The Death of Convoy PQ 17

Ice forms on a 20-inch signal projector on the cruiser HMS Sheffield while she is helping to escort an Arctic convoy to Russia.

My pop* was of the “greatest generation.” A merchant marine officer, he got paid to sail cargo to the Brits and Russians before the war and during it. Used to sail the Murmansk Run. A tough one, that. Bombers, U-boats. The very sea was an enemy – so cold that it wasn’t worth stopping to pick a man up, if he fell over the side. He’d be dead of the exposure before a boat could get to him, let alone the risk to the convoy.

His ship got hit by a dive bomber, just outside Murmansk – they ran it ashore before it could sink, and he spent six months there on repairs. Got her back to New York. She was sunk in the Indian Ocean on her next float, torpedoed by a sub. My dad had rotated off.

There were times when I was feeling low that I read a letter he wrote me while I was a plebe at the Naval Academy. He talked about being under fire, seeing ships alongside you blow up, or sail beneath the waves with their bows shot off, screws still turning. The screams of the men in the water. The fact that you couldn’t stop. - by Lex   (Yesterday, 08 Dec 03)

After December the 7th his studies were cut short – men were needed to sail ships, move equipment, food and people to the fight. So my father closed his textbooks and went to sea after Pearl Harbor – the Murmansk run from New York, carrying tanks and ammunition for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. It wasn’t a milk run. He had classmates from that school that didn’t come back either. He saw some of them die in front of him. A country half our population, with 400,000 dead in three and one half years? Everyone knew someone who didn’t come back. Those were hard times. You had to pull together.

There was a time when I was at the Boat School, plebe year that I was feeling rather sorry for myself that I hadn’t gone to Virginia or Duke – I wasn’t a particularly good plebe, and the upperclassmen were especially fond of pointing that fact out to me. We spoke on the phone, my father and I, and troubled by my evident unhappiness he wrote a letter to me afterwards. Remember getting letters?

I remember this one: He told of a time in the North Sea, the convoy harassed by dive bombers in the daylight hours and threatened by U-Boats around the clock. He told me the story of an ammunition ship getting hit at night alongside him, the way she went up in a column of fire, the strange fact that years later, he couldn’t remember having heard a sound. He told me of another Liberty ship alongside of his, her bow blown off at 15 knots, the way she steamed right under the sea until at last her fantail lifted in the air, the propellor still thrashing. It was a really good letter. He’s been gone for 24 years, but sometimes when I’m feeling low, I pull it out and read it again. It puts things into perspective.

When I was a kid he told me about coming up on deck during the war, the General Quarters alarm sounding, to man his AA gun when his ship was under air attack and seeing a Stuka dive bomber framed in the hatchway at the top of the ladder, growing larger, screaming as it came, the bomb coming loose, falling towards the ship, towards my father.

“Were you scared, dad?” I asked, maybe 10 years old.

“Scared?” he said with a grunt. “I was terrified.” by Lex   (Pearl Harbor, 07 Dec 06)

There are three main types of water masses in the Barents Sea: Warm, salty Atlantic water (temperature >37 °F) from the North Atlantic drift, cold Arctic water (temperature <32 °F) from the north, and warm, but not very salty coastal water (temperature >32 °F).

According to the Minnesota Sea Grant, a person who's thrown into freezing water, at 32 degrees, would only have about 15 minutes before they became unconscious or too exhausted to move; they would only survive for about 45 minutes.

North of the Arctic Circle, in June, there are 24 hours of daylight, the sun never sets. Unless the weather is bad, which it can be, there is nowhere to hide when the Luftwaffe and the U-Boats come-a calling.

There were many who served in World War II who are often forgotten, the men of the Merchant Marine, like Lex's Dad, who manned the convoys moving men, equipment, and other wartime necessities from the factories in the United States to the United Kingdom. Supplies transferred to the Soviet Union from the Western Allies played a key role in the ability of the Russians to withstand the Nazi onslaught in 1941.

Much of the logistical assistance of the Soviet military was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks and by 1945, nearly a third of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. Trucks such as the Dodge 3/4-ton and Studebaker 2 1/2 ton were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminum, canned rations and clothing were also critical. Lend-Lease also supplied significant amounts of weapons and ammunition. The Soviet air force received 18,200 aircraft, which amounted to about 30 percent of Soviet wartime fighter and bomber production (mid 1941–45). Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, 8 percent of war-time production. (Source)

Many of us know about the Battle of the Atlantic and the long struggle to defeat the German U-Boat fleet. Can you imagine standing on a beach in Florida and watching a commercial vessel burning - towering columns of black smoke, men dying - after being torpedoed by a U-Boat, right off of the American coast?

Now picture the same thing, only in the dark waters of the Barents Sea, where there is little chance of being rescued, where the water temperature alone will kill you in short order.

That was the Murmansk Run.

PQ 17 was the code name for an Allied Arctic convoy during the Second World War. On 27 June 1942, the ships sailed from Hvalfjord**, Iceland for the port of Arkhangelsk in the Soviet Union. The convoy was located by German forces on 1 July, after which it was shadowed continuously and attacked. The First Sea Lord Admiral Dudley Pound, acting on information that German surface units, including the German battleship Tirpitz, were moving to intercept, ordered the covering force built around the Allied battleships HMS King George V and the USS Washington away from the convoy and told the convoy to scatter. Due to vacillation by Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, German armed forces high command), the Tirpitz raid never materialised. The convoy was the first large joint Anglo-American naval operation under British command; in Churchill's view this encouraged a more careful approach to fleet movements.

As the close escort and the covering cruiser forces withdrew westwards to intercept the German raiders, the merchant ships were left without escorts. The merchant ships were attacked by Luftwaffe aeroplanes and U-boats and of the 35 ships, only eleven reached their destination, delivering 70,000 short tons (64,000 metric tons) of cargo. The convoy disaster demonstrated the difficulty of passing adequate supplies through the Arctic, especially during the summer midnight sun. Convoy PQ 17 lost 24 of its 35 merchant ships during a week of daylight attacks by U-boats and aircraft. (Source)

Escorts and merchant ships at Hvalfjord before the sailing of Convoy PQ 17.

Map showing the path of convoy PQ-17 and the location of attacks and sinkings.
(Source)

Area of Operations, The "Murmansk Run"
Google Maps

PQ 17 composition:

(Source)

Merchant ships of convoy JW53 passing through pack ice during the voyage. An escort destroyer can be seen in the background. View from the Dido class cruiser HMS SCYLLA.
(Source)

Cold is the sea...

Especially above 66°33' North Latitude!

The United States Merchant Mariner suffered more casualties than any other American service during World War II, 1 of every 26 mariners would not return home. Facing submarines, mines, armed raiders, destroyers, aircraft, “kamikaze,” and the elements. About 8,300 mariners were killed at sea, 12,000 wounded of whom at least 1,100 died from their wounds, and 663 men and women were taken prisoner.  Some were blown to death, some incinerated, some drowned, some froze, and some starved. Sixty-six died in prison camps or aboard Japanese ships while being transported to other camps. Thirty-one American merchant ships vanished without a trace to a watery grave. (Source)

Hidden away in the water off Battery Park is one of the most moving memorials you are ever likely to see. The American Merchant Mariner’s memorial, sculpted by Marisol Escobar in 1991, takes the form of three merchant seamen stranded on a sinking ship, terrified, calling for help and trying to reach the desperate hand of one of their shipmates floundering in the water below. (Source)

To the men of the Merchant Marine, may their memory be ever bright!

Navy-Merchant Marine Memorial, Washington DC

To the strong souls and ready valor of those men of the United States who in the Navy, the Merchant Marine and other paths of Activity upon the waters of the world have given life or still offer it in the performance of heroic deeds this monument is dedicated by a grateful people.

* Carroll F. LeFon, Sr.
**Anglicized spelling.