We didn’t know it was the PQ 17. We were stationed in Vayenga
and we received an order to sail towards Tirpitz,
who had allegedly gone to sea and was sinking transport vessels one by one.
So we were to head for Tirpitz and fight her.
German intelligence discovered that the Allies were to send another convoy to the Soviet Union.
The convoy was named under the Allied naming system PQ 17.
But we also knew that the thorn in the German side was the equipment.
So this was to be a classic, demonstrative defeat of an Allied convoy.
The First Sea Lord ordered all surface ships of the convoy to concentrate on a certain point.
In other words, they were to leave the convoy.
ARCTIC CONVOYS (a drama in two acts) Act 2
…to head for Tirpitz and fight her.
And every half hour the commander was reporting, “Tirpitz is that many miles away.”
And then, one wonderful day he reported this, and then suddenly we were informed
that Tirpitz had changed course and was heading back home.
For the German battleship, further participation in the mission made no sense.
It was too prodigal to send a battleship to chase and sink merchant ships one by one.
Besides this, the German command realized that British warships had left the convoy
to focus as many forces as possible on finding and destroying Tirpitz.
The battleship had already been spotted by Allied reconnaissance aircraft
and the threat to the ship was real, because large forces of the British fleet were nearby.
Unprotected and scattered, Convoy PQ 17 was to be finished off by German aviation and submarines.
Now you can imagine how the sailors in the Allied vessels began to feel
once they realized that they’d been left to fend for themselves,
no longer able to rely on anybody else for protection.
Worse, these were mainly slow unarmed steamers, with predominantly civilian crews.
Now certainly the sailors realized when they signed on that it was not going to be a picnic,
but neither were they expecting the hell that was to follow.
I think everybody that served on the Russian convoys felt
that they were doing the right thing to help the right people.
The destruction of PQ 17 began on 5th of July, 1942.
The Germans were methodically searching the sea for the scattered ships and sinking them one by one.
It is July, 1942. The Soviet troops are suffering disastrous defeats:
heavy losses near Kharkov
the Germans are capturing the Crimea, Sevastopol is about to fall…
Every tank, every gallon, every drop of oil, every aircraft mattered to us.
And when they gave this order to scatter the convoy,
for us, I don’t know what to call this…
It’s something that makes your heart ache, a tragedy for all Soviet people.
Because of this lost convoy, thousands and thousands of Soviet people lost their lives.
Together with the convoy’s vessels, 430 tanks sank to the bottom of the Barents sea.
To put this into perspective,
in July 1942, the Soviet army had about 400 tanks on the entire Stalingrad front.
210 aircraft lost together with PQ 17 accounted for one third of the Red Army’s air force
that operated in July 1942 near Stalingrad.
The Soviet army didn’t receive 3,350 cars, almost 1,000 more than the Stalingrad front had at its disposal.
We were ordered to search for the transport vessels
and escort them to Arkhangelsk, Molotovsk, and Murmansk.
From July 9 through July 11, five merchantmen and several escort ships from PQ 17 arrived in Arkhangelsk.
Nobody wanted to believe that only one seventh of the vessels survived.
Everyone still had hope.
Those who went on search missions hoped to find the survivors.
The people floating in boats and on rafts, frozen and exhausted,
hoped they would be found.
And they were found, almost all of them.
Over the following two weeks, another six vessels arrived at Arkhangelsk, both towed and on their own power.
When Convoy PQ 17 left port, it included 35 merchant ships.
Only 11 of them reached Soviet shores.
We saved a lot of people, about 40 people,
who were left at sea during the voyage of Convoy PQ 17.
All that they said was, “It was rather rough, it was rather cold and…
we survived.”
They never said much about it.
And then we find out that the admiral who was in command of all this,
simply ordered the merchant ships to scatter, saying,
“Save yourself if you can.”
For us, it’s hard to understand the behavior of the British.
And we’ll never understand it from a human point of view.
But from their experience of fighting convoys, the British did everything quite logically.
From the 17th century, the tactic was the following:
if an enemy fleet shows up, you must focus on destroying it.
As soon as the enemy fleet has been destroyed or forced to retreat,
the ships will sail without any hindrances and with minimal losses.
That’s the logic behind convoy duty.
This was precisely the thinking behind the British actions around PQ 17.
A primary threat had put to sea, was vulnerable, and the British were going to gather the forces to destroy it.
The tragic events of Convoy PQ 17 demonstrated to the Allies
Allies that the enemy was smart, strong, and ruthless; fighting them was difficult,
so they should continue the war until the very end.
Though the Admiralty’s actions were subject to sharp criticism from Moscow,
both Great Britain and the Soviet Union realized that they needed to join forces to defeat the enemy,
and a lack of trust would only make the Allies weaker.
In early September of ‘42, convoy PQ 18 set off.
And this time before sending it, the Allies did some pretty thorough planning.
They changed the convoy route, they changed the port of departure,
they upgraded the escort—they provided an aircraft carrier,HMS Avenger.
Nevertheless, the convoy was still subjected to fierce attacks and lost 12 merchantmen.
And worse, the White Sea Throat—the most dangerous part of the voyage—was still ahead.
This was essentially our last battle— the battle near cape Kanin Nos
The Nazis sent torpedo bombers there.
In September 1942, the future of the entire Northern supply route was decided by Convoy PQ 18.
Convoys from Britain to the Soviet Union were labelled PQ.
The return convoys had a reverse index—QP.
On September 13, when Convoy PQ 18 had travelled the majority of the way,
Convoy QP 14 left Arkhangelsk; it included some of the surviving vessels from PQ 17.
Now, they had been kept there for some time, pending information to find out what the future held in store,
but finally had the opportunity to return home.
Ordinarily, the return trip was much safer, the Germans preferred to concentrate their attacks
on heavily loaded merchantmen
going the other way, delivering supplies to the Soviet Union.
However, on this occasion the Germans decided that they were going to attack anything that they found.
For the convoys coming from Russia to England,
they never bothered with the merchant ships, they went for cruisers…
From their point of view they were doing the right thing, you know.
The Allied convoys were simultaneously fighting off fierce enemy attacks in two Arctic regions.
Convoy PQ 18, escorted by Soviet destroyers,
was fighting its way through the White Sea Throat to Arkhangelsk.
Our commander, Anton Iosifovich Gurin
fired the main battery.
Since they were flying to us at a low altitude, we could fire at them effectively.
The aircraft was swept away—130 millimeters!
I don’t want to lie—we shot down two or three aircraft in this battle.
27 ships of Convoy PQ 18 reached Soviet ports.
The equipment they brought was immensely important for the troops;
very soon it was saving the lives of Soviet soldiers and contributing to the overall victory.
But there are no entirely happy stories at war.
Convoy QP 14, which was carrying people back home, was attacked.
The Somali was torpedoed, and Captain Onslow (our captain)
decided to tow the Somali back to the United Kingdom, back to the UK.
And we got the towing ropes across, and a connecting line, a telephone line, and everything.
And we towed her for two or three days actually, and we thought,
“Good, we’re going to save this ship.”
And then we hit a ferocious storm. And it was like so bad I couldn’t describe it.
It was one of the worst storms that I ever experienced,
mountainous waves (you know, 60 feet high, they were big rolling waves),
and it was blowing at about 60 miles an hour, and it was snowing, the blizzard,
it was absolutely horrendous— you couldn’t describe it. 230217VERYCOLDSHIP
And the tow rope parted, and the poor Somali, she broke her back,
because she had been torpedoed, you see. And she broke her back.
And in our searchlights we could see the bow sticking up, and the stern like a V sticking out of the sea.
We tried so hard to save as many of the crew as we could.
And it was an awful experience.
On the 22nd of September 1942, Convoy QP 14 made port.
Besides a British destroyer, they also lost the American merchantman Silver Sword,
which was a survivor of the PQ 17 run.
You can only imagine the feeling of the personnel aboard, to include those who had lost their ships as well,
they were passengers, when they were torpedoed a mere few days short of their objective.
The outstanding valor and bravery of the sailors aboard PQ 18 and QP 14,
as well as their success in delivering the cargo, showed that the northern route was still necessary
and, if correctly planned, very feasible
Throughout the rest of World War II, tragedies like that of PQ 17 were never repeated.
The Allies gained military dominance in the north, and all following attacks on the convoys ended
in great losses for the Germans.
Allied vessels reached Soviet ports safe and sound.
I went along to a couple of the sessions they had, giving the Ushakov medal to the Arctic convoy veterans.
And they felt so proud, yeah.
Of course, the share of supplies sent via Arctic convoys during the whole war is quite small.
But their role was considerable, because they were carried out in the right place and on time.
This has been a key strategic idea since Napoleon times.
They were all fighting against a common enemy and they all had to help each other out to win.
The Soviet Union made huge contributions to the final victory,
and as far as the convoys were concerned, it wasn’t merely the equipment that mattered,
but also the knowledge that they weren’t fighting alone.
If we hadn’t have done it…
we would never have won the war.
And I hate to think what… what would have happened.