From the author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man and Enigma: The Battle for the Code, a deep dive into the Second World War’s maritime epic in the Arctic.
In a reconfiguration of recent events in Ukraine, it is 1941, and Russia has been invaded. The terms of the new alliance were that Western nations would ship urgently needed war materials to Russia via the shortest but most dangerous route: sailing north of the Arctic Circle while being hunted by U-boats, the Luftwaffe, and a surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. This endeavour was called the Arctic convoys.
Battle of the Arctic is about the conflict and naval battles that unfolded while Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers and intelligence officers delivered on this wartime commitment to Russia from 1941-45, passing through terrific storms, snow, ice and Arctic mirages. When ships went down in seas so cold that a man could die after just five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic. As is shown in this description, the aftermath of such incidents was harrowing. 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 Russian hospitals so primitive that amputations were carried out without anaesthetics. Other survivors, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD and the gulags as well as famine and prostitution.
This narrative has been written using a remarkable collection of vivid witness accounts brought together at the passing of the last survivors, and it has been produced with the benefit of research in Russian, German, American and British archives. Polish, Dutch, Norwegian and French sources have also been quoted. This has enabled the telling of this extraordinary story to oscillate between the sailor’s eye view on the front line and the controversies that infuriated world leaders.
Although during WW2, the relationship with Russia was far from smooth sailing, this wartime sacrifice for Stalin’s Soviet Union is today used by both parties as the historical precedent for future cooperation between Russia and the West.