Arctic convoys of World War II

The Arctic convoys of World War II were oceangoing convoys which sailed from the United Kingdom, Iceland, and North America to northern ports in the Soviet Union, most to Arkhangelsk (Archangel) or Murmansk in Russia. There were 78 convoys, Convoy PQ 1 to Convoy PQ 18 (outbound), Convoy QP 1 to Convoy QP 15 (inbound), Convoy JW 51 – Convoy JW 67 (outbound) and Convoy RA 51 to Convoy RA 67 (inbound). Convoys ran from August 1941 to May 1945, sailing via the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, with periods of no sailings during several months in 1942 and in the summers of 1943 and 1944.

About 1,400 merchant ships delivered supplies to the Soviet Union under the Anglo-Soviet Agreement and US Lend-Lease programme, mainly escorted by ships of the Royal Navy with support from the Royal Canadian Navy, and the U.S. Navy. Eighty-five merchant vessels and 16 British warships (two cruisers, six destroyers, eight other escort ships) were lost. The Kriegsmarine lost a number of vessels including the Scharnhorst-class battleship Scharnhorst, three destroyers, 30 U-boats and the Luftwaffe suffered the loss of many aircraft. The convoys demonstrated the Western Allied commitment to helping the Soviet Union, prior to the opening of a second front and tied up a substantial part of Germany's naval and air forces.

During the First World War (1914–1918), Central Powers blockades halted traffic between Imperial Russia and its Allies via the Black Sea and the Baltic. The Tsarist authorities sped up development of an ice-free port at Romanov-on-Murman (now Murmansk); supplies arriving via the Arctic came too little and too late to prevent the Allied collapse on the Eastern Front. The operation of Murmansk proved and established the feasibility of an Arctic supply-line for military materiel.^{[citation needed]}

The Soviet authorities had claimed that the unloading capacity of Arkhangelsk was 300,000 long tons (300,000 t), Vladivostok 140,000 long tons (140,000 t) and 60,000 long tons (61,000 t) by the Persian Gulf route. When surveyed by British and US technicians, the capacity of the ten berths at Arkhangelsk was assessed as 90,000 long tons (91,000 t) and the same from Murmansk from its eight berths. By late 1941, the convoy system used in the Atlantic had been established on the Arctic run; a convoy commodore ensured that the ships' masters and signals officers attended a briefing before sailing to make arrangements for the management of the convoy, which sailed in a formation of long rows of short columns. The commodore was usually a retired naval officer, aboard a ship identified by a white pendant with a blue cross. The commodore was assisted by a Naval signals party of four men, who used lamps, semaphore flags and telescopes to pass signals, coded from books carried in a bag, weighted to be dumped overboard. In large convoys, the commodore was assisted by vice- and rear-commodores to direct the speed, course and zig-zagging of the merchant ships and liaise with the escort commander.

Following Convoy PQ 16 and the disaster to Convoy PQ 17 in July 1942, Arctic convoys were postponed for nine weeks and much of the Home Fleet was detached to the Mediterranean for Operation Pedestal, a Malta convoy. During the lull, Admiral John Tovey concluded that the Home Fleet had been of no great protection to convoys beyond Bear Island, midway between Spitsbergen and the North Cape. Tovey would oversee the operation from Scapa Flow, where the fleet was linked to the Admiralty by landline, immune to variations in wireless reception. The next convoy should be accompanied by sufficient protection against surface attack; the longer-range destroyers of the Home Fleet could be used to augment the close escort force of anti-submarine and anti-aircraft ships, to confront a sortie by German ships with the threat of a massed destroyer torpedo attack. The practice of meeting homeward-bound QP convoys near Bear Island was dispensed with and Convoy QP 14 was to wait until Convoy PQ 18 was near its destination, despite the longer journey being more demanding of crews, fuel and equipment. The new escort carrier HMS Avenger (Commander Anthony Colthurst) had arrived from the United States and was added to the escort force.

The Soviet leaders needed to replace the colossal losses of military equipment lost after the German invasion, especially when Soviet war industries were being moved out of the war zone and emphasised tank and aircraft deliveries. Machine tools, steel and aluminium was needed to replace indigenous resources lost in the invasion. The pressure on the civilian sector of the economy needed to be limited by food deliveries. The Soviets wanted to concentrate the resources that remained on items that the Soviet war economy that had the greatest comparative advantage over the German economy. Aluminium imports allowed aircraft production to a far greater extent than would have been possible using local sources and tank production was emphasised at the expense of lorries and food supplies were squeezed by reliance on what could be obtained from lend–lease. At the Moscow Conference, it was acknowledged that 1.5 million tons of shipping was needed to transport the supplies of the First Protocol and that Soviet sources could provide less than 10 per cent of the carrying capacity.

The British and Americans accepted that the onus was on them to find most of the shipping, despite their commitments in other theatres. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, made a commitment, to send a convoy to the Arctic ports of the USSR every ten days and to deliver 1,200 tanks a month from July 1942 to January 1943, followed by 2,000 tanks and another 3,600 aircraft more than already promised. In November, the US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Admiral Emory Land of the US Maritime Commission and then the head of the War Shipping Administration that deliveries to Russia should only be limited by 'insurmountable difficulties'. The first convoy was due at Murmansk around 12 October and the next convoy was to depart Iceland on 22 October. A motley of British, Allied and neutral shipping loaded with military stores and raw materials for the Soviet war effort would be assembled at Hvalfjörður in Iceland, convenient for ships from both sides of the Atlantic.

From Convoy Dervish to Convoy PQ 11 the supplies to the USSR were mostly from Britain, in British ships defended by the Royal Navy. A fighter force that could defend Murmansk was delivered and protected the Arctic ports and railways into the hinterland. British supplied aircraft and tanks reinforced the Russian defences of Leningrad and Moscow from December 1941. The tanks and aircraft did not save Moscow but were important in the Soviet counter-offensive. The Luftwaffe was by then reduced to 600 operational aircraft on the Eastern Front, to an extent a consequence of Luftflotte 2 being sent to the Mediterranean. British-supplied tanks and aircraft helped the Soviet counter-offensive force back the Germans further than might have been possible and in January and February deliveries of tanks and aircraft allowed the Russians to have a margin of safety should the Germans attempt to counter-attack.