Independence Day 1942 found convoy PQ-17 seven days out of Hvalfjord and eight days from Archangel, steaming in and out of fog banks. The thermometer said 3 degrees Fahrenheit, but it felt colder. The fog muffled all sounds except the grumbling of the ships’ bilge pumps and the clacking of their steam pipes—sounds the crew had stopped hearing long ago. None of the mariners could sleep or even relax. With Bear Island behind them, they knew they could be attacked at any moment. S. J. Flaherty described the mood on the Liberty ship John Witherspoon: “Everybody goes about his job watching and waiting; there is not much to be said. This is tension—the same type that quiets a cornered animal before an attack.” Any man who tried to sleep did so fully clothed, wearing a bulky jacket, sea boots, an inflatable Mae West life vest, and a thick cork life belt. A willingness to accept discomfort, one sailor wrote, “could mean just that difference between living and dying.”
At two o’clock in the morning, a German torpedo bomber materialized like an apparition out of the fog and flew low over the Troubadour. The pilot might have been as surprised as the men on the ship. The plane veered off. Carraway and his men stood at their guns, staring into the gray void, wondering if the plane would circle back from a different direction. But an hour dragged by, then two, and then three. On the opposite side of convoy PQ-17, a hole opened in the fog and a Heinkel 115 seaplane dropped through it. The pilot had turned off his engines so he could approach the convoy in silence. The plane glided down along the rightmost column of ships, flying mast high, and released two torpedoes. The Heinkel 115’s engines growled back into life and the plane rose and swooped off.
The torpedoes were easy to spot, churning through the glassy water. Aerial torpedoes were smaller and less powerful than torpedoes fired by U-boats, but they could still sink ships. They often skipped like flat rocks when they first landed, then bit into the water and accelerated under the power of their own small motors. The Heinkel 115’s torpedoes headed straight for one of the antiaircraft ships, which dodged them. The torpedoes kept going, right at the freighter Carlton, the Jonah on its third attempt to reach Russia. The lookouts on the Carlton saw the torpedoes and shouted for the helmsman to turn the ship and dodge them. The old freighter narrowly succeeded. One of the torpedoes passed harmlessly out to sea. The other cut through the convoy diagonally and headed straight for the starboard side of the Liberty ship Christopher Newport, the lead ship in the eighth column.
Men on the Christopher Newport saw the torpedo coming. A member of the ship’s Navy Armed Guard, Hugh Patrick Wright, poured a stream of .30-caliber machine-gun fire into the torpedo. The rounds seemed to hit the target but deflect off the water or the torpedo. The torpedo kept coming. The men carrying ammunition for Wright’s gun turned and fled, yelling at Wright to flee too. Every man on that part of the ship ran except for Wright. “He continued firing and changing [clips] as fast as he emptied them,” his commander wrote. “Realizing the complete uselessness of his .30-caliber, Wright kept firing until the torpedo passed out of sight under the starboard lifeboats. . . . Wright’s fire was very accurate and his coolness was evidenced by the fact that he kept up a running stream of oaths directed at his ‘son-of-a-bitching gun.’”
After the torpedo disappeared beneath the ship, all was quiet for a moment. Then a tremendous explosion shook the Christopher Newport. Wright was hurled from the machine gun onto a deck two levels below, where he lay motionless. Another Armed Guard gunner, Paul Webb, was blown “like a rag doll” into the ship’s smokestack. Webb had stayed at his gun trying to clear it after it jammed. The crippled Christopher Newport veered sharply to starboard, forcing the ships behind it to swerve to avoid colliding with it.
The torpedo had found the Christopher Newport’s engine room, blowing a hole in the hull, cracking steam pipes, and stopping the ship dead. Freezing seawater poured in through the hole and swirled over the blazing-hot boilers. The boilers exploded, killing all three men on watch in the engine room. Sudden death in the engine room was common in the U-boat war. Men toiling down there were blind and deaf to all that happened outside. They had no idea the ship was under attack until a torpedo burst into their workplace. If they survived the explosion, they had to scramble up ladders through steam and inrushing seawater just to reach the main deck.
The torpedo that hit the Christopher Newport started a fire in the cargo holds, which contained 200 tons of TNT. The captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. The rest of convoy PQ-17 left the Christopher Newport behind, as convoys always did when a ship was sinking, disabled, or straggling. Any ship that stopped to help risked becoming the next victim. Men on vessels near the stricken Christopher Newport stood in the cold for a final look. Most of them had never seen a ship sink before. From the Troubadour, on the opposite side of the convoy, Carraway mistook the sinking vessel for a different Liberty ship, the Benjamin Harrison, on which another of his friends from the Armed Guard served. Now Carraway had two friends to wonder about.
The evacuation of the Christopher Newport went smoothly. Someone revived Wright, the determined machine gunner, and helped him into a lifeboat. He suffered from a headache and a badly sprained ankle. The rescue ship Zamalek swooped in and collected him and forty-six other survivors from the lifeboats. Wright immediately offered to help man the Zamalek’s antiaircraft guns. Most of the survivors did not even get their feet wet. The only dead were the three unlucky souls in the engine room—the first casualties of convoy PQ-17. The Christopher Newport’s captain took a revolver aboard the rescue ship. He declared he needed it to control the black members of his crew. His rescuers on the Zamalek insisted he turn over the gun to them. The Christopher Newport stayed afloat in the convoy’s wake, its main deck crowded with U.S.-built tanks, trucks, and crated-up planes. The fire apparently had died short of the cargo of TNT.
The trawler Ayrshire had fallen behind the convoy and was hurrying to catch up when it came alongside the deserted, listing Christopher Newport. Lieutenant Leo Gradwell talked about boarding the ship to salvage some of its more valuable cargo. His men were relieved when he kept the trawler on course to return to the convoy. The Ayrshire already was tempting fate by straggling. The trawler passed two British submarines that had been sent back from the convoy to try to sink the Christopher Newport so it would not be a hazard to future convoys. On other escort ships in convoy PQ-17, young officers pulled out charts displaying the structure of the convoy and marked the box representing the Christopher Newport with an X.
The mariners could hear German planes flying overhead, but the fog was thick enough to conceal the planes from the ships and the ships from the planes. Some of the German pilots dropped bombs blindly through the gloom, hoping for a lucky hit. They had been unlucky, but the random bombing unnerved the mariners. Bombs suddenly materialized out of the billowing gray fog and splashed into the sea, like thunderbolts hurled from the clouds by angry gods. One bomb narrowly missed a British corvette; two others straddled the freighter Washington but did no damage. On the Ironclad, Lieutenant William Carter reassured himself that the odds were against any ship being hit: “Mathematically, there is a lot more open water surface within the overall boundaries of a convoy than there is ship surface area to be bombed.” Still, “For my own part, this ‘bombs through the fog syndrome’ was the scariest thing I had yet encountered. It must have been the fact that it had such an eerie aspect to it that made it so frightening.”
Like Howard Carraway, Carter had wondered since joining the Navy how he would react the first time he found himself in real danger. Now he knew. “I was relieved to find that I had no awareness of fear during the action itself,” he wrote. “I was too busy. My mind took over and went into its problem-solving mode at breakneck speed, pushing everything else out of the way in the process.” After the danger passed, he replayed the action in his head, “sort of like going to a movie and watching all that scary stuff happen to someone else.” Then, after thanking God for keeping him alive, Carter turned analytical, “thinking about what was likely to happen next, and whether there was anything more that could be done to prepare for its coming.”
Not all men on the Ironclad could channel their fear into constructive action. Carter’s shipmates encouraged him to check on a mariner whom they agreed “had gone nuts.” The first air attack had left the man so shaken that he had stopped standing his watches and performing his other duties. All he did was sit in a chair outside the galley. Carter could not persuade him to return to work and had no idea what to do about him. Everyone on the Ironclad was edgy. The chief engineer stopped by Carter’s quarters to say the captain was tired of Carter sounding the ship’s General Quarters alarm and summoning the crew to lifeboat stations at every hint of an attack. Carter replied as diplomatically as he could that he had the authority to sound the alarm whenever he saw fit.
After an hour or so, the bombs stopped falling through the fog and the sound of the planes’ engines died away. Only the Shad remained, circling. It had in effect become part of the convoy. At one point, according to several mariners’ accounts, men on one ship signaled the German pilot that they were getting dizzy watching the Shad’s endless circles. They asked the pilot to fly in the opposite direction for a while. He signaled back, “Glad to oblige,” and the Shad flew in the opposite direction. On another occasion, the Shad fired a burst from its machine guns into the sea near the Ayrshire when the trawler started lagging behind the convoy again. The pilot did not seem to be trying to hit the Ayrshire, only to nudge it closer to the convoy so the Shad would not have to fly such wide circles. The interactions with the pilot did not lessen Carraway’s enmity for the “accursed” Shad. He kept hoping the pilot would get careless and stray within range of the ships’ guns.
At 8:00 a.m. on the Fourth of July, the American ships in convoy PQ-17 began taking down their U.S. flags in unison. Some of the British sailors thought the Yanks were striking their colors, surrendering. “The yellow muckers!” shouted a British seaman on one of the antiaircraft ships. But the Americans were not giving up. They were replacing their oily, wind-torn American flags with brand-new ones to celebrate Independence Day, 800 miles from the North Pole while hauling arms to Soviet Russia. Although the Panamanian-flagged Troubadour did not raise a new U.S. flag, the Norwegian captain Salvesen invited Carraway to his stateroom to toast the Fourth of July with “a wee drop” of Scotch. The Americans’ show of patriotism impressed the British. “It was a splendidly defiant gesture in the face of the enemy,” wrote Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam. “Loud music came from some of the American ships and their crews could be seen dancing around on deck.” Godfrey Winn tried to imagine what convoy PQ-17 was like for the Americans: “They are much farther from home than we are; their ships don’t possess any real armament like ours; for many of them it will be their first voyage through hostile waters, and anyway they’ve been at sea weeks longer than we have, with all the time the tension increasing.”
Out of sight of the convoy, the big British and American warships in the cruiser force and the distant covering force exchanged holiday greetings. The captain of the British cruiser HMS Norfolk pointed out, “The United States is the only country with a known birthday.” The captain of the American destroyer USS Rowan joked that England, as America’s mother country, could celebrate July 4 as Mother’s Day. He added that Americans liked to enjoy fireworks on the Fourth of July and “I trust you will not disappoint us.” Admiral L. H. K. Hamilton, commander of the cruiser force, added his good wishes to the Americans: “It is a privilege for us all to have you with us and I wish you all the best of hunting.”
Beyond this shipboard holiday bonhomie, however, confusion and stress were setting in among the men responsible for protecting convoy PQ-17. In London, Admiralty officials had learned nothing of the Tirpitz’s whereabouts since the battleship’s berth at Trondheim was discovered empty the previous afternoon. Clouds and fog hampered aerial reconnaissance. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound—who as First Sea Lord outranked everyone else in the British Admiralty—sent a message to Admiral Hamilton giving him permission to keep the cruisers near the convoy for a while longer if he thought it wise, rather than turn them around near Bear Island for their own protection, as originally planned.
Every minute the cruisers stayed near the convoy increased the chance of them being sunk by the Tirpitz, or even by the bombers and U-boats already swarming around convoy PQ-17. By allowing Hamilton to keep the cruisers in harm’s way, Pound was taking a risk. He also was bypassing Admiral Tovey, who was Hamilton’s immediate boss. Tovey bristled when he saw Pound’s message to Hamilton; he wanted the cruisers to get away from the convoy immediately. Tovey quickly sent Hamilton a message ordering him to withdraw the cruisers from convoy PQ-17 as soon as the ships reached a point 150 miles east of Bear Island, unless it was crystal clear by then that the Tirpitz was not going to attack.
The messages to Hamilton from Pound and Tovey did not exactly conflict, but they showed indecision at the highest ranks of the British Admiralty over whether to protect the convoy or its escorts from the Big Bad Wolf. Hamilton found himself in an awkward position. He informed Pound and Tovey he was going to refuel his cruisers from the British fleet oiler Aldersdale, which was sailing in the midst of convoy PQ-17. Hamilton may have thought the refueling would buy time for the British to locate the Tirpitz, and for his two bosses to agree on what he should do.
The Germans were only slightly less confused. They at least knew where the Tirpitz was—safely anchored at Altenfjord, the jumping-off point for its planned strike at convoy PQ-17. The Tirpitz could reach the convoy from Altenfjord in about ten hours. But German reconnaissance pilots had provided conflicting reports about the presence of an Allied aircraft carrier in the convoy’s escort force. One pilot’s report had left the Germans wondering if two Allied carriers were in the area. Until those conflicts were resolved, the Tirpitz was going nowhere. Admiral Raeder tried to contact Hitler with an update on the situation but was told the Führer was “not available.” That was hardly an encouraging sign for Knight’s Move.
The German bomber squadrons in Norway did not need to wait, however. They had battered previous Arctic convoys with no help from the Tirpitz. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering was happy to upstage Admiral Raeder and the German Navy. So far, the Luftwaffe had merely probed convoy PQ-17. Now it would mount a serious attack. A little before 1:00 p.m., a squadron of Junkers 88 bombers took off from the air base at Bardufoss near the North Cape. Next went the Heinkel 111 bombers, whose glassed-in noses were all too familiar to survivors of the London Blitz. The planes had been converted into torpedo bombers for Arctic convoy duty. They roared over the Norwegian tundra and out over the North Cape and the Barents Sea, with nothing between them and the North Pole except convoy PQ-17.
The Junkers 88s reached the convoy first. Their mission was largely diversionary: to fly over the convoy at high altitude and distract the ships’ gun crews. Men on the ships saw the Junkers 88s approaching on the horizon, but by the time the planes reached the convoy the clouds obscured them. The rumble of their engines filled the air. The ships sent up a barrage of antiaircraft fire. The Junkers quickly departed. To the south the sky was clearing. On the horizon the mariners saw a cluster of tiny black dots bobbing up and down, heading at them. “Small, fast bugs skimming just above the water line,” one mariner wrote. It looked to Carter as if every German bomber in Norway was heading for the convoy. The sound of the planes’ engines grew from a faint bumblebee buzz into a drone. The black dots resolved themselves into Heinkel 111 torpedo bombers. A trawler blinked a signal that eight bombers were approaching, then quickly increased the estimate to ten, and then to twenty. In fact, twenty-three bombers were racing at convoy PQ-17, each of them carrying two torpedoes in its bomb racks. The ships’ gunners stood by their weapons and waited. Word came over the escorts’ loudspeakers to “Stand by.” Commodore Dowding wondered if the convoy should execute a sharp change of course to try to confuse the German pilots. But it was too late for maneuvering.
The Heinkels split into two groups. Ten planes approached convoy PQ-17 from the right front corner; the other thirteen circled around toward the convoy’s rear. The planes in the first group could not have chosen a worse moment to attack. They arrived just as one of the warships in the cruiser force, the American destroyer USS Wainwright, had finished refueling from the oiler in the convoy. The Wainwright otherwise would have been miles away from the merchant ships with the rest of the cruiser force. The Wainwright charged at the inbound planes and delivered a thunderous broadside with its 5-inch guns. The destroyer disappeared in a cloud of its own gun smoke. Men on the merchant ships thought for a moment that the Wainwright had exploded. The clear sky ahead of the bombers erupted into a storm of shrapnel. Most of the Heinkels dropped their torpedoes early and fled. Only one plane kept coming. It launched its torpedoes just as one of the Wainwright’s shells set its fuselage afire. The destroyer dodged the torpedoes and the burning Heinkel plunged into the Barents Sea.
The Wainwright turned back to the convoy, passing close alongside the Troubadour, whose Armed Guard gunners cheered and waved “like the student section at a high school football game,” Carraway wrote. The ship’s radioman was practically dancing, “happy as a kid in his first long pants. If this was war, then he liked it!” One of the antiaircraft ships sent the Wainwright a message of congratulations, adding, “We have had the fireworks we were talking about.” The fireworks display was not over, however. Just as the ships emerged from a fog bank into brilliant sunshine, the other thirteen Heinkel 111s raced at convoy PQ-17 from behind.
The commander of the Heinkel squadron, Lieutenant Konrad Hennemann, was a rising star in the Luftwaffe. He recently had received a personal commendation from Goering for sinking 50,000 tons of Allied shipping. He seemed determined to add to his total regardless of the cost. He flew his bomber straight up the center of the convoy at the height of the ships’ masts, strafing the decks of the merchant ships with his machine guns. Dozens of the ships’ guns swung toward him, including the turret gun on the Troubadour’s tank. The tank gun produced a distinct BUNG, BUNG, BUNG sound. Jim North watched the tank fire at the plane. The shots appeared to miss, but North thought he saw the plane wobble slightly—as if the pilot was startled to be attacked by a tank in middle of the ocean.
Just as the Heinkel released its torpedoes, North saw a red glow near the front of the plane. The glow blossomed into a flame. The Heinkel roared over the front of the convoy, with antiaircraft fire still pouring into it, and crashed into the sea. By the time the convoy reached the spot where the plane had gone down, nothing remained but an oil slick with a small flame guttering in the middle. Hennemann had no chance to escape. “A very brave man,” Commodore Dowling reflected. “The concentrated fire on him was terrific and he must have been riddled with every kind of projectile.” Hennemann would be posthumously awarded the Knight’s Cross.
One of Hennemann’s torpedoes narrowly missed the American freighter Bellingham, the second ship in the fourth column, and sped out to sea. The other torpedo struck the British freighter Navarino directly below its bridge. The Navarino shuddered and slowed. The Bellingham, directly behind it, had to swerve to miss it. Some of the Navarino’s crew panicked and launched lifeboats while the ship was still moving. Two of the lifeboats capsized. Other crewmen jumped into the sea as ships surged past them on either side. A man in the water shouted optimistically, “On to Moscow! See you in Russia!” The rescue ships moved in behind the sinking Navarino, racing the clock and the icy water. Rescuers pulled one man out of the water but decided he was dead, his body limp, his eyes open and staring. When they lowered him back into the sea, however, he let out a faint groan, and they quickly pulled him aboard again. He would spend the rest of the voyage in the boiler room, the hottest place he could find. Ten other men escaped the Navarino on a raft and watched with alarm as the rest of convoy PQ-17 steamed out of sight. “The horizon emptied and we were on a raft in the middle of the Arctic Ocean,” one of them recalled, “and we began to fear that the others had reported that we had gone down with the ship.” One of the rescue ships finally returned for the raft. The only man killed on the Navarino was a young fireman who, like the dead on the Christopher Newport, had been standing watch in the engine room.
Other German pilots followed Hennemann’s example, flying low into the heart of convoy PQ-17. The mariners were shocked to see the German bombers—54 feet long, with 74-foot wingspans—zooming past them at eye level. They could look down into the cockpits. The noise of the guns was deafening. Some Navy gunners fired through low-flying planes into other ships. One of Carter’s men on the Ironclad accidentally shot a tanker, although he insisted afterward, “I didn’t hurt her much.” The Ironclad in turn was hit by a stray round from another vessel—possibly the Troubadour. Commodore Dowding noted afterward that the American gunners kept firing even after planes had passed, spending precious ammunition to punish empty air. “The U.S. ships have not had much experience of this sort of thing,” Dowding added.
Carraway kept up a steady fire with one of the Troubadour’s .30-caliber machine guns although, as he had suspected, those guns lacked the firepower to bring down planes, and his rounds simply bounced off. The scene on the Troubadour was chaotic. “All the crew . . . were running around the deck, yelling and screaming in all their forty tongues, looking like demons or wild men in their bundled Arctic clothing, clumsy life jackets, silly shrapnel helmets, gas masks and addled brains,” Carraway wrote. But he happened to glance up at the bridge and saw Salvesen standing “calm as an oak in the midst of all the confusion. . . . I was proud of the captain.”
A Heinkel 111 flew so close over the Troubadour that the mariners could smell its exhaust. Carraway watched in horror as a torpedo skipped across the water straight at the ship’s bow. “[M]y knees buckled, my heart crowded my tonsils, my blood turned to water, and fear gripped me,” he wrote Avis. He thought of the men he had stationed in the tank. If the ship went down, they might never get out. Carraway ran across the deck to the tank, “faster, I think, in all the heavy clothing and boots, than I had ever run on a cinder track,” and shouted at the men inside, “Get out—Torpedo!”
Carraway was not the only one who saw the torpedo coming. Jim North, standing lookout on the Troubadour’s bow, shouted and pointed. Salvesen yelled to the helmsman, “Hard left, full stern!” The torpedo vanished under the ship directly below North. Expecting an explosion, North half ran, half fell down a ladder from the bow to a lower deck, his rubber boots slipping on the ladder’s rungs. For decades afterward, North’s heart would race anytime his feet slipped, even on a polished floor in his home. The torpedo did not explode. It popped out of the water on the opposite side of the Troubadour. It zoomed away from the ship for about 100 feet, and then turned around and ran back toward the port side of the Troubadour, where North had stopped running. The torpedo seemed to be chasing North around the ship. The Armed Guard fired at it with machine guns to no avail. Mariners shouted at it in Spanish and Portuguese, “Go away!” Just before it reached the Troubadour again, the torpedo stopped, turned on one end, and sank. The crew stared at the spot where it had disappeared, half expecting it to resurface and pursue the ship a third time, but it did not. Men flung themselves down on the Troubadour’s deck and thanked the Almighty. The captain hollered, “Did you see that? Did you see that? Don’t tell nobody, they won’t believe it.” At that moment, North decided God did not intend for him to die in convoy PQ-17. Still, he was shaking so badly that he could not light a cigarette, even with a long kitchen match.
North then heard a muffled roar to his left as a torpedo exploded into the side of the Liberty ship William Hooper, which occupied the dreaded coffin corner next to the Troubadour and directly behind the Ironclad. North watched transfixed as the William Hooper’s entire engine room seemed to burst out of the ship’s smokestack in a fiery mass. Flames engulfed the Hooper. Some of its crew jumped overboard before the captain gave the order to abandon ship. The captain had to interpose himself between other crew members and the remaining lifeboats. He shouted at them: If you launch a lifeboat while a ship is still moving, the lifeboat will capsize. The crew retreated. The Armed Guard kept shooting at the bombers and managed to hit one. But that would not save the William Hooper or its 8,600 tons of war supplies. The captain ordered the men to abandon ship, which they did in three lifeboats and two rafts. The only three casualties on the Hooper were—like the casualties on the Christopher Newport and Navarino—men on watch in the engine room.
The rescue ships Zamalek and Rathlin picked up the survivors from the rafts and lifeboats. A young Filipino seaman from the Hooper claimed to have been blown so high into the air by the explosion that a Heinkel 111 had flown under him. The rescue ships’ duty was extremely hazardous. Saving men from sunken ships meant stopping dead in the water in the convoy’s wake, where U-boats waited for stragglers. Rescue ships would lower meshed nets for men who still had the strength to climb up them, and motor lifeboats to save men too weak or injured to help themselves. Men in the water often were coated with thick, black bunker oil from their sunken ships. Sometimes their bodies were so slippery they could not be pulled into the boats. Men who had swallowed oil could die from its toxic effects hours, days, or even years after being rescued from the sea. Motor lifeboats had rescue swimmers who swam after helpless men. The Rathlin’s rescue swimmer, who was a competitive swimming champion before the war, never entered the water without a knife to protect himself if someone he tried to save became hysterical. The surgeons on the rescue ships performed delicate medical procedures in the middle of air raids. The Zamalek’s surgeon had just finished operating on the gunner who had lost an eye in the previous day’s attack when the ship wheeled around to pick up survivors of the William Hooper.
Men pulled from the freezing sea after less than twenty minutes could usually recover fully, but those who had been longer in the water faced a more uncertain future. The British author Paul Kemp described the emergency treatment for half-frozen, semiconscious mariners in Arctic waters:
On being brought aboard they were stripped and wrapped in warm blankets. Artificial respiration was started immediately and intramuscular injections of camphor in oil were given. The mouth, nostrils and eyes would be gently cleansed of oil fuel. As soon as breathing became more regular, the patient was not interfered with until a pulse could be felt and the pupils began to contract. A prolonged bout of shivering would follow, after which consciousness would return. The patient would then be moved to a warm bunk and sleep would be induced, by morphine, if necessary.
If a man did not recover within forty-eight hours, he might need long-term treatment for exposure, or worse. Severely frostbitten limbs could turn gangrenous and require amputation. An American seaman in Archangel described visiting a building near the hospital where about twenty mariners “were lying in a small room with a dirt floor. Their ships had been torpedoed, they’d been out in lifeboats in the freezing weather, and had suffered from severe frostbite. One guy had one leg off, the other guy two.”
While the rescue ships picked up the William Hooper survivors, Gradwell ordered the Ayrshire to drop behind the convoy to protect the rescuers. The trawler took aboard six of the survivors. German planes launched torpedoes at the Ayrshire. At one point, the trawler’s coxswain had to execute a zigzag maneuver to dodge torpedoes approaching from two directions at once. “In spite of his twisting and turning, one (torpedo) ran so close along Ayrshire’s port side that I could have read the maker’s name without glasses,” wrote First Officer Richard Elsden. “It was very nasty for a few moments.” Gradwell took it in stride. In the midst of the air attack, the Ayrshire passed a British corvette and Gradwell called out flippantly to an officer on the corvette, “Are you happy in the Service?” The officer asked for more time to consider his answer.
A torpedo crashed into the Soviet tanker Azerbaijan, whose blond female bosun had obsessed the mariners at Hvalfjord. “[T]he ship trembled violently,” the tanker captain Izotov recounted, “a violent explosion was heard, the whole aft part of the ship from the mainmast disappeared behind a mass of oil from the diesel fuel, which soared upwards into a huge column above the mast.” The bomb had hit the tanker’s reserve fuel tank. Men on nearby ships assumed the Azerbaijan had blown up, but the tanker stayed afloat, trailing smoke and flames behind it. It swerved out of formation, nearly colliding with the British freighter Empire Tide—which had narrowly escaped being hit the previous day when the Christopher Newport was torpedoed and similarly swerved out of formation. Izotov personally took charge of the firefighting. Eight Russians on the aft end of the tanker leaped into the water to escape the flames. One of the rescue ships picked them up, and then picked up a ninth man who had jumped in after them. The ninth man introduced himself as a commissar, the Communist Party’s eyes and ears on the Azerbaijan. The commissar demanded that the eight men who had jumped overboard ahead of him be returned immediately to the Azerbaijan. The captain of the rescue ship refused: One of the Russian seamen already was in the process of being treated for a serious leg injury. The Azerbaijan lowered its lifeboats as a precaution, and four other crew members climbed into one of them and cast off. The captain shouted at them to return, and one of the tanker’s officers fired a rifle shot over the lifeboat to get their attention or perhaps to warn them to come back or be shot. They rowed the lifeboat back to the Azerbaijan. The Russians slowly brought the fire under control. The intense heat had melted and warped part of the tanker’s main deck. The ship’s entire cargo of linseed oil had spilled into the Barents Sea. The rescue ships drew close to the tanker, assuming the Soviet captain wanted the crew examined for burns and possible smoke inhalation. “Go away!” Izotov shouted at them in English. “We don’t want you!” The would-be rescuers retreated.
The Azerbaijan’s third assistant engineer got the ship’s engines restarted—he “showed himself a Communist who is loyal to his homeland,” Izotov reported. Izotov also commended a machine gunner named Ulyanchenko, who had clung to his machine gun and kept firing despite being “bathed from head to foot with oil and water.” The Azerbaijan, still smoldering, hurried back to its position in the convoy. The Western mariners could scarcely believe it. “Her crew were singing and smiling,” observed Jack Broome, the commander of the core escort. “A couple of lusty dames waved cheerfully from her bridge.” The Azerbaijan’s phoenixlike resurrection would not be its last.
The air raid abruptly ended. The last of the Heinkel 111s disappeared over the horizon in the direction of the North Cape, leaving only the Shad to continue its endless circles. The Barents Sea around convoy PQ-17 looked like a battleground. Pieces of wreckage drifted in patches of oil. The rescue ships darted back and forth to make sure they had not missed anyone. The upper decks of the antiaircraft ships were so littered with spent shell casings that men had to wade through them. A British destroyer picked up four German airmen who had escaped their downed Heinkel into a dinghy. The Navarino and William Hooper drifted forlornly in the convoy’s wake, listing badly but refusing to sink. Two British minesweepers were dispatched from the convoy to send them to the bottom. Their gunfire alarmed the men on other ships, who thought for a moment that the Germans were back. The horizon, however, was empty. “The sea was flat calm and seemed to be oil instead of water,” recalled Walter Baker on the Ayrshire. “Not a bit of mist or fog was there, and looking away into the distance we swore that we could see the curvature of the earth’s surface. Perhaps it was that we wanted to be over there beyond the horizon—away from this spot as quickly as possible.”
The morning’s air attacks had cost the convoy three ships and seven men—three men each from the Christopher Newport and the William Hooper, and one from the Navarino. More than a dozen other men had been injured, some of them by friendly fire. A stray round from an American freighter had shattered the thigh bone of a gunner on the Empire Tide. A wild shot from a destroyer had struck a corvette sailor in the buttocks. The Germans had lost four planes.
The mariners were exhausted but full of themselves. The Germans “had thrown all they had at us for three days,” Carter wrote. “For a convoy of old rust buckets, with a few new Liberty ships thrown in, we had given a pretty good account of ourselves, and we had also given the famous Luftwaffe about as much as it could handle.” One of his young Armed Guard gunners, Francis Brummer, realized he was still chewing some food he had stuffed into his mouth when the air alarm first sounded an hour before. “I’d been too scared to swallow it,” he reflected. “It was all dried up, like sawdust.” One of the Icelandic seamen who had joined the Ironclad at Hvalfjord had taken cover from the planes by hiding in a tank on the ship’s deck. Another Icelander had stayed on deck and gotten a piece of shrapnel lodged in his back, apparently from a plane’s machine guns. On the Troubadour, Jim North observed, “everyone was high as a kite on excitement and fear, laughing and shaking.” On the Ayrshire, Gradwell gave the order to “splice the main brace”—to give each man an extra tot of rum for the day. The Ayrshire’s coxswain did the honors, while accepting hearty congratulations for having maneuvered the trawler out of the way of the torpedoes. The cook gave each man a can of corned beef, and the men built enormous sandwiches. “Eagerly we discussed the events we had lived through,” Baker wrote. “The words spilled from our mouths in the relief of the moment. We felt unconquerable. We couldn’t lose now.” Even the seasoned convoy veterans felt optimistic. Broome on the destroyer Keppel wrote in his diary: “My impression on seeing the resolution displayed by the convoy and its escort was that, provided the ammunition lasted, PQ-17 could get anywhere.”
Few men in convoy PQ-17 realized their fight with the torpedo bombers would be the high point of the voyage. More than 3,200 miles away, a decision at the Admiralty headquarters in London was about to trigger a disastrous chain of events that neither the Allies nor the Germans, in all their planning for convoy PQ-17, had seen coming.