Convoy PQ 17 sails from Iceland

On 27 June 1942 convoy PQ 17 put to sea from Hvalfjörður, a deep fjord on the west coast of Iceland. It consisted of 35 merchant ships, most of them American and British, carrying tanks, aircraft, lorries, ammunition and raw materials for the embattled Soviet Union. With them sailed three rescue ships and a tanker for the escorting warships. Their destination was Archangel on the White Sea. Behind the convoy, at increasing distances, came the covering forces: British and American cruisers, and further off the battleships and an aircraft carrier of the Home Fleet. It was the largest Arctic convoy so far and the first major joint operation of the British and American navies under British command. A few days later it became the symbol of the Allies’ greatest convoy disaster of the war.

The route to Murmansk and Archangel

After the German attack on the Soviet Union, Britain, and from the autumn of 1941 also the United States, undertook to supply equipment to the Red Army. The first convoy reached Archangel in August 1941, and on 1 October a protocol was signed in Moscow which set monthly deliveries up to the end of June 1942 and opened the way to Lend-Lease for the USSR. Churchill promised to send a convoy every ten days. The shortest route ran from Iceland, occupied by the British in 1940, round the North Cape to Murmansk and Archangel. It was 1,400 to 2,000 nautical miles long, and the whole of it lay within range of German airfields and bases in occupied Norway.

In the winter of 1941–1942 the convoys designated PQ (to the USSR) and QP (homeward) got through almost without loss, shielded by the polar night and by storms. In the spring the situation was reversed. Hitler, convinced that Norway was the “zone of destiny” of the war, sent heavy ships there and demanded that Admiral Karl Dönitz move some of his U-boats north. In January 1942 the battleship Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismarck, arrived at Trondheim, followed by the cruisers Admiral Hipper, Admiral Scheer and Lützow. Luftflotte 5 in Norway received Ju 88 bombers and He 111 torpedo bombers, which practised massed, simultaneous attacks from several directions. Convoy PQ 13 lost five of its nineteen ships in March, and in fighting with German destroyers, U-boats and aircraft between the end of March and mid-May the British lost the cruisers Trinidad and Edinburgh. On 2 May, on the route of convoy PQ 15, the Polish submarine ORP Jastrząb was lost, attacked in error by an Allied minesweeper and a Norwegian destroyer.

PQ 17’s predecessor, convoy PQ 16, left Hvalfjörður on 21 May. Over several days of unbroken polar daylight it was attacked by aircraft and lost seven of its 35 ships. The Polish destroyer ORP Garland, one of its escorts, was badly damaged, and more than twenty of her crew were killed. The Germans announced that the convoy had been destroyed; the British judged the outcome tolerable, but the escort commander demanded an escort carrier and much stronger anti-aircraft defence for the future.

The Admiralty against summer convoys

For months the commanders of the Royal Navy had warned against running convoys in the summer months. The Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral John Tovey, and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, pointed out that in the polar day, when the ice forced ships to sail close to Norway, a convoy was under observation the whole way, air cover from land ended far short of the destination, and the fleet’s heavy ships would have to fight without support a thousand miles from their bases. In May Pound wrote to the American Admiral Ernest King that the Russian convoys were becoming “a regular millstone round our necks”.

Politics prevailed. On the Eastern Front the German summer offensive was beginning, and Stalin was demanding supplies and a second front. In May Vyacheslav Molotov visited London and Washington, and Roosevelt pressed for the convoys to continue. Winston Churchill wrote to the Chiefs of Staff in May that the operation was justified if half the ships got through, since abandoning it would weaken Britain’s position with both its great allies. Because the bombing in June had destroyed much of the largely wooden town of Murmansk, all the ships of PQ 17 were routed to Archangel.

Operation Rösselsprung

British intelligence, which was reading some German naval signals and listening in to Luftwaffe communications, knew that the Germans were preparing a strike against the next convoy called Rösselsprung (“Knight’s Move”). The ships from Trondheim – Tirpitz and Admiral Hipper with destroyers – and from Narvik – Lützow and Admiral Scheer – were to move to the northernmost anchorages in Altafjord and attack the convoy east of Bear Island, beyond the reach of the British battleships. The U-boats of the Eisteufel group were positioned across the convoy’s path, and Luftflotte 5 assembled more than 260 aircraft in the north, including about a hundred Ju 88 bombers and more than forty torpedo bombers. The weakness of the plan was its chain of command: every stage of the operation had to be approved by Hitler himself, who after the loss of the Bismarck feared for his heavy ships and demanded that before they sailed the position of the British carrier be established and any threat from it ruled out. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder therefore had to conduct an operation that was meant to destroy the convoy without exposing his ships.

The convoy and its cover

On the afternoon of 27 June the ships left Hvalfjörður. The convoy commodore was John Dowding, sailing in the River Afton. The close escort, the 1st Escort Group, was led by Commander John “Jack” Broome in the destroyer Keppel. He had six destroyers, two anti-aircraft ships converted from merchantmen (Palomares and Pozarica), four corvettes, three minesweepers, four anti-submarine trawlers and two submarines. With the convoy sailed the rescue ships Rathlin, Zamalek and Zaafaran, ready to pick up survivors.

Closer cover was provided by Rear Admiral Louis Hamilton’s 1st Cruiser Squadron: the British heavy cruisers London and Norfolk, the American Wichita and Tuscaloosa, and four destroyers. Further west cruised Tovey with the battleship Duke of York, the American battleship Washington, the aircraft carrier Victorious, cruisers and destroyers. The American ships belonged to a task force sent to Scapa Flow in the spring of 1942 to reinforce the Home Fleet. The Admiralty laid down that Hamilton’s cruisers would not go east of Bear Island unless the convoy was threatened by an enemy force they could fight; beyond that line protection against surface ships was to be provided by British and Soviet submarines. At about the same time the homeward convoy QP 13 left Archangel and Murmansk for Iceland, bringing back, among others, the Garland, repaired in the USSR, and a dummy convoy sailed from the Orkneys to distract the Germans.

The ships carried a cargo worth, by contemporary estimates, some 700 million dollars: nearly 300 aircraft, almost 600 tanks, more than 4,000 lorries and other vehicles, and in all, according to American figures, about 180,000 tons of cargo. Many of them were new American Liberty ships, with crews sailing north for the first time.

How many ships there were

Popular lists give a figure of 37 ships, of which only eleven survived. The sources, however, count differently. The most common figure is 35 merchant ships; some sources speak of 34 or 36, depending on whether they count the fleet oiler and the ships that turned back. Together with the rescue ships and auxiliary tankers, almost 40 civilian vessels sailed with the convoy. The figure of eleven refers to the ships that reached Soviet ports in July; two ships had turned back to Iceland at the very start of the voyage and also survived.

What July brought

The first days of the voyage were quiet. One ship ran aground while leaving the fjord, and the Exford turned back after being damaged by ice in the Denmark Strait. On 1 July the convoy was spotted by the submarine U-456 and by reconnaissance aircraft; from then on it was shadowed almost continuously. On 4 July, after the first attacks by torpedo bombers, Pound received word that Tirpitz had left Trondheim. Unsure where the battleship was, that evening he ordered Hamilton to withdraw westwards at high speed and the convoy to scatter and proceed to Soviet ports independently. The cruisers withdrew, and Broome’s destroyers with them.

Tirpitz did not put to sea until 5 July, and turned back the same day, because the Germans judged that aircraft and U-boats would destroy the convoy on their own. The scattered ships, unprotected in the light of the polar day, were easy targets. By 10 July 22 merchant ships had been sunk – 24 vessels including the tanker Aldersdale and the rescue ship Zaafaran; according to some lists, 23. Eleven ships reached Archangel and Murmansk, some only after weeks of hiding in the ice and along the coasts of Novaya Zemlya. 153 seamen were killed, and some 3,300 vehicles, 430 tanks and 210 aircraft went to the bottom.

Churchill called it “one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war”. Admiral King soon withdrew the American ships to the Pacific, and Stalin found the order to scatter hard to understand. The Arctic convoys were suspended until September, when convoy PQ 18 sailed with an escort carrier and over a dozen destroyers.

Place in the war

PQ 17 sailed at a moment when the Allies’ fate hung in the balance on every front: Tobruk had just fallen, the next day the Germans advanced on Voronezh, and supplies from the West mattered in real terms to the Red Army. The convoy’s fate showed the limits of what could be done on the Arctic route in the summer of 1942 and became a source of lasting distrust between the Allies: Moscow suspected the British of lacking the will, the Americans accused the Admiralty of cowardice, and in London Pound’s responsibility was argued over for years. The disaster did not, however, halt the aid. The Arctic convoys ran until 1945, and in the end most Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR went via Iran and the Pacific. PQ 17 itself remained a warning against orders issued from afar without full knowledge of the situation at sea – and a reminder that in the Battle of the Atlantic and on its Arctic flank it was above all the seamen of the merchant navy who paid for them.