Of all convoy runs, Atlantic or Pacific, there is one that has become wardroom and fo’castle legend wherever men of the sea gather to swap yarns. It has been told and retold by those that lived through to tell it. And the men that had been on it are considered a little higher in the echelon of veterans—whether they be the brass hats of the escort ships, or the humblest merchant seamen tending boilers in rusty old teakettles that could scarcely keep pace in the convoy parade. It is the dread “Murmansk Run.”
Men—and boys—who had never seen salt spray in their lives returned from one Murmansk Run seasoned veterans of both the sea and the war.
German armies were at the gates of Moscow by the end of 1941. Relief, in American war supplies, simply had to get through to the Soviet forces. The shortest practicable route was over the Arctic Circle and around the North Cape of Norway down to the port of Murmansk, or into the White Sea to Archangel. But bitter weather and a ruthless, vigilant enemy combined to make this the most dangerous of all wartime voyages.
Not only was there danger from enemy submarines, based all along the Norwegian coast; German airfields were close at hand, and—a more serious potential menace than either—heavy units of the German High Seas Fleet. The Von Tirpitz, the Admiral Hipper, the Scheer and Lützow, together with squadrons of destroyers, lurked in deep rugged Alten Fjord, a constant murderous threat against anything smaller than a battleship daring to pass their lair.
To combat these heavy craft, the British Home Fleet had to maintain constant patrol with ships of similar armor and armament. More than this, the Home Fleet had to protect each Russia-bound convoy. It was rugged duty for a navy which had already taken serious losses. Help was needed, and help was forthcoming.
On March 26, 1942, Task Force 99 sailed from Casco Bay, Maine, for Scapa Flow, to operate with the Home Fleet. The Admiral flew his flag from the battleship Washington, and his force comprised the cruisers Wichita and Tuscaloosa, and the destroyers of DESRON 8.
Late in June a special job came up, one that promised vital action and, possibly, a chance to end the threat of the German “fieet-in-being.” Reconnaissance and intelligence agreed that the Tirpitz and the Nazi cruisers were being readied for sea. At the same time one of the largest and most important convoys was heading for Murmansk.
The Tuscaloosa and the Wichita were assigned to the Cruiser Covering Force to escort the convoy from Iceland around the North Cape. The Washington joined the heavy units of the British Home Fleet.
The prime mission of the Cruiser Covering Force was to get the convoy through, with the secondary mission of luring or delaying any heavy units of the Nazis into range of the big boys of the Allied force. German air and submarine attacks were expected in great strength; a previous Murmansk convoy had got through with little damage, which made Hitler angry. This particular convoy, PQ 17, represented some $700,000,000 worth of arms for hard-pressed Russia, which made the Nazis anxious. An added prize for the Germans was convoy QP 13, outward bound from Murmansk, scheduled to pass PQ 17 to northward of North Cape.
The Tirpilz came out promptly, together with one or two cruisers (reports do not agree), a large screen of destroyers, and a whole fleet of covering aircraft. She eluded the heavy ships of the Home Fleet, and, while she never struck at either convoy, her presence in the area caused the Cruiser Covering Force to be withdrawn. The convoy scattered, and found its way to Murmansk as best it could under continued heavy air and undersea attack.
“Heavy air and undersea attack” could well have been a standard daily entry in any log of an Armed Guard Officer. It would have fitted naturally and normally after that other standard entry “Steaming as before.”
One of the veterans of the Murmansk run was a young lieutenant of the Naval Reserve from Gainesville, Georgia, assigned to the SS. Expositor as Armed Guard Officer in February, 1942. At this early stage of the war there were not enough man power to give every officer a full gun crew. To man his single 4-inch 50-caliber gun and four 30- caliber machine guns, he had only four seamen and a signalman striker—“striker” in Navy language meaning an enlisted man studying for noncommissioned promotion.
At nine o’clock in the morning of March 4, 1942, the Expositor left pier 98 in Philadelphia and headed for New York. Here a cargo was taken aboard which caused the Armed Guard crew to feel a few shivers against which their pea jackets were no protection.
The cargo was 5,000 rounds of 75-mm. shells, 5,000 rounds of 37-mm. shells and 5,000 cases of TNT.
The next stop was Halifax, where the ammunition ship was incorporated in a convoy bound for the Clyde Anchorage in Loch Long off Gourock, Scotland. At 2:30 in the morning of March 27, the ships dropped anchor in that great convoy berthing spot. But the Expositor was not unloaded. On April 1 they were on the move again, in company with three other American merchant ships, SS. Lancaster, Alcoa Rambler, and Paul Luckenbach. The morning was clear, the weather fine. The water of Loch Long lapped gently on the gray stone sea walls of Gourock. The gun crew watched the brown hills of Scotland fade in and they swapped wisecracks about April Fool’s day. Their destination was certainly the Soviet Union, and on whom would the joke be if they didn’t make it?
At four o’clock that afternoon the lead ship in the convoy began to turn. A message had been received from the British Admiralty ordering the convoy to return to Gourock. Anchored again in Loch Long the reason for the return was made known. The DEMS Office (Defensive Equipment for Merchant Ships, the counterpart of the Navy’s Armed Guard) had decided the ships were insufficiently armed. To the men of the Expositor, this was another certain proof that they were embarking on the hazardous Murmansk run.
Next day additional guns arrived on board, two 20-mm. Oerlikon A.A. machine guns and one twin-mount Hotchkiss machine gun. It was an embarrassment of riches. The battle bill for the gun crew had been complicated before with only five men to man five guns. Now, with additional guns, volunteers from the merchant crew had to be drilled in their use.
On April 7, the quartet, under Admiralty orders, left for the Lynn of Lorn, off Lismore Island, Scotland. Three days later, in a convoy which now consisted of 25 ships, American, British, and Russian, they steamed out of the Lynn of Lorn bound for Reykjavik, Iceland, last stop on the way to North Russia. On the 15th the ships arrived off Reykjavik Harbor and were ordered to Iceland’s convoy anchorage area, Hvalfjordur Bay.
There the ships remained for ten days, surrounded by grim, brown lava cliffs from whose snowy tops bristled anti-aircraft artillery. It was remote from Reykjavik’s few urban attractions, and the crew heard with relief that they were to be on the move again, even though it was now officially announced: “Destination, Murmansk.”
Then at 0800, April 26, the convoy began to move. On the second day out of Iceland, lookouts reported what was to be a continuous hazard all the way to Murmansk—floating mines.
The third day was stormy. The sky was low and goosefeather-gray and occasional snow flurries blotted out ships ahead. It was still morning when a plane was heard, flying very high. By the sound, it seemed to be circling.
“One of those damned vultures,” a veteran merchant seaman growled.
The plane kept circling. “He’s radioing our position, speed, and course,” the seaman added knowingly. “And lie’s smart, knows enough to keep out of range. He’s just a spotter. We’ll be in for it in a little while.”
“What do you mean?” a novice asked.
“Bombers, that’s what.”
The Expositor plodded along with the convoy. All hands grew as fond of snow as a small boy with a new sled. Sunshine, alternating with the flurries, was reviled. Thus for four hours, and then—
“I don’t remember how many planes there were,” the lieutenant in command said. “We had just passed through a snow squall and were in the clear when we saw them coming in on our starboard bow.”
The signal to commence firing was hoisted. The entire convoy seemed to blaze at the same time. The planes roared over the fire- belching ships, their bombs falling oft to the starboard side of the convoy. The bombers climbed higher and disappeared into the clouds.
Nobody had a chance to say “scared ’em off, hey?” before one of the planes screamed down through the clouds on a dive-bombing run aimed at the lead ship in the port column. The anti-aircraft cruiser guarding the convoy opened fire with every gun on her decks. Guns from the merchantmen in the first three columns joined on the instant. It was a blanket of fire such as no German pilot had ever expected to face. The bomber never came out of its dive. It crashed about 150 yards off the port side of the number one column without dropping its bomb load.
That was all.
The Expositor’s Armed Guard crew had had its indoctrinating baptism of fire. Not very exciting at that. Buzz—whoosh—bang—bang! But the old timers muttered something about “luck” and wondered aloud what the next time would be like, and how soon.
“We felt pretty good about it,” one of them recalls. “We had shot down one of the planes, there was no damage done to us and we had driven off the others. Spirits were pretty high.”
The convoy wallowed along resolutely, and without molestation. Then at 3:30 the following afternoon, two more “vultures” were sighted. Again the spotters carefully avoided flying over the convoy in gun range. They circled far out. They were still there five hours later, when the last man came up from evening mess, blinking at the bright arctic sun. Then as if the pilot had spent all that time building up courage, one of the planes suddenly streaked toward the port wing of the convoy. As anti-aircraft fire began to find the range, the bomber tilted off on a wide tack and climbed high into screening clouds.
A moment later, it flashed over the convoy for a second try and again the anti-aircraft fire forced the plane to seek cloud refuge. The pilot seemed determined to have at least one shot at the ships. The third time he came out of the clouds in a steep dive at the port wing of the convoy. It was his last. Streams of tracers poured into the plane and followed it as it crashed into the ocean. The companion bomber made no attempt to attack. It straightened out and disappeared over the horizon.
Gun crews remained at their stations on watch. It was still snowing in flurries and there was the feeling that something else was going to happen.
It lacked about an hour for sunset, which is to say it was one o’clock in the morning when the Commodore hoisted a signal.
“Expect attack!”
Three planes were slanted in toward the starboard and the ships opened fire.
This was the first glimpse of torpedo bombers. The three planes continued their approach in formation toward us. It looked like an attempt to pick off the leading line of ships. They came in low, flying about 50 or 75 feet above the water.
Then the torpedoes began to drop. The men at the guns kept their eyes on the planes. But above the ear-splitting chatter of the ordnance they heard the hollow, reverberating explosion that even the novices knew meant torpedoes had found targets against hulls.
The starboard plane of the trio crashed in flames, as its companions sheered off into the clouds. Then the gunners could look around.
They saw the stern of the SS. Bothaven, the Commodore’s ship, plunging bow first into the water while men spilled from the decks and swam toward the three lifeboats that had been launched. Where the SS. Cape Corso had been was a flame-shot column of smoke.
The explosion of that ship sent flames 500 feet in the air. The entire midsection seemed to blow up. The ship was a flaming mass. It sank in about 30 seconds, and there were no survivors.
The SS. Jutland, steam pouring from her vents, was dead in the water and her crew taking to the boats from decks that inched closer and closer to the sea.
“Three ships sunk by two torpedoes?” somebody demanded. “A submarine must have gotten one of them.”
And, as if in confirmation, the Expositor's lookout shouted: “Submarine!”
“Where away?” The sea beyond the convoy’s perimeter was empty. The lookout was correct—fantastically correct. A conning tower was rising in the very center of the convoy and just a few yards from the Expositor's starboard quarter!
“The periscope was only about 10 or 15 feet away from the ship,” the captain recalls, “and the submarine was surfacing. It was so close aboard that none of our guns could be brought to bear, no machine guns, no broadside guns, no nothing. And nobody else in the convoy could shoot at it without hitting us— loaded with TNT. It was kind of embarrassing to say the least.”
One of the cooks aboard the Expositor was standing on the fan tail by the stern gun when the sub’s conning tower bubbled up under his bulging eyes. The man stood there, unable to believe what he saw. Then he turned to the mute gun, which had been depressed to its lowest trajectory. The mess hand rushed over to the piece, grabbed it by the barrel and tried to tug it into position to fire, grunting and groaning as he pulled.
The submarine continued to surface until the conning tower was awash, while the Expositor widened the distance from it.
By the time the submarine was 25 yards away, the 4-inch gun could be brought to bear on the German craft. The first shot missed. The gun was still too high. The second was a direct hit on the conning tower, at 30 or 40 yards. It was blown completely off.
After the second shot, the submarine appeared to be sinking. Water boiled up in a great froth of air and bubbles. As the men watched the oil spread over the submarine’s grave the lookout yelled: “Torpedo track off port bowl”
The ship jolted as her screws went into reverse. A few feet in front of her bow the torpedo hissed its way to nowhere.
Enemy submarines and aircraft were working in very close co-operation. The reconnaissance planes did nothing but circle the convoy, evidently radioing to the subs, or to where the message could be relayed to them, our position, course, and speed. Then the subs would lie ahead of the convoy and as we came by would let us have it. The submarine that came up in the center of the convoy was evidently hurt by some of the heavy depth charges that had been dropped by the DE’s and corvettes, after the Cape Corso was hit.
This marked the end of enemy action for that day. But as the ships dropped into their convoy position, filling up the gaps left by the torpedoed vessels, a fourth casualty was discovered. A British corvette had disappeared in the melee, wiped out by a torpedo.
The only casualty aboard the Expositor was a seaman’s dungarees. The deck hand, his arms full of 40-mm. ammunition, was on a ladder in the path of the 4-inch gun’s blast.
“The concussion ripped his pants off, and I literally mean off,” an officer recalls. “He didn’t have a stitch on him. He stood there in a daze for a moment, and then dropped his shells and tumbled to the deck after them. Somebody ran to pick him up. There wasn’t any more of a scratch or bruise on him than there was pants. He was just dazed, and he couldn’t quite figure out why he was mother- naked.”
May 3 was almost logged as an uneventful day, but a few minutes before midnight the attack signal was again jerked up the halyards. This time the Germans changed tactics. Two torpedo bombers appeared, one on each wing of the convoy. They launched their tin-fish simultaneously against both flanks of the flotilla. It was a clean miss all the way around. No torpedo found its mark, nor did a shot from the anti-aircraft guns.
Although evidences of submarine activity continued for the remaining week of the voyage, there were no further engagements with the Germans. The Armed Guard crew could not loaf the time away, however. Watches had to be maintained at any cost and the men worked with little rest and less sleep.
On May 6, the convoy anchored in the harbor of Murmansk. The port could accommodate only about ten ships at the docks, which had been bombed and rebuilt many times with timber.
As the Expositor berthed, a sailor asked about liberty ashore.
“I’ve dated all kinds of women in the world except Russians,” he observed. “I’d like to get me a date with a Russian.”
He leaned over the rail to watch a Russian woman stevedore walking along the pier below. She stopped to pick up a length of piling, obstructing the path, and nonchalantly tossed the 120-pound log out of the way. The sailor spat reflectively into the water.
“On second thought,” he said, “I don’t believe I care to meet these women.”
Now the weather sided against the Germans. It snowed. It snowed so hard for two days that the vessel’s stern was invisible from the bridge. The blizzard hampered the unloading considerably but it grounded the Luftwaffe until the third day. Then the sun came out, and with it the bombers, skimming close over the ridge of low hills that curved around the harbor.
Twelve of the big multimotored aircraft headed for the sitting ducks. The gun crews went into action; everybody else scattered for shelter.
It seemed impossible that the Germans could miss. They did, but the gunners didn’t. Only nine of the bombers flew back toward Finland, two were brought down by gunfire and one by a Russian fighter plane that buzzed up to meet them.
After the Expositor unloaded she traded places with an ammunition ship.
“I don’t know whether that ammunition ship had been spotted or not,” an officer reports, “but that afternoon when we had taken her anchorage out in the stream we were the target for a direct attack by six dive bombers.
“Bombs dropped fore and aft and to both sides of us, but they all missed by about 100 yards. We were completely circled by bombs, but we weren’t hit.”
The next day, about the same time in the early afternoon, the bombers came again. This time the misses were nearer.
“In fact,” he added, “the spray from the first bomb completely obscured the ship. The British destroyer that was sitting on our starboard quarter signaled to ask ‘What damage?’ Just as our signalman prepared to answer ‘No damage’ a second flight of dive bombers came heading for us.
“The bombs fell so near that the concussion lifted the ship and shook her like a dog shakes a rat.”
The twenty-two ships were unloaded in twenty days, despite bombings, blizzards, and inadequate wharfing. The men were anxious to leave. Murmansk was a pile of rubble. New buildings were all made of wood so they could be reconstructed quickly. There was the International Club, open to everyone, for hot tea, chess, and tattered old magazines in six languages, but the ship was the most comfortable place to stay when off duty.
On May 21, the convoy left for Iceland. Twice in the first three days submarine contacts were made.
Late in the afternoon of the third day— late by the clocks, not by the sun—a reconnaissance plane began its vulture-like circling beyond firing range. Presently a torpedo bomber joined in the circular vigil above the ships. For three hours the tantalizing surveillance continued. Then each dropped two green flares. Ten minutes later red flares were dropped, signals to lurking submarines.
But, as if in response to the flares, a Hurricane fighter plane was catapulted from a British ship. It started in pursuit of the torpedo bomber. Both planes disappeared in a cloud bank, where the fighter evidently lost its prey because ten minutes later, the Hurricane returned and started to close in on the second German plane. Seconds later the torpedo bomber popped out of the cloud and turned to join the fight. But it was too late to save the reconnaissance plane. A savage burst of fire from the Hurricane sent the first Nazi crashing into the sea. The bomber fled, and the Hurricane streaked after it. The pursuit vanished over the horizon.
The convoy churned on, the empty ships riding high. Then a shout went up from the decks of the watching ships. The Hurricane was returning—alone. It pan-caked on the water near its mother-ship and a boat put out to it. The men crowding the rails of the other ships saw the pilot taken aboard, his plane abandoned. A little while later a flutter of flags broke out on the Englishman. The pilot had died of wounds. For the remainder of the day all flags were flown at half mast in honor of the fighter who had given his life to save the ships.
Next day the now familiar shores of Iceland were sighted. The voyage was almost over. There was the subinfested water between Reykjavik and New York to cover, but after what the men had already been through, that seemed almost a humdrum chore. The ships remained in Iceland for two dreary, chafing weeks. Only the Master of the ship and the Armed Guard Officer were permitted to go ashore, and then for the transaction of official business only.
On June 10, the confinement was broken. The ships left under escort. Eight days later the men were reminded that they still were a long way from home. A steamer on the edge of the convoy was torpedoed. Four men were killed in the explosion, the rest taken aboard other ships. Two days later another was torpedoed and sunk. Both times the attackers escaped, undetected.
At one o’clock on June 28, the Expositor dropped anchor just off the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. One Armed Guard crew had returned with all hands intact from the Murmansk run—12,000 miles, 116 days, the ship safe, and the metaphorical scalp of one submarine nailed to the mainmast. It was just another voyage; tougher than most, easier than some.
The crews’ adventures were probably duplicated scores of times. They are related here not because they are exceptional, but because they are illustrative. And not all gun crews survived the German-Finnish gantlet to tell their stories.
The route to Archangel was, if anything, worse than the Murmansk run, being longer. Consider the experiences of the Armed Guard Officer on the SS. Schoharie, which brought a shipload of tanks, ammunition, and food to Murmansk in a convoy that numbered 40 ships at sailing, and 27 upon arrival.
The convoy was one of the more important in the constant line of supply to the Soviet Union. Stalingrad and Leningrad were in what seemed to be the last stages of siege and destruction. To secure the delivery of the desperately needed supplies, the British provided the convoy with an escort of a converted aircraft carrier, a light cruiser, two anti-aircraft cruisers, 21 destroyers, and a small fleet of corvettes, minesweepers and trawlers—a task force in itself. And yet, a third of the convoy was lost.
It was on Sunday, September 13,1942, the seventh day out of Iceland, that Lieutenant Maynard looked over the side in the course of gun inspection to see a British merchantman instantly blotted out in steam and smoke. Before the signal to scatter could be raised, a second ship was torpedoed.
The superstitious in that convoy had reason to confirm their distaste for the number 13. Before that September day was done, a wolf-pack of submarines ran riot inside the convoy’s columns, a swarm of 37 Heinkel torpedo planes made an attack at 25 feet above the water, and a half dozen JU-88s subjected the ships to a dive-bombing attack. A total of ten merchantmen was sunk, or left crippled under corvette protection only to be sent down by the Nazi’s aerial rear guard.
It was a desperate day-long fight with an enemy who alternately dropped from the sky or rose from the ocean depths.
The view over the side was not cheering. Cargo ships in convoy may not pause or break the established pattern to rescue the shipwrecked. That job is left for the escorting warships. But it does not boost the morale of the Armed Guardsman to see men struggling in the icy brine as their own ship passes through the flotsam of battle; they are humanly prone to wonder when it will be their turn to cling with numbing fingers to a shattered spar and see the ships go by.
“There were men in the water, and men in lifeboats,” one man recalls. “Some of them swearing, some praying, and some mockingly sticking out their thumbs and calling ‘Going my way, Mister?’ as we slid by not a 100 feet from them.”
Monday was inaugurated by the torpedoing of a tanker early in the morning. At noon thirteen torpedo planes came out of the clouds and concentrated on the carrier, whose own fighters shot down six of the enemy without loss. Half an hour later twenty Heinkels swarmed over the horizon. One of them torpedoed an ammunition ship which disintegrated just as the plane skimmed over the stricken vessel’s masts; the explosion also blasted the Nazi plane and its crew to atoms.
Day in, day out, the Heinkels and Junkers plagued the convoy. The thirteenth ship was lost to Finnish dive bombers just as the battered flotilla stood in for the straits of the White Sea. The convoy had to fight off attacks every day at sea of the four remaining, and for the four moonlit nights of unloading at Archangel.
“And that,” one of the observers of the action reported, “is about all that happened on our trip to Archangel,” a trip during which he himself once had to grab a 50-caliber gun and train it against a Voss-Ha 140 boring in on the Schoharie. The plane disappeared in a blur of flame and smoke, and tumbled “just like a ball of fire” into the sea.
“I think that was the most fun I had on the entire voyage,” he concluded.
These stories could be duplicated and elaborated by the hundreds of Armed Guard officers and men who commuted from Atlantic ports of the United States to Iceland, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Africa, the Near East, South America, and wherever ships ply salt water. Many did not return to tell their stories of submarine torpedoing, and of the Nazi captains’ favorite target practice on lifeboats and rafts.
*From Battle Report: The Battle of the Atlantic. Copyright 1945 by Walter Karig, and reprinted with the permission of Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., publisher.