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Overview
During the last four years of the Second World War, the Western Allies secured Russian defenses against Germany by supplying vital food and arms. The plight of those in Murmansk and Archangel who benefited is now well known, but few are aware of the courage, determination, and sacrifice of Allied merchant ships, which withstood unremitting U-boat attacks and aerial bombardment to maintain the lifeline to Russia.
In the storms, fog, and numbing cold of the Arctic, where the sinking of a ten thousand–ton freighter was equal to a land battle in terms of destruction, the losses sustained were huge. Told from the perspective of their crews, this is the inspiring story of the long-suffering merchant ships without which Russia would almost certainly have fallen to Nazi Germany.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781526714268 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 212,233 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
'The world will hold its breath'
At 03.15 ON the morning of 22 June 1941, the darkness of the night was broken by a flickering of light. A few seconds later the insistent croaking of frogs in the reed-beds of the River Bug, where the storming parties of the German Wehrmacht lurked expectantly, was obliterated by the concussion of distant artillery. Shells from more than 7,000 guns whined overhead and the explosions of their detonations thundered and flashed on the far bank to the east. The bombardment began Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Soviet Russia. Advance troops started to cross the Bug on a 500-mile front by every method military cunning could devise. Over an hour earlier Heinkel bombers of the Luftwaffe had dropped mines in the waters of the Black Sea and the Baltic. Other aircraft went into action at first light, bombing and strafing ahead of the advancing columns, destroying roads, tanks and fuel dumps. Most significantly, by noon, the Luftwaffe had eliminated over 1,000 Russian aircraft, most of them on the ground. Their own loss was trifling. A German officer likened it to throwing stones at glasshouses. 'When Operation Barbarossa is launched,' Adolf Hitler had boasted, 'the world will hold its breath.'
In fact the world had been holding its breath since learning of the astonishing German-Soviet non-aggression pact agreed in late August 1939 by their respective foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov. Though alarmed by the openly declared territorial ambitions of Germany, Stalin's overtures to Britain and France had for some time remained inconclusive. Mutual suspicion clouded all negotiations: the Western powers feared the Communist 'infection'; the Russians, wholly antipathetic to the Fascist Axis, had a yet deeper aversion to an alliance with the traditional enemy of Marxism, the capitalist and imperialist governments in Paris and London. Russian policy was highly subjective, centralized in the person of the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, a man as ruthless as Hitler, but with a greater cunning. The expedient solution of an accommodation with Hitler would buy time, and Ribbentrop and Molotov swiftly concluded their pact under the very noses of the Anglo-French mission still in Moscow.
When in September 1939 the German army invaded Poland from the west, the Red Army did likewise from the east, recovering territory lost to the Poles under Marshal Pilsudski in 1920 but also, and more significantly, increasing Russian-held territory for the traditional strategy of defence in depth against the day when this might become necessary. Similar reasons were given for the annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1940. Like Germany and in marked contrast to the Western democracies, Soviet Russia had been preparing for war for many years, spurred on by the doctrine of world revolution. The Red Army regarded a major European war as likely from about 1932, with this crystallizing into 'absolute certainty' by the time Hitler became Reichskanzler. Ironically, the military and naval limitations imposed on Germany in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles had created a hothouse of debate within a small, almost intimate, officer corps. As early as 1922 the German Ambassador to Moscow, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, had engineered an agreement known as Rapallo-Politik allowing officers of the then Reichswehr to conduct military studies and experiments in Russia, beyond the supervising restrictions of the Inter-Allied Military Control. Here Soviet and German officers exchanged views and while the Reichswehr was incapable of deploying massed tank formations such as the Red Army displayed at the Kiev manoeuvres of 1935, the advent of National Socialism gave Germany the dynamic to convert theory to practice, to build an economy based on an armaments industry and to field at the Mecklenburg manoeuvres of 1937 the first Nazi tank squadrons, forerunners of the Panzer divisions. Similar expansion of the German airforce took place and further 'experimentation' in land, sea and air warfare followed during the Spanish Civil War. The German reoccupation of the industrial Rhineland in 1936 increased Germany's war potential, and the Fascist alliance with Mussolini's Italy created the power bloc from which the coming war was to be waged. As the decade drew to its close the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia resulted in the acquisition of enormous war booty, and the coercion and formation of vassal states in the Balkans secured reserves of fighting manpower as well as assets such as the Ploesti oilfields of Romania.
Nor had the Russians been idle. The victorious emergence of the Bolsheviks after the revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war led to years of strenuous restructuring of the exhausted Russian economy. It was not until the end of the 1920s that the production of coal, iron and steel reached the output of 1913. The tank formations which the Germans observed and then emulated were constructed by industrial plants initially set up with the aid of foreign advisers. Americans helped organize mass production of motor vehicles, Germans that of aircraft. As Marshal Voroshilov, the People's Commissar for Defence, said of it in Pravda in March 1933, the First Five Year Plan (1929-33) laid 'excellent foundations on which to build all the technical appliances for modern warfare'.
As the political differences between the ideologies of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany widened, the rapprochement between the military professionals withered and died. They met as opponents on the 'experimental' battlefields of Spain; the rupture seemed complete, the battlelines drawn, until the revival of mutual military expedience in the Ribbentrop-Molotov accord. Neither of the contracting powers regarded the pact as anything other than temporary. For the Germans, as they planned the invasion of France immediately after the suppression of Poland, it removed the fear of fighting on two fronts; for the Russians it bought time in which to step up military production and the opportunity to gain defensive territory without German interference. As the Germans invaded Poland, the Russians followed, driving a salient beyond Lvov to protect the Ukraine, aware that they were vulnerable not only if Germany chose later to seize the Ukraine for the wealth of its resources, but also because the area nurtured a politically unreliable separatist movement based on Lvov.
Stalin also wished to protect the seaward approaches to Leningrad and in November 1939 commenced the Winter War with Finland. This hard-fought, bitter campaign was a pyrrhic victory for the Russians. They lost an estimated 200,000 men, 700 aircraft and 1,600 tanks. Marshal Semyon Timoshenko was appointed to rectify the defects in the Red Army exposed by its mauling at the hands of the outnumbered Finns. He had little time to replace the aeroplanes and tanks before Hitler pounced. For their part, the Finns, unsupported by the Western powers in their hour of need and driven into the Axis camp by 1941, retained their independence despite the loss of Vyborg and territory in the north. Stalin had achieved his objectives at a cost: Vyborg protected Leningrad; the narrow northern buffer covered the Arctic port of Murmansk.
Operation Barbarossa was planned for May 1941. Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France had already fallen. Although the British had extricated the men of their expeditionary force at Dunkirk, it had been at the expense of their equipment. They too were short of the means with which to wage effective war. Fortunately, the resources of the Royal Air Force staved off a German invasion by defeating the Luftwaffe's air offensive in the summer of 1940 in what came to be called the Battle of Britain. Nevertheless, Britain was subjected to increasingly heavy bombing raids while German U-boats from the French Biscay ports now had access to the Atlantic trade routes to attack with ease her immense seaborne trade. Augmented by the demands of war and, in these early months, inadequately escorted, Britain's merchant shipping was vulnerable to attack by both submarine and surface raider. The latter could now move almost undetected in the Norwegian fiords and break out into the Atlantic at will.
Shelving plans for invading Britain, Hitler began to transfer his Panzer divisions across Europe. The Soviet Union, home of the despised Slavs and seed-bed of the hated Communist creed, was the real enemy; Russia was the declared ground upon which the victorious Reich would expand and consolidate its 1,000-year rule. But Hitler was compelled to delay his attack in the east and to divert troops to Yugoslavia, Greece and North Africa. The pro-British Serbian majority in Yugoslavia had refused to submit quietly to Hitler's hegemony and their suppression cost Germany valuable time. Moreover, his Italian ally's military operations had badly miscarried. Mussolini's invasion of Greece was held up by ferocious resistance. The Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were ordered to retrieve the situation and save the Italians from defeat. The Greek campaign was complicated by the intervention of British, Australian and New Zealand troops under Britain's treaty obligations, but these were eventually driven south, to be withdrawn by the ships of the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, the British in North Africa, though poorly equipped, defeated the Italians and proved stubborn and difficult to evict. Resources involved in the fight for the Western Desert were to impinge on the campaign on the Eastern front by diverting German arms to North Africa and affecting the flow of Allied supplies to Russia.
Not only did these unintended campaigns cost the Germans time and the disruption of their logistical arrangements for the transfer of troops to the line of the Bug, they also began to turn public opinion in the United States in favour of the Allies. Shocked by the arrogance of Hitler's actions, a growing awareness of the true situation in Europe began to spread in America.
These delays and the early onset of the Russian winter cost the Germans their political and military objectives. Despite their early tactical successes, eventually they were to lose the campaign and, in the Russian counter-attack, combined with the Allied invasion of Normandy, the war in Europe. But in the first few days of the invasion of Russia the German officer's euphoric reference to the destruction of glasshouses seemed justified. Despite earlier Russian efforts to secure territory for defence in depth, standing orders designed to preserve the non-aggression pact were confirmed to incredulous field commanders now confronted by a full-scale invasion. In an excessively centralized command structure, local initiative was paralysed and so, it seemed, was Stalin. Although the Soviet leader had himself warned that a spring offensive by the Germans was likely, it had been his policy to adhere strictly to the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Russia supplied Germany with grain and oil up to the very day of invasion and Russian reconnaissance flights were inhibited by standing orders intended to avoid provocation. The object of all this was to buy Stalin time. The impressive tanks of the 1935 man uvres had become obsolete and many were defective; more had been lost in Finland and only a quarter of the most modern were serviceable. Manpower was spread too thinly; the Red Army's 170 divisions in the west were largely unsupported after fanning out to garrison the areas of Poland occupied in 1939. Most important of all, despite Timoshenko's reforms, Stalin had compromised the Red Army and destroyed its command structure by 'purging' 35,000 officers pour encourager les autres. This policy only served to weaken the morale of the remainder.
Stalin's apparent paralysis at the moment of invasion is curious. He had ignored many warnings: Germans in the Soviet Union sent their families home; in January, in a Berlin cinema, an American commercial attaché had been given details of Barbarossa by an anti-Nazi and this warning was eventually passed to Moscow; the Soviet agent Richard Sorge sounded a strident warning from Tokyo; and informative German radio traffic transmitted via the Enigma encrypting device was intercepted and decoded by the British at Bletchley Park. This 'Ultra' intelligence confirmed other indications garnered by the British and on 10 June, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, told Maisky, the Russian Ambassador in London, that Churchill 'asks you urgently to communicate all these data to the Soviet Government'. On 18 June the anti-Nazi 'Lucy' spy-ring based in Lucerne, in Switzerland, which consisted of a German, a Swiss, an Englishman and a Russian, fed the Kremlin with detailed plans for Barbarossa (and continued to inform the Soviets of German troop movements, plans and positions for the entire Russian campaign). Simultaneous with the 'Lucy' warning, a German deserter revealed the date of an attack as Sunday, 22 June. He too was ignored.
But Stalin, as well as being callous and crafty, was also ignorant. He chose not to act upon these warnings, despite his own misgivings, blinding himself to the flood of evidence with the characteristic impenetrable detachment and self-conceit which had enabled him to gain immense power and to wield it with a terrifying disregard of all reason. Whether or not he had a nervous breakdown at this time, or deliberately retreated into a world of self-delusion, it is impossible to say, but when the blow came it stupefied him, confronting him personally with a challenging reality perhaps hitherto unimagined. Whatever the true reasons, the cost to the Soviet war apparatus by the end of that fateful Sunday was the loss of 1,500 Russian aircraft on the ground and 322 in the air; in addition, 3 Russian divisions were unaccounted for. This was but a foretaste of what was to follow.
By the end of June the German High Command was celebrating the success of Barbarossa. The tanks of Guderian's Panzer Group 2 and Hoth's Panzer Group 3 had trapped three Russian armies and the Germans were advancing along the whole of the vast front. Only one fact was beginning to emerge to suggest it would not simply be a matter of breaking glass: although surrounded and taken prisoner in enormous numbers, even against hopeless odds individual Russian soldiers refused to submit. They fought, Hitler wrote to Mussolini, with a 'stupid fanaticism' and 'the primitive brutality' of animals. The Wehrmacht's losses began to mount ominously. In the opening weeks of Barbarossa they reached 100,000, more than the total of all other campaigns since the war had begun.
Stalin's paralysis did not last long. A fortnight after Barbarossa had been launched, a new Russian Stavka, or High Command, had been formed. Voroshilov, Timoshenko and Budenny were appointed to command the right, centre and left of the line. With savage and intimidating brutality, Stalin had those of the old front-line commanders who had survived shot, thus providing the cause of the Russian disaster for public consumption. Throughout the Red Army, political orthodoxy was more important than military ability, and defeat was perceived as treachery; there were political commissars on hand to interfere with field operations and make a nightmare reality of this fear, even in the face of the enemy. But the paranoid insecurity of Communist control, which was a legacy of revolution, civil war and minority power, now disappeared beneath an emerging patriotism. This was brilliantly exploited by Stalin who emerged publicly from his cataleptic state on 3 July to broadcast to a people hitherto treated as traitors unless submitting to his will. With all the fulsome fraternity of Marxist rhetoric, he addressed his 'comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters', announced 'a patriotic war' and called for a scorched-earth policy which would result in 'freedom for our Motherland'. He reawoke the powerful, demotic image of Mother Russia, revived historical memories of the great struggle against Napoleon's Grande Armée and invoked the deep feelings of the Russian people for their country. Patriotism of the most self-abnegating sort was to characterize the spirit of the Russians in the coming struggle with the Germans, replacing to a large degree the fear of extreme coercion, and ironically elevating Josef Stalin to the ancient, Tsarist status of 'Little Father'.
The Russian people's 'passionate defence of their native soil', Churchill commented later, 'while the struggle lasted, made amends for all'.
For Winston Churchill, Prime Minister and his own Minister of Defence, the period of Britain's standing alone with little beyond the moral support of the American President Roosevelt behind the vital Lease-Lend Act had ended. But having the Soviet Union, if not exactly as an ally, then at least as a co-enemy of the Third Reich, was cold comfort. Churchill had no love for Communists and had marked 'the stony composure' with which the Russian government had regarded events in France in 1940 'and our vain efforts in 1941 to create a front in the Balkans'. Furthermore, the Soviets had given economic and material aid to the Germans. The Arctic port of Murmansk, preserved from the Finns, was nevertheless used as a fuelling port by German ships. From the White Sea the commerce raider Komet had been assisted by Russian ice-breakers to break out into the Pacific through the Kara Sea and North East Passage.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Arctic Convoys 1941–1945"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Richard Woodman.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations,
Foreword,
Preface,
Maps,
1. 'The world will hold its breath',
2. To the edge of the earth,
3. Undertaking the impossible,
4. 'Now there is no end to our troubles': Operation Dervish, and convoys PQl-6, QPl-4,
5. 'A matter of the highest urgency': Convoys PQ7A-11, QP4-7,
6. 'Ideal weather for carrier aircraft': Convoys PQ12, QP8,
7. 'Baptism of fire': Convoys PQ13, QP9,
8. 'Just a process of attrition': Convoys PQ14, QP10,
9. 'It is beginning to ask too much ...': Convoys PQ15, QPll,
10. 'Success was beyond expectation': Convoys PQ16, QP12,
11. 'It is not enough',
12. Convoys QP13, PQ17,
13. Convoy PQ17,
14. Convoy PQ18,
15. 'For eighteen days there was no let-up': Convoy QP14,
16. 'A tough blow for the Russians': Operation FB and convoy QP15,
17. 'Only destroyers': Convoys JW51A and B, RA51,
18. 'Dangerous work in hazardous circumstances': Convoys JW52-54A, RA52-54A,
19. 'An inconvenient, extreme and costly exertion': Convoys JW54A-55B, RA54B,
20. We're going alongside the bastard!': Convoys JW55B, RA55A, The Battle of North Cape,
21. They never let me down': Convoys JW56A-58, RA55B-59,
22. 'Allies, or just two nations?': Convoys JW59-62, RA60-62,
23. We are having a bad time with the U-boats': Convoys JW63-64, RA63-64,
24. The true glory: Convoys JW65-67, RA65-67,
Convoy dispositions,
Notes,
Sources and bibliography,
Acknowledgements,