in the Arctic, the air near the water or ice often becomes colder than the air above it, and this can result in items near or on the water looking from a distance as if they are suspended in the air. Dowding in his report recalls how he and the other survivors were later told these seemingly unimpressive puffs of smoke appeared to those in HMS Lotus, which at that moment appeared from over the horizon, as ‘pillars of smoke as from a ship on fire’.17

  Although these pillars of smoke, viewed from HMS Lotus, were located in the direction where Tirpitz might have been expected, the fact they told John Hall that he had stumbled across more merchant seamen in trouble was enough for him. He immediately had his ship’s course diverted so that he could steam to the rescue for a second time that day.18

  Suspecting the U-boat that had caused all this misery might still be lurking nearby, he had Lotus approach River Afton’s jolly boat and rafts with extreme caution. Then he quickly had his crew pick up the 36 survivors, all that were left out of the 58 men who had been in River Afton.19 According to Charlton, ‘There was not time to take the dead engineer on board… The raft was his final resting place.’20

  No sooner had the last survivor been brought aboard at around 2.45 a.m. on 6 July, than Lotus’ engines roared into action, and she sped off once again towards the south-east.21 No doubt the exact number of tanks and aircraft lost during that day were the last thing Hall would have wanted to think about. But statisticians back at the Admiralty would later conclude that the seven British merchant ships and seven US ships that were sunk or abandoned on 5 July were carrying 308 tanks, 178 aircraft and 2,218 other vehicles, the kind of numbers which if lost in the course of a land or air battle would have been adjudged a major setback if not a crippling defeat.22

  The River Afton survivors were not the only men whose lives were saved as an indirect result of Pan Kraft’s distress signal. The same desperate plea – ‘Hit by bomb… SOS… 76°50’ N 38°00’ E’ – wrapped up in that haunting morse code message, which had galvanized Lotus’ Lieutenant Hall to return to the danger area where the lives of those in River Afton as well as Pan Kraft would be in jeopardy, also struck a disturbing note in the ears of those listening in on their radios in the quartet of ships to the north which had taken refuge in the ice.23 It was the final movement of that symphony of sound that prompted Troubadour’s Howard Carraway to sum up what he was hearing in the following pithy, and very American, way. ‘All over the Arctic, German planes and subs were raising hell.’24

  Even before hearing it, the signals picked up from other attacked ships were making him more and more anxious. In that day’s diary entry for his wife, he wrote: ‘The big Washington that I mentioned earlier was abandoned after being attacked within 50 miles of us.’25 (The abandoning of Washington is described in Chapter 18.)

  But it was the SOS signal announcing the attack on the much nearer Pan Kraft which pushed him and those in the other ships in the group over the edge.26 ‘It was Harry’s ship,’ Carraway noted in his diary, referring to his friend, ‘the one I had been waiting to hear from…He was not more than 20 miles away according to his [stated] position, and we scanned the horizon for a sight of the ship or the planes…

  ‘Wary now, the trawler skipper (Leo Gradwell)… told us to follow him into the ice to avoid the bombers, [which we did]… We were scared stiff. Planes were within… five minutes of us, and the trawler and our few guns were all the protection we had… We manned our guns and waited… Poor Sparks got very sick, and threw up over the rail from fear and excitement.

  ‘After what seemed an eternity, an hour [or so] passed, and [then] there were no more distress signals. We breathed deeper, [and] felt more secure as we packed further into the ice fields [where] the cakes were getting bigger [and] the ice harder.’27

  On the other hand, those below decks wondered whether saving themselves from the Luftwaffe would result in their falling victim to other terrors. ‘Every moment it sounded as though the bulkhead would burst in under the pressure, or be cut clean… through, as by a giant tin opener,’ wrote Walter Baker, one of two coders in Ayrshire. But fear of the German planes evidently trumped concern about the cutting properties of the ice. Notwithstanding Baker’s concern, they somehow pressed on. His report continues: ‘When the ice became really thick, our bows would rise up over it, and then the weight of the ship would force them down, crack it and on we would go.’28

  Emboldened by the dying down of the distress signals coming from the south, or perhaps deterred by the thickening of the ice to the north, they eventually steered to the south-east and then stopped.

  Leo Gradwell asked Richard Elsden, his first lieutenant, to walk across the nearby ice to talk to the other ships’ crews in an attempt to boost their morale. It was while fulfilling this mission, that Elsden had the idea which was to produce one of PQ17’s iconic images. The ships’ relatively dark silhouettes stood out against the white ice. Why not camouflage with white paint the starboard sides of the ships which would be facing towards the south when the ships’ bows were pointing eastwards, thereby making them harder to spot from the direction where aircraft were likely to appear, and why not complete the job by also painting their decks?29 The idea was swiftly adopted by the commanders of all the ships.

  ‘All hands turned to,’ Carraway wrote. ‘There were thirty and more brushes slapping white paint over our decks, housing, rails, boats, funnel, masts, forecastle, everywhere.’

  Carraway has recorded how before the job was completed, ‘the trawler came alongside. Her skipper (Gradwell)… and his first lieutenant, a kid in his twenties, both English to the core, came aboard for a war council. [Gradwell]… asked [Troubadour’s ] Captain Salvesen if he wanted to head south to Russia, or what. The Captain [Salvesen] said he thought we’d better go back into the ice as far as we could, finish the painting and let the excitement die down a little before we made a run for it… That was agreeable, and we headed once more into the ice.

  ‘The other ships soon followed. About ten miles into the heavy stuff, we found an opening and stopped. The others stopped too, south of us, but within easy signalling distance.’

  While they lay in this position, Carraway was given the chance to have a rest. When he woke up, he was so astounded by the spectacle, he was prompted to write in his diary: ‘The ship was a mass of white. I never saw such a transformation.’30

  The crews in the four ships had vied with each other to produce the best results. According to Ironclad’s William Carter, the steward in his ship ‘went into the dirty laundry hampers, and got out sheets and table cloths. We spread these on the deck, and weighted them down with spare fire bricks used to repair the fire box of the boiler. They were also wrapped around the masts and secured in place by tying them with string.’

  Paradoxically the sun, which usually tends to assist observation, only served to improve the blending-in effect. ‘The glare from the bright sunlight was blinding,’ Carter reported, ‘with us surrounded by solid white ice for miles around. All of us were bothered somewhat by snow blindness. We all had dark goggles, but they would not stay clear of vapor, so we stopped using them… The ships were [only] about a hundred yards apart. [But] in the sun’s glare from the ice, we could barely see each other.’ 31

  Reassuringly even Gradwell, the group’s leader, was satisfied with what they had done. Carraway noted in his diary: ‘The trawler signalled us that we were very nearly invisible.’32

  For the moment at least they were safe. But knowing they could not stay where they were forever, they soon began to wonder how long this blessed state could last.

  21 To Add Insult to Injury

  Main Action: 5 July 1942

  In the minefield near Iceland, QP13

  (See Maps 1 and 23)

  Gossamer sinking: GMT + 3

  QP13 sinkings: GMT

  After all the torment suffered by PQ17’s merchant seamen in the course of 5 July 1942, the last thing the officials in the British Admiralty and Ministry of War Transport wanted to see was another disaster on the same day. Yet partly as a result of their departments’ own inefficiency during the run up to the westbound QP13’s departure, that is what was to happen during the passage of that convoy.

  It is possible that the repercussions from the bombing of Murmansk and the nearby bays in the Kola Inlet during the days leading up to 27 June 1942, when the bulk of the freighters participating in QP13 left the inlet, were partly to blame (QP13 consisted of 23 merchant vessels which sailed from Murmansk and another 12 from Archangel).1 The bombing was so heavy that the British headquarters in Murmansk had to be moved to the town’s outskirts. At the beginning of July 1942 Rear Admiral Richard Bevan, the Senior British Naval Officer North Russia, was moved to confirm that most of the town was ‘in ruins’. His 2 July 1942 report that effectively formed part of his war diary confirmed: ‘Incendiaries caused the many wooden structures to be burnt down, only rows of brick chimneys being left standing.’2

  The damage was not confined to residences. During June 1942 three Allied merchant ships (the British Empire Starlight, and the American Steel Worker and Alcoa Cadet) which had reached northern Russia in previous convoys were sunk in the Kola Inlet by a mixture of bombs and mines dropped from German planes. The bombing near the Murmansk hospital became so intense that it had to be closed down, and all its patients moved to other hospitals near the Kola Inlet and in Archangel. British administrators in Murmansk were also preoccupied by the fallout from another acute emergency which occurred just three days before QP13, and PQ17, were due to sail.

  At around 9 a.m. (Russian time: GMT + 3) on 24 June 1942, in the course of yet another bombing raid, the British minesweeper HMS Gossamer, which was anchored in the Kola Inlet’s Mishukov Bay (near Mishukov Point, a short distance to the north-west of Murmansk – see Map 23), was hit.

  At least one of the bombs struck Gossamer aft, the resulting explosion practically severing her stern from the front of the ship. Some 15 men were killed as a direct result of the explosion.

  When Gossamer shortly afterwards began to tip over slowly to starboard, the survivors were ordered to abandon ship. According to Gossamer’s Lieutenant Commander Thomas Crease: ‘The only two wounded men it was not possible to get away would undoubtedly have died anyhow, the one with a shattered spine, and the other with a very severe chest wound and two broken legs.’ However, a handful of men ended up being drowned.3