BATTLE OF THE ARCTIC

Fighting in freezing-cold waters.

Beginning soon after Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the USSR, Britain and, after Pearl Harbor, the United States sent supplies in 78 convoys sailing across the Arctic north of Norway to Soviet ports. Journalist and historian Sebag-Montefiore, author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, covers a subject well explored by scholars such as Richard Woodman in Arctic Convoys: 1941-45, but he is a tireless researcher who has turned up letters, diaries, and personal accounts that fill in some gaps. Soviet ports remained ice-free, so convoys sailed year-round, but even arctic summers were freezing, foggy, and stormy, with icebergs a persistent threat. Not surprisingly, everyone hated the weather. As Sebag-Montefiore writes of the sailors, “when they signed up to the Merchant Navy, they had to be able to endure a claustrophobic existence below decks, the monotony of an uneventful long journey, as well as terror when the wind got up and the sea became rough.” Relentlessly ungrateful, Stalin and his agents denounced the allies for skimping on supplies and fleeing German attacks; their hostility extended to allied seamen, both healthy and injured, landing at their ports, where hospitals were so primitive that amputations were performed without anesthesia. A lively writer, Sebag-Montefiore delivers 600 pages that will hold most readers’ attention without attempting to cover all the battles, courage, suffering, and tortuous strategic and political background. The author takes advantage of interviews and fresh documentation to emphasize the experiences of individual sailors. Heroism was not in short supply, but readers may squirm at the scale of their suffering. Sailors who jumped into the icy water when abandoning ship froze to death within minutes. Remaining dry in a lifeboat was impossible, and frostbite was epidemic. Terrible weather and the priority of fending off attackers meant that rescue was slow or absent.

A gripping chronicle of warfare in extreme conditions.