The impact of the landing threw him out of his seat, and left him nursing a broken left hand to add to the injury to his finger. But the action ended well for him, and the other three men in his crew, because after they had climbed out of the wrecked Heinkel into its floating rubber dinghy, they were approached by Ledbury and rescued by her crew. The British destroyer’s Lieutenant Commander Hill was so impressed by the German pilot’s bravery that he refused to comply with the normal rule that forbids the making of any detour to rescue a fallen enemy in U-boat infested waters lest such an act jeopardize the safety of the warship’s crew. Also, like one of those merciful jousting knights one reads about from ancient times, he nobly felt it behoved him to save the four Germans because notwithstanding Keppel’s Commander Broome’s subsequent statement that the American destroyer had been responsible, Hill believed it was Ledbury’s guns, rather than Wainwright’s, which had shot down Kanmayer’s plane.26

  Kanmayer’s aircraft was one of four Heinkels that failed to make it back to Bardufoss after the attack. Equally significant was that of those that did return, there were hardly any that were not damaged.27 This reduced the likelihood that the mass attack could be repeated. What must have been particularly galling for the German commanders was the realization that they had been masters of their own misfortune. Their faulty tactics had lessened their chances of success: the firepower focusing on the Heinkel torpedo bombers could have been reduced if the other Luftwaffe unit sent to attack the convoy had been able to deploy at the same time as Eicke’s group rather than arriving on the scene earlier.28 That is not to denigrate what the armed guards and gunners in the Allies’ ships had achieved, for the men protecting PQ17’s merchant ships had shown how difficult it was to decimate a well-disciplined convoy from the air.

  That lesson made what happened next, while the convoy was still heading in a north-easterly direction towards the relative security provided by the ice edge, so difficult to comprehend (see 6B in Map 1, 6 in Map 13 and Note 29 for the location, to the south-east of Hope Island).29 Some minor details in the following account by Ledbury’s Roger Hill have been justly challenged (see Note 30), but no-one disputes the fundamental thrust of what he said took place shortly before 10.30 p.m. that night, less than two hours after the last aircraft had flown away to the south-west: ‘The Commodore hoisted a string of flags. The Yeoman knelt down, and using his big telescope, called out the letters for someone to write down. Then he looked them up in the code book, and said to me: “The Commodore’s Chief Yeoman has made a proper balls-up this time; the signal means: Convoy is to scatter.”

  ‘ “Put the answering pendant at the dip,” I replied (which means: your signal not understood, and makes the originator check it). I saw that the destroyer near me had also got the answering pendant at the dip.

  ‘The Commodore’s ship lowered the flags, and then hoisted the same ones again… At the same time [Commander] Jackie Broome in [the destroyer HMS] Keppel, came up on the radio telephone: “To all destroyers: Strike!, repeat Strike!” ’30 That was the pre-arranged code, which when circulated without a time of origin, warned all destroyers to get ready to receive the order to join Keppel immediately.31

  ‘ “Christ!” I thought, “Here we go. Surface attack by the Tirpitz (the German battleship).” And I searched the horizon with my glasses.’32

  Shortly afterwards, prompted by Broome, Hill issued the order to go full steam ahead to join Keppel.33 Within minutes, Keppel followed by the five other destroyers under Broome’s command, was pulling out ahead of the convoy so that they could all head off to the south-west together, the direction from which their crews expected Tirpitz would appear. But before they made their final move, Broome ordered his chief yeoman to use his most powerful signal searchlight to send a message to Rear Admiral Louis Hamilton, commander of the cruiser force, which was now clearly visible a few miles to the north-east, and which was surging southwards too.34 Hamilton approved Broome’s proposal that the six destroyers should link up with Hamilton’s Cruiser Squadron One.35 Then off they went together towards Norway, with lookouts on every ship scouring the horizon with binoculars for signs of the fearsome German battlegroup which at least some expected to spot on the horizon at any minute.36

  It seems likely that many of the sailors in the Allies’ two converging forces believed at the time that what they were doing was not only right, but that it was heroic. However even then, there were some in the Allies’ warships who reviled what they were witnessing. ‘We hate leaving PQ17,’ Douglas Fairbanks wrote in his diary. ‘It looks so helpless… The ships are going round in circles, turning this way and that like so many frightened chicks… Is the German Fleet out? If so, what of it? That’s what we came up for, isn’t it?’ Later, once he had realized that they were not going to meet up with Tirpitz after all, his diary struck an even glummer chord: ‘The wind is out of our sails. We try and tell ourselves that there must have been good reasons for us to have avoided further action… [But] the men feel ashamed and resentful.’37

  Fairbanks’ gloss represented the charitable interpretation. Howard Carraway in SS Troubadour evidently felt he and his men had been betrayed: ‘Brought into the middle of the fire and [only] then told there was no water,’ was the caustic complaint he scribbled in his diary.38

  But it was not just the abandonment that was causing upset. Some of the men in the ships left behind, who had seen how aircraft and U-boats had been stalking the convoy ever since it was first sighted, were terrified they were being cut loose and left to die. ‘We’re better off as we are,’ wailed Sidney Kerslake, the 22-year-old coxswain on the armed trawler Northern Gem when he heard the new orders. ‘On our own we have no chance at all.’ His youth and the thought of missing virtually all his adult life made the prospect of death particularly horrific. He later admitted that he had only controlled his emotions because he felt it was expected of him on account of his responsible position.

  However, even he lost it when another young member of the crew kept repeating over and again: ‘We’ll never make it’, or words to that effect. ‘I literally had to shake him by the shoulders to get him to stop saying what most of us were thinking,’ wrote Kerslake. The young coxswain only adopted a more fatalistic attitude when it dawned on him that he was possibly becoming downcast for no good reason. ‘I thought: “We are a small ship on a very large ocean, and with a bit of luck, we should take some finding.” ’39

  No such sense of proportion was in evidence in the Soviet Union’s take on the action up to this point, once it became known. In an excoriating critique of their allies’ conduct, the following passages appeared in a letter that the head of the political department of the Soviet Union’s Northern Sea Fleet wrote to his country’s Political Department Commissar:

  ‘At the captains’ conference [in Iceland just before PQ17 set out], the English bragged that the convoy was to be protected by a strengthened escort, and that there was therefore no need to be afraid of any attacks from the air… In theory with this strength, it was possible to repel a large attack… However something strange occurred. As soon as the planes arrived, the military vessels immediately turned around and steamed off in the opposite direction, “heroically” abandoning the merchant ships… In this way the British “warriors” saved their own skins… As the convoy was being dispersed, they said [to those they were supposed to be protecting] “Save yourselves if you can.” ’40

  So what was this strange event to which the Northern Sea Fleet’s political department chief alluded? Was it that Britain, an island nation famed for her navy, had allowed her fleet to become so antiquated, that even when reinforced by American warships, it was no match for Tirpitz, Germany’s gigantic new battleship? Or was it that the British admirals, aided and abetted by their American partners, were at best refusing to take risks to aid another country, or, at worst, were running scared? Or was there something else going on behind the scenes, which was so secret that no-one was saying anything about it?

  2 To Russia with Love

  Main Action: 21–31 August 1941

  Operation Dervish: the first Arctic convoy

  (See Map 1)

  The first of the convoys carrying supplies to north Russia following Germany’s 22 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union (the German Operation Barbarossa) could not have been more different from PQ17. It was a relatively small, low-key affair. Codenamed Operation Dervish, one Dutch and five British merchant ships plus a fleet oiler left Hvalfjord (Whale fiord), north of Reykjavik, on the west coast of Iceland on 21 August 1941, and accompanied by a close escort of three destroyers, three minesweepers and three trawlers reached Archangel ten days later.1

  It was also watched over during part of its journey by an aircraft carrier and two cruisers screened by three destroyers, but their presence turned out to be unnecessary.2 The convoy was not opposed by any of the German surface ships which would eventually be based in occupied Norway whose presence there would later make the passage to northern Russia such an ordeal.

  It can even be said that the journey, later dubbed the worst in the world, was for some a positively pleasurable experience. This was particularly the case for the men and women travelling in the passenger/cargo liner Llanstephan Castle. She doubled up as the convoy’s commodore ship, as well as being the troopship for around five hundred personnel from the RAF’s 151 Wing. They were going to Russia so that they could teach the Russians how to erect, fly and maintain Hurricane aircraft which were being given to the Soviet Union.3 Llanstephan Castle was also carrying the likes of the Polish Legation staff and their wives who were on their way to Moscow. Most of these passengers were relaxed enough to make the most of the ship’s facilities which were up to the standard one might have expected to find in a luxury liner in peacetime.

  Because the liner’s previous voyage had been to South Africa, where she had been re-victualled, the half a dozen dishes on the menu for breakfast included items such as butter and jam, eggs, and grapefruit which had not been readily available in England for more than a year.

  The passengers also included a journalist, and the well-known Polish artist Feliks Topolski, who according to one account went ‘skipping about the ship like a cheerful gnome and never ceasing drawing’.4 The other passengers played deck games, watched boxing and concerts, and attended a series of lectures about Russia’s history and culture, past and present. They were also able to observe some of the natural Arctic phenomena which, unbeknown to them, would play a significant role in the fighting that was to come.

  In his account of the journey, Flight Lieutenant Hubert Griffith, 151 Wing’s adjutant, mentions that he and the other passengers saw what he referred to as a school of whales ‘spouting’. He does not appear to have registered that the presence of such creatures would one day pose a threat to exhausted Arctic convoy escort commanders who would have to make split-second decisions on whether their asdic (sonar) equipment had detected a mammal or a U-boat.

  Similar comments could be made concerning Griffith’s observations about the sun. He wrote: ‘The sun hardly set at all: walking around the boat deck at midnight, the rim of the sun was seen to have set just below the horizon, and half an hour later, it was on the point of rising.’ Little thought appears to have been given to the danger this never-ending daylight would represent for those sailing merchantmen and escorts alike as they attempted to travel along this same route in Arctic convoys during subsequent summers.5

  Morris Mills, a 16-year-old deck officer trainee, who was making his first ever trip in the merchant ship SS New Westminster City, would never forget what impressed him most of all. In the account of his wartime experiences he wrote: ‘The voyage was quite pleasant with sunny days and a moderate sea. Nearing the Arctic ice fields [however], the temperature… plunge[d] at night time, as I found to my cost. There was a magnificent display of Aurora Borealis, and Captain Harris decided to give us a lecture [about it]. We were mustered on the afterdeck and [I] foolishly turned out with only a seaman’s jersey. Within minutes I was chilled to the bone.’

  Apparently the discomfort was worth it. ‘The Northern Lights were spectacular,’ Mills’ account continues, ‘shafting the Arctic skies with a dazzling array of… rainbow colours, flashing and darting through the heavens, reflecting on the seas like sparkling jewels. Dull grey ships would momentarily be transformed into glittering gems, as the myriad splendour darted over their fat, ugly forms.’6

  While engaged in such ecstatic contemplation, it was probably hard to appreciate that when summer changed to winter, these same lights could make all the difference between life and death if you were being hunted by a ship or U-boat on a moonless night.

  There was likewise no opposition to the other supply operation unleashed while Dervish was drawing to an end. Another aircraft carrier left Scapa Flow (the Royal Naval base in the Orkneys) on 30 August 1941, and then steamed, supported initially by a cruiser and three destroyers, part of the way towards north Russia. When they and their reinforcements had shaken off the German aircraft in the fog in the vicinity of Hope Island (south-east of Spitzbergen), the two dozen Hurricane fighter aircraft, operated by the part of the RAF’s 151 Wing on board the carrier, were on 7 September flown off and landed on the airfield near Vaenga (now known as Severomorsk), a base in north Russia’s Kola Inlet, near Murmansk.7

  The aircraft, along with 24 crated Hurricanes carried by the Dervish vessels, at first flown by their British pilots, and subsequently by the Russians they trained, were to protect the north Russian jetties, harbours and bays which would eventually act as reception centres for the aid being transported in the course of subsequent convoy operations.8 Although the first Arctic convoys delivered their supplies to Archangel and its satellite ports, once the coming winter froze the waters leading up to them, Murmansk in the Kola Inlet would become the drop-off point until the thaw the following year. The Dervish minesweepers were to form another part of the convoy set up. They, or their replacements, were to remain in north Russia, and would be used to protect the waters near the bases, and to assist further out to sea if convoys needed to be helped, for example if they were attacked.

  The delivery of the Dervish convoy aid and the supporting aircraft was only a beginning, but it was a symbol of Britain’s, and her allies’, intent. It represented one of the first major attempts to bring succour to the besieged Soviet Union, although much pro-Russia activity on the political and diplomatic fronts and a couple of abortive attempts to attack German shipping near the Norwegian and Finnish coasts had preceded it.

  It had not taken long for Britain to declare how it would react to the German gambit. Starting at 9 p.m. on the night of the invasion, Winston Churchill, Britain’s 66-year-old prime minister, had broadcast on the BBC a pro-Soviet Union speech that had enraptured Ivan Maisky, Russia’s 57-year-old ambassador in London.9 Although it included the words: ‘No-one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years’, it also included the declaration ‘that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people’.10

  It was doubly important because the first reaction by the 59-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt to the invasion was relatively muted: the American president, no doubt fearing a backlash from the public as well as isolationist politicians if he made a rousing speech to match Churchill’s, decided to make do by commenting on 24 June 1941, in response to a question posed at a White House press conference: ‘We are going to give all the aid that we can to Russia.’11

  Churchill’s speech was to be backed up by a written declaration of intent. On 7 July 1941, in his first telegram to Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s 62-year-old leader, after the start of the invasion, Britain’s prime minister had written: ‘We shall do everything to help you that time, geography and our growing resources allow.’12 He had also agreed to the signing of the 12 July 1941 ‘Agreement for Joint Action’ stating that Britain and the Soviet Union would help each other in the war against Germany, and neither would unilaterally make peace.

  But these were just words, and they were not very encouraging words when read alongside Churchill’s 20 July 1941 telegram rejecting Stalin’s suggestion sent two days earlier that Britain should seek to divert German forces from the East by invading northern France. In the same telegram, Churchill warned Stalin he should ‘realize the limitations imposed upon us by our resources and geographical position’.13 The fact that five days later Churchill wrote to Stalin to say that the War Cabinet had agreed, as a one-off, to send the Soviet Union as soon as possible 200 American Tomahawk fighter aircraft only served to highlight the failure by the Western allies to set up a regular supply of arms and equipment on which Stalin’s forces could rely.14

  Given that by 16 July 1941 the German Army, apparently unstoppable, had already captured the city of Smolensk, just 230 miles from Moscow, it is possible that nothing along these lines would have been arranged by Britain and America in time to make a difference, had it not been for the dramatic intervention of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s 50-year-old personal envoy to London. Hopkins feared that Stalin might be tempted to make terms with Hitler unless he was convinced that his putative partners would give meaningful ongoing material support. Hopkins also believed that nothing relating to the Soviet Union would be agreed at the meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill that had been scheduled for the following month unless Stalin first answered some direct questions about the Soviet Union’s chances of successfully resisting the invasion.

  With that in mind, on 25 July 1941 Hopkins, who was staying with Churchill at Chequers, the British prime minister’s country retreat in Buckinghamshire, sent an urgent telegram to the President. Hopkins proposed that he should fly out to see Stalin at once, adding persuasively: ‘I think the stakes are so great that it should be done. Stalin would then know in an unmistakeable way that we mean business on a long term supply job.’15