The Arctic Convoys

War in Europe

By: World History

Narrated by: David Riley

As World War II raged across the Russian steppes, in Africa and especially in the skies over Europe, elite German and Soviet forces fought a bitter battle in an isolated northern corner of Europe. Here, the battle was for control of the ice-free port of Murmansk, where the Soviet Union received convoy after convoy loaded with British and American tanks, guns, fuel, small arms, food and aircraft.

Supplies from the Allied convoys kept the Soviet Union alive at a critical time during the early stages of the war, and Hitler therefore tried every means to stop the convoys. At the beginning of the campaign against the Soviet Union, he hoped to capture Murmansk and thus weaken his archenemy. Later, when he realised that fighting in the barren, mountainous terrain of the north was unwinnable, he set his sights on destroying the convoys. The Luftwaffe and U-boats attacked the Allied sailors throughout the perpetual daylight of polar summer while crushing ice and raging storms threatened during the dark winter months.

The men aboard the Arctic convoys dreaded the voyages, and it was with good reason that the crews dubbed them “suicide convoys”. If they fell overboard in a storm, a quick death awaited them in the icy sea, and if the ships’ holds, filled with fuel and ammunition, were hit by a torpedo or a bomb, everything exploded in a sea of flames.

The Arctic convoy trips and the fighting on the Northern Front challenged some of the war’s toughest men. Read their stories here.

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