Battle of the Arctic

WINSTON CHURCHILL called it ‘the worst journey in the world’. But was even this telling quote, describing the nightmarish torment experienced while transporting military aid to northern Russia during World War Two, an understatement?

As this book’s title implies, Battle of the Arctic tells a unique story. For much of the conflict was complicated by terrific storms, snow, ice, fog, whales, and Arctic mirages, so that what is chronicled at times sounds like a cross between the nightmarish torment experienced by both Shackleton in his ship Endurance and Scott of the Antarctic, and an Arctic version of Robinson Crusoe.

The action unfolded as Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers, and intelligence officers delivered on their countries’ promise to take arms to Russia notwithstanding the German attempts to hunt them in their aircraft, U-boats, and surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. When ships were attacked and went down in seas so cold that a man could die after five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic. Men perished one by one in lifeboats, and as castaways on deserted Arctic islands where they were stalked by polar bears. Frostbitten and wounded survivors ended up in primitive Russian hospitals where amputations were carried out without anaesthetics. Others, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD and the gulag, as well as famine and prostitution.

Using new material unearthed in American, British, Russian, and German archives, as well as Polish, Norwegian, French, and Dutch sources, and a remarkable collection of vivid witness accounts brought together at the passing of the last survivors, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore can at last shine a revealing light on this extraordinary tale that oscillates between the sailors’ eye view on the front line, and the controversies that infuriated world leaders.