World War II Behind Closed Doors (21 page)

THE ARCTIC CONVOYS

For the Soviets, the two main priorities in their relationship with their Allies remained the demand for the opening of the second front and confirmation of the legitimacy of their pre-1941 borders, but a close third on their wish list was the continuation – and possible increase – in supplies of goods and military equipment.

But here again, as far as Stalin was concerned, the Western Allies had let the Soviet Union down. A joint British-American delegation, led by Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Supply, and Averell Harriman, Roosevelt's special envoy, had arrived in Moscow at the end of September 1941 and signed an agreement that the Western Allies would supply a huge amount of equipment to the Soviet Union each month, including 500 tanks and 400 aeroplanes, plus quantities of tin, zinc, copper and other badly needed raw materials.
⁷³
But this promise had not been met – only a tiny amount of aid arrived in November and December. Beaverbrook resigned from the government in February 1942, partly in protest at the ‘lack’ of aid to the Soviet Union and also to campaign openly for the Western Allies to mount a swift second front – a campaign that clearly touched a chord in
Britain, where fifty thousand people attended a rally in London in May 1942.
⁷⁴

In the early months of 1942 the flow of aid increased to the Soviet Union, although it never reached the optimistic levels pledged by the Moscow agreement of September 1941. Much of the supplies were sent via railway from Iran or across the Pacific to Vladivostok, but a significant amount arrived in the Soviet Union by one of the most dangerous wartime sea routes – up the coast of Norway and around the Barents Sea to the northern ports of the Soviet Union, chiefly Murmansk and Archangel.

The first convoy left Liverpool for Archangel on 12 August 1941, arriving in the Soviet Union on the 31st, but the first of the famous ‘PQ’ convoys (named after the first two initials of the planning officer in the Admiralty, Commander Philip Quellyn Roberts) sailed from Hvalfjord in Iceland on 29 September. Churchill promised Stalin in October 1941 that a convoy would leave every ten days for the Soviet Union, but it proved impossible to keep to this ambitious schedule – a failure that only served to irritate Stalin further.

However, the Soviet leader failed to recognize the immense difficulties faced by these convoys. At the beginning it was primarily the weather: during the winter ice formed all over the exposed areas of the ships, and the crews knew that they would survive for only a few minutes if they fell into the sea. But once the weather improved, the danger increased. The combination of the long summer nights, the concentration of German aircraft in northern Norway, the constant threat from U-boat attack and the slow speed of the merchant ships in the convoys, which were relatively unprotected from air attack, now made the voyage hazardous in the extreme. So much so that on 16 May 1942, less than a week before Molotov's arrival in London, the British Chiefs of Staff had discussed the question of whether or not to send PQ16, a convoy shortly scheduled to leave Iceland en route to Murmansk.

The fate of PQ13, which had left Reykjavik in Iceland on 20 March, was known to all the Chiefs of Staff – and the knowledge made them anxious. Five out of the twenty merchant ships on that
convoy had been lost, together with one escort vessel. On one of the merchant ships, the
Induna
, out of a crew of 66 only 24 had survived – and only six of these had finished the journey with all their limbs intact. Two other Allied merchantmen were subsequently sunk by German air raids in the Soviet port of Murmansk. And although the last convoy, PQ15, had not suffered as much, the Chiefs of Staff thought this ‘gave a false impression as regards the possibility of getting convoys through to North Russia’. Past experience showed, they felt, that ‘unless the weather is unsuitable for flying the chances of even a ship steaming at 18 knots getting through without being attacked from the air are very remote’.
⁷⁵
So on 16 May they recommended to the Prime Minister that, until the ice had receded further and the convoys could follow a more northerly route that would take them a greater distance from the German air bases in Norway, ‘it would be better to defer the sailing of our convoys’. As a result, at least two planned convoys would have to be cancelled.

Since the next convoy, PQ16, was due to sail just two days later, on the 18th, the matter was clearly urgent. Churchill gave his answer on the 17th in a note to General Ismay: ‘Not only Premier Stalin but President Roosevelt will object very much to our desisting from running the convoys now. The Russians are in heavy action and will expect us to run the risk and pay the price entailed by our contribution…. My own feeling mingled with much anxiety is that the convoy ought to sail on the 18th. The operation is justified if a half get through. The failure on our part to make the attempt would weaken our influence with both our major allies. There are always the uncertainties of weather and luck which may aid us. I share your misgivings but I feel it is a matter of duty’.
⁷⁶

The following day Churchill put the question of the sailing of PQ16 to the War Cabinet. But since he had already decided what the answer to the Chiefs of Staff should be, it was a foregone conclusion. Churchill first outlined in some detail the Admiralty's concerns, and then listened to a suggestion that perhaps Stalin should be asked if he really wanted these convoys to try to get through, given that half of them might be lost. This notion was
quashed at once with the reply that ‘the decision was one which we must take ourselves and ought not to place on other shoulders’. Churchill then reiterated that ‘it was our duty to fight these convoys through, whatever the cost…. The effect on war comradeship between the United Nations, of cancellation of the May Convoy would, I fear, be very serious’.
⁷⁷

Churchill could not have made it clearer that the decision to let PQ16 sail was a political and not a military one. By explicitly announcing that he was prepared to send this convoy on the basis that ‘The operation is justified if a half get through’ he was demonstrating that he was ready to sacrifice hundreds of British, American and other Allied lives, plus eighteen fully laden merchant ships, in order to show Stalin that the British were serious in their desire to help the Soviet war effort. In pure military terms, contemplating sending a convoy where ‘only half get through’ was dubious in the extreme. But in cold political terms in the circumstances of the time, it made sense.

The timing of the decision was vital. Molotov was due to arrive in London in a few days and Churchill knew that he would be calling once again for a second front. And since Churchill was aware that he could not provide military assistance on that scale, at least, he must have thought, the British could demonstrate that they were prepared immediately to sacrifice something to help the Red Army – that they were prepared, as he put it, ‘to pay the price entailed’ by their alliance with the Soviet Union. And though the sailors, soldiers and airmen who waited on board the merchant ships and assorted escort vessels that constituted convoy PQ16 knew nothing of these political machinations, they did know, in the words of Eddie Grenfell,
⁷⁸
a Royal Navy sailor on the
Empire Lawrence
, that ‘this was not going to be a pleasant journey, because by this time we'd heard about the mass air attacks, and, of course, I knew about the weather up there’.

Neil Hulse
⁷⁹
was a merchant sailor on board the same ship, and remembers that the Arctic ‘didn't have a very good reputation for voyages’. So much so that he had not initially wanted to sail on PQ16: ‘I went with [some] others and we decided we'd
try to get a transfer to another ship because we hadn't yet signed on for this voyage. [So] I went across Liverpool, to Lime Street Station to travel home and wait for an appointment for another vessel’. But as he sat in the station buffet at Lime Street, Hulse suddenly felt ‘ashamed of himself’. He thought of the example set by Captain Darkin of the
Empire Lawrence
, a man in his seventies who had volunteered to come back and serve the war effort. So he changed his mind, went back to Liverpool docks and joined the ship.

The
Empire Lawrence
, laden with tanks for the Red Army, sailed from Birkenhead and joined PQ16, which left Iceland on 21 May. The voyage across the North Sea was ‘reasonably quiet’, says Neil Hulse. ‘But we were getting radio messages from the convoy ahead of us of the air attacks and submarine attacks which were taking place’. Eddie Grenfell was almost fatalistic about the voyage ahead: ‘It was the same thing in the Mediterranean, the same thing everywhere. We always had attacks. It was the war and we just thought, well, I hope I survive it…. It was never any – honestly, I mean this – there was never any feeling about “I hope we all survive”. You said: “I hope I survive. I hope I'm alive tomorrow”. That was the feeling’.

PQ16 suffered its first major attack on 26 May, 370 miles off the northern coast of Norway, and was systematically targeted for the next four days. ‘I've never experienced such concentrated air attacks anywhere else in the war as I did in the Arctic’, says Eddie Grenfell. ‘There were days when they attacked us with 150 dive bombers and torpedo bombers, quite apart from the U-boats that were all over the place. And it was dreadful – they just came. Don't forget they were only a few minutes' flying time away from Norway and they came out in a wave of twenty to thirty at a time. And then they did their attacks, they went back, refuelled and came out again…. It was just noise all the time. Dreadful noise of guns being fired, firing all the time – and it was rather exciting’.

Kurt Dahlmann
⁸⁰
was one of the German pilots who attacked PQ16. He dropped bombs on the convoy from his Junkers 88 dive bomber, whilst his comrades' Heinkel 111s made lower torpedo
raids on the ships: ‘The planes had different speeds. The Heinkel 111 was slower than the Junkers 88 and it was very difficult to coordinate the flights in such a way that the attacks took place simultaneously’. For the German aircrew – just as for the sailors beneath them – one of the biggest enemies was the weather: ‘Of course the danger of freezing was immense – especially since we didn't have that much experience with frozen conditions’.

The
Empire Lawrence
had its own air protection – in the shape of a single Hurricane fighter flown by a South African pilot called Alistair Hay. ‘They were suicide ships as far as he was concerned’, says Eddie Grenfell, ‘because he was shot off [by catapult] but there was no coming back. There was no flight deck to land on. So he knew that he was either going to be killed or else he might be lucky and come down in the sea. And so long as he wasn't there more than five minutes he might be picked up’.

‘If anyone was a Kamikaze’, says Neil Hulse, ‘it was our pilot. He [the pilot] would talk about it to me over a dram because I was second officer. He just said, “Neil I'm going to bale out and I know you will pick me up as soon as possible”. But he showed no sign of any fear whatsoever…. It was just a marvellous example of a guy who knew what he wanted to do and it didn't seem to upset him as far as his nerves were concerned’.

‘We were used to people being killed’, says Eddie Grenfell. ‘And we just knew that he was going out to do a job and we wished him the best of luck. We knew it was rather a dangerous job – more dangerous than anything we'd ever seen anyone else do before then. But we never thought: “Well, God, what a wonderful chap, what a brave fellow” and all that, because we were all doing the same – [and] as we realized in two days' time, we were going to suffer more than he ever did’.

On 26 May, Alistair Hay sat in the cockpit of his Hurricane on the fore-deck of the
Empire Lawrence
, gunned the engine to full throttle and released the brake. The catapult shot forward and propelled him up into the air. As he flew towards the massed German warplanes, over the radio Neil Hulse heard him say: ‘I am going in, I am going in’. Single-handedly, he fought a squadron of
German Heinkels. He managed to shoot two of them down before he ran out of ammunition. Then he was ordered over the radio: ‘Bale out! Bale out!’

Hay flew back towards the convoy, turned his plane upside-down so that he could more easily escape, and then dropped from the cockpit. He managed to parachute into the water near one of the escort ships, HMS
Volunteer
, and was picked up after only a few minutes in the water. Via Aldis signal lamp, the crew of the
Empire Lawrence
anxiously enquired after his fate. ‘How is our pilot?’ they signalled. And the reply came back: ‘He is thawing out…’.

But the Hurricane flight of Alistair Hay was not the only act of conspicuous bravery from the
Empire Lawrence
that day. For Eddie Grenfell volunteered to climb the ship's mast, together with another sailor, in order to try and fix the radar. This was a dangerous task to perform on a ship travelling at full speed even in good weather – but in the swelling seas of the Arctic, with the mast covered in black ice, it was perilous in the extreme. Climbing slowly, Eddie and his comrade managed to reach the top without incident and began to repair the wires. Then, suddenly, the Germans attacked again. ‘We had all the blooming guns firing from our own ship’, says Eddie, ‘and then there were the dive bombers coming in and firing all at the same time. Honest to God, in all my life I have never been so frightened, just crouching down there’. Then there was a sudden noise – a huge bang – as gunfire hit only a few feet or so beneath them. A hole appeared in the mainmast, damaging the access ladder – but the mast was still upright. After the attack was over, the two of them somehow managed to negotiate their way back down the broken mast and on to the relative safety of the main deck. ‘Bring these boys some rum!’ called the captain. ‘That was the bravest thing I've ever seen’.