CHURCHILL, STALIN & THE ARCTIC CONVOYS
The PM helped save the Red Army, at great cost, but the Kremlin responded with hostile ingratitude
Winston Churchill was determined to help Joseph Stalin following Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, no matter the cost and despite their deep ideological differences. This meant that the warships of Admiral John Tovey’s Home Fleet were required to escort supply convoys through the Norwegian and Barents Seas to Murmansk and Archangel. Both were within the Arctic Circle and in the case of Archangel it iced up from winter to spring.
Churchill and US President Franklin D Roosevelt, whose country had not yet entered the war, feared if they did not immediately back the battered Red Army then Stalin might rapidly sue for peace. Not everyone agreed with this. General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial Staff, felt that all military equipment should go to the British armed forces, but he was overruled. Churchill and Roosevelt, just three months after Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union, began shipping military supplies via the Arctic. The battle of the Arctic convoys proved a bloody affair as the Germans did everything possible to stop them. These convoys were codenamed PQ – the most infamous being PQ17.
Ship after ship
“I went to Russia on the third convoy to sail from Scotland,” recalled correspondent Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune. “We left on the night of 13 October [1941], at a time when the German Army was only 65 miles [105km] from Moscow and moving so fast we did not know whether our ships would get to Russia on time.” He and the convoy survived unscathed and he travelled on to the Soviet capital. The passage became more hazardous as time passed. Kerr observed: “Our ships that sailed to Russia were inadequately armed… they did not have the fire power they needed to ward off attack, but they also knew how much the supplies were needed by the Red Army. We began to lose ship after ship.” It was only the arrival of a US Navy task force at Scapa Flow, after America entered the war, that helped tip the balance. At the end of May 1942 Churchill pushed through the largest Arctic convoy to date, PQ16.
Russian-born British journalist Alexander Werth persuaded the editor of The Sunday Times to let him cover the war from Moscow. Once funding was approved he flew to Reykjavik and then prepared for the sea journey to Murmansk – Iceland had been turned into a giant aircraft carrier as part of the war against Hitler’s U-boats. Like Kerr, Werth experienced first-hand the desperate attempts to get military supplies to the Soviet Union. He fo
