First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, Admiral of the Fleet and operational head of the Royal Navy, had complained that the Arctic convoys were “a most unsound operation” and “a regular millstone around our necks.” As convoy PQ-17 lumbered through the Barents Sea on the Fourth of July 1942, that millstone hung heavily around the First Sea Lord’s neck.
Pound understood the importance of the Arctic convoys, but that did not make him like them any better. The convoys mainly benefited the Soviet Union. In fact, they diverted American war supplies to the Red Army that otherwise would have gone to Britain. To Pound and most of his subordinates in the Admiralty, the convoys to Russia were more of a political necessity than a military one, which made the prospect of sacrificing precious Royal Navy ships and lives in the Arctic even less palatable than losing them in the North Atlantic. At least in the North Atlantic, the Royal Navy was protecting ships and supplies heading for Britain.
The British had lost two cruisers on Arctic convoy duty in only the past few months. Those losses had followed the losses of two Royal Navy battleships in the Pacific and a third, the HMS Hood, off Iceland. The Hood had been sunk by the Tirpitz’s sister ship the Bismarck in 1941 with a staggering loss of 1,415 lives. Although the Royal Navy was still the most powerful navy on earth, it had no way of replacing such losses. It was critically short of aircraft carriers and convoy escort vessels, with the war’s end nowhere in sight.
Pound could not shake the fear that protecting convoy PQ-17 from the Tirpitz would cost the Royal Navy yet more of its dwindling supply of powerful warships. He had received no reports on the Tirpitz’s whereabouts since the German battleship’s berth at Trondheim had been discovered empty on the afternoon of July 3. Pound knew nothing about the restrictions Hitler had placed on the Tirpitz’s movements. For all he knew, the ship had already raced out of the Norwegian fjords near the North Cape and was knifing through the Barents Sea, readying its 15-inch guns to savage convoy PQ-17 and its escorts.
Pound was sixty-four years old and had spent most of his life as a Royal Navy officer. He had risen through the ranks by single-minded dedication and tireless work rather than tactical brilliance or force of personality. He had served as flag captain on a battleship during the Battle of Jutland, the greatest naval engagement of World War I. Some of his superiors thought him ill suited for the post of First Sea Lord because he tended to take on too much responsibility and to dismiss opposing views. But the untimely deaths and illnesses of other contenders for the job had left it to him in 1939—just in time to lead the Royal Navy into the crucible of World War II. Pound had spent the first three years of the war toiling for long hours under incredible stress. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that eventually would kill him. An arthritic hip forced him to limp painfully from place to place with a cane. The discomfort also made it hard for Pound to sleep at night, and he was known to nod off in the middle of meetings.
Churchill placed great trust in Pound, though he sometimes grumbled Pound was too cautious and lacked “the Nelson touch”—the boldness of the British naval icon Admiral Horatio Nelson. Being compared unfavorably to Nelson was no grave insult. But some of Pound’s subordinates thought he had a different flaw: He tended to meddle in decisions that properly belonged to commanders in the field.
While convoy PQ-17 was fighting off the Junkers and Heinkels, Pound gathered his senior naval staff at the Admiralty headquarters in Whitehall. He oversaw a series of meetings that occupied much of the afternoon of July 4. No one could offer him any new information about the Tirpitz or the Germans’ intentions. That evening, Pound left his office and limped to the Citadel, the bombproof underground chamber that served as Britain’s nerve center for the sea war. The Citadel’s centerpiece was a large table on which the movements of convoys and the reported movements of U-boats were represented by ship models, flags, and other markers. The markers were constantly moved from one place to another as new intelligence arrived from code breakers, reconnaissance pilots, and resistance fighters watching the docks and shorelines. The Citadel also housed the offices of Rodger Winn, who was responsible for tracking U-boats, and his counterpart Norman Denning, who tracked German surface warships, including the Tirpitz. It was Denning and Winn that Pound wanted to see.
Pound asked Denning where he thought the Tirpitz was. Denning said he was confident the battleship was at Altenfjord. Pound asked if Denning could assure him the Tirpitz was not already at sea, rushing at convoy PQ-17. Denning acknowledged he could not. The information in recent batches of decoded German messages was too sparse. Denning pointed out, however, that the absence of information was significant in itself. There had been no flurry of German messages that normally would accompany a major ship movement. Nor had the Germans notified their U-boats in the Barents Sea that the Tirpitz was coming, which they surely would have done as a precaution to keep the Tirpitz from being torpedoed by mistake. Similarly, the Germans certainly would send destroyers to sea ahead of the Tirpitz to make sure the way was clear. But British submarines on patrol near the North Cape had sighted no destroyers.
The fictional British detective Sherlock Holmes solved one of his most famous cases by noticing that a dog had not barked in the night when it logically would have been expected to make a racket. Denning essentially was suggesting to Pound that if the Tirpitz had put to sea, some kind of “dog” would have barked. Pound was not satisfied. He said Denning was providing “negative information” when Pound needed positive proof. Denning said he expected newly decoded German messages from Bletchley Park soon and would inform Pound as soon as they arrived. Pound moved on to the U-boat tracking room, where Winn told him a dozen U-boats were in the vicinity of convoy PQ-17. The U-boats obviously posed a threat to any British warship near the convoy. If an Allied cruiser was torpedoed in the Barents Sea, it would be hundreds of miles from a friendly port, at the mercy of German planes and submarines.
Pound returned to the Admiralty headquarters in Whitehall. He gathered half a dozen of his senior staff around an eighteenth-century wooden table in the dark-paneled boardroom, beneath paintings of Admiral Nelson and King William IV. Pound told his staff he was considering withdrawing the escorts from convoy PQ-17 and instructing the merchant ships to scatter. That way, at least some of the merchant ships probably would reach Archangel, and the Royal Navy would avoid a potentially disastrous confrontation with the Tirpitz. He went around the table asking his staff officers for their opinions. All but one opposed scattering the convoy. But the Admiralty was not a democracy; the decision belonged solely to the First Sea Lord. The way he reached it was “almost melodramatic,” recalled his director of operations, Admiral John Eccles.
The First Sea Lord leaned back in his leather-backed chair and closed his eyes—an invariable attitude of deep meditation when making difficult decisions; his hands gripped the arm of the chair, and his features which had seemed almost ill and strained, became peaceful and composed. After a few moments the youthful Director of Plans . . . whispered irreverently, “Look, Father’s fallen asleep.” After thirty long seconds, Admiral Pound reached for a Naval pad Message and announced, ‘the convoy is to be dispersed.’ As he said this, he made a curious but eloquent gesture to the others, indicating that this was his decision, but he was taking it alone.
It was a shocking decision, a bet-the-house gamble based not on any fresh knowledge but on a continuing lack of knowledge. It went against the best intelligence the Admiralty possessed of the Tirpitz’s movements. It usurped virtually all decision making from Pound’s veteran officers in the field, while leaving them to puzzle over its meaning and deal with its consequences. It would scatter dozens of ill-equipped ships and thousands of frightened men across an utterly unforgiving landscape, with the enemy already upon them. Although Pound was trying to save lives, the scatter order would amount to, as Admiral Tovey had put it, “sheer bloody murder.”
Pound wasted no time in communicating his decision to the convoy leaders in the Arctic. At 9:11 p.m. on July 4, he personally wrote a signal to send to Admiral L. H. K. Hamilton, commander of the cruiser force:
MOST IMMEDIATE: Cruiser force withdraw to westward at high speed.
When the message arrived, the cruiser force was within sight of convoy PQ-17, closer, in fact, that at any previous point in the voyage, because the cruisers were refueling from the oiler sailing with the convoy. The “withdraw” signal had included no explanation of why, but the instruction to withdraw “at high speed” suggested urgency. Hamilton concluded the Admiralty’s order meant the Tirpitz was fast approaching from the west and that the cruisers were being diverted to intercept it. Hamilton could not ask for clarification without breaking radio silence and revealing the cruisers’ position to the Germans. One of Hamilton’s cruisers had just launched a Walrus spotter plane to survey the ice ahead of convoy PQ-17. The Walrus was still visible in the distance, but the cruiser could not attract the pilot’s attention to tell him to come back. The cruisers would have to leave the Walrus pilot to fend for himself.*
Pound’s “withdraw” signal went out to all the cruisers and was copied to Jack Broome, the commander of the convoy’s core escort force. The Admiralty’s signal had not mentioned the core escorts, and Broome did not think it affected them. Unlike Hamilton, Broome did not recognize at first that the “withdraw” signal heralded a dramatic turn of events. After all, the original plan for convoy PQ-17 had been for the cruisers to turn around after the convoy passed Bear Island. Broome assumed the “withdraw” signal was nothing more than Pound’s long-anticipated order for the cruisers to do so. Given that the cruisers were in dangerous waters, withdrawing them “at high speed” only made sense. Broome still felt optimistic after the convoy’s performance against the torpedo bombers. His sense of humor remained intact as well: After a British submarine commander signaled that he hoped to keep his vessel on the surface for as long as possible if the Germans attacked, Broome—whose vessel was not a sub but a destroyer—replied, “So do I.” Broome did not yet suspect what Pound had in mind.
Twelve minutes after the “withdraw” signal, Pound ordered a second signal sent to all the escort warships. This signal bore the less urgent heading of “IMMEDIATE”:
Owing to the threat from surface ships, convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports.
Once Broome saw the second signal, he concluded, as Hamilton had, that the Tirpitz was hurtling at convoy PQ-17 and that the cruisers were being sent to intercept it. Broome immediately suggested that the freighter Empire Tide launch the fighter plane from its catapult to shoot down the Shad, which would make the convoy harder for the Tirpitz to find. But the Admiralty’s second signal was maddeningly short of vital information. How close was the Tirpitz? Why were the merchant ships dispersing to “Russian ports” when the only port available was Archangel? More broadly, what was going on? Pound had promised to keep his commanders in the Arctic fully informed; now he seemed to be withholding information.
While Broome and the other escort commanders puzzled over the second signal, one of Pound’s aides reminded him that the proper nautical term for breaking up a convoy was not “disperse” but “scatter.” The aide pointed out that the merchant captains might misinterpret “disperse” to mean split into small groups, whereas Pound wanted each ship to sail alone. At 9:36 p.m.—thirteen minutes after the second signal and twenty-five minutes after the first—Pound ordered a third signal sent:
MOST IMMEDIATE: Convoy is to scatter.
On the bridge of the destroyer Keppel, Broome looked up to see the ship’s chief telegraph operator holding out the signal to him. The telegraph operator was out of breath. He had run all the way from the telegraph room to the bridge. Broome stared at the paper in astonishment. The signal, he recalled later, “seemed to explode in my hand.” The words were only part of what made the message so jarring. The way in which the three signals had been sent—one quickly following the last, with no context—suggested a crisis unfolding so fast that the Admiralty could not keep up with it or even take time to explain it.
Every sailor on lookout duty began frantically scanning the horizon for the Tirpitz. “We were all expecting . . . to see the cruisers open fire, or to see enemy masts on the horizon,” Broome wrote. Everyone thought that an enemy attack “was now not only a possibility, it was a certainty, it was on the convoy’s doorstep.”
Moments after the signal was sent, Pound was informed by one of Denning’s colleagues in the Citadel that freshly decrypted Enigma messages supported Denning’s view that the Tirpitz was still at Altenfjord, ten hours and hundreds of miles from the convoy. The new messages—which were hours old—showed the Germans had been expecting the Tirpitz to anchor at Altenfjord. In addition, the U-boats had been assured there were no German surface ships in the “operational area” off the North Cape. To Pound, the new messages were unpersuasive; they were further “negative information” rather than proof. They did not change his mind. “We have decided to scatter the convoy,” Pound said, “and that is how it must stand.”
The men on the merchant ships of convoy PQ-17 still had no inkling that anything unusual was happening. They had not been privy to the Admiralty’s three signals. They had not even been informed that the Tirpitz had left Trondheim. They were going about their routine shipboard duties, grateful for a lull in the German attacks. Some were still talking about their successful fight against the torpedo bombers. Others were taking the opportunity to get a little sleep. Not one of them was aware of the catastrophe about to engulf them.
Broome, as commander, had the duty of breaking the news to them. Although he felt certain the Admiralty had compelling reasons for issuing the scatter order, Broome keenly felt the weight of having to implement it. That simple act would instantly transform the calm, orderly convoy into a chaotic scramble for self-preservation. “I was angry at being forced to break up, to disintegrate such a formation, and to tear up the protective fence we had wrapped round it, to order each of these splendid merchantmen to sail on by her naked, defenceless self,” Broome wrote later. The moment he relayed the scatter order, he knew, “convoy PQ-17 would cease to exist.”
Broome dutifully instructed the signalman on the Keppel to hoist the pennant meaning “scatter” onto the destroyer’s signal halyards. The scatter pennant was white with a red St. George’s cross extending along its length and breadth. The pennant was included in the merchant ships’ Admiralty-issued codebooks, but most of the civilian mariners had never noticed it or given it any thought. No one at the preconvoy conference in Iceland had mentioned the possibility of scattering the convoy. When the pennant was hoisted onto the destroyer’s signal halyards, the merchant captains had to thumb through their codebooks to see what it meant. Even when they found it, they were not sure what to make of it under the circumstances.
On the bridge of the British freighter River Afton, Commodore Jack Dowding, the convoy’s civilian commander, recognized the pennant but assumed it was a mistake. Why would the convoy be scattered? Dowding signaled Broome on the Keppel to confirm the message, and waited for a correction. Instead the Keppel confirmed the scatter order. Dowding still did not believe it. Broome ordered the Keppel to turn around and steam back to the River Afton so the two men could speak in person. Broome and Dowding had known each other for years. As the Keppel approached, Broome saw Dowding waiting on a wing of the River Afton’s bridge, looking calm but puzzled.
Broome described to his old friend the signals he had received from the Admiralty. Dowding kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. Broome imagined him wondering if the leaders of the Admiralty had lost their minds. In any case, there was nothing more for Broome and Dowding to discuss, and no time for them to waste.
Broome wondered what he was supposed to do with the convoy’s core escort force, including the six destroyers as well as the corvettes, antiaircraft ships, minesweepers, rescue ships, trawlers, and other small antisubmarine vessels. They had originally been assigned to protect convoy PQ-17 all the way to Russia. But the point of the scatter order was for all the ships in the convoy to get as far apart from one another as possible. How could the core escort protect thirty-three widely scattered ships? On the other hand, Broome thought, the Keppel and the other five destroyers in the core escort might help Hamilton’s cruisers in a showdown with the Tirpitz. The destroyers might even tip the scales in such a fight. Broome proposed that the six destroyers leave the convoy and join Hamilton’s cruisers in their run westward. Hamilton agreed: He needed all the help he could get against the Tirpitz. Gun crews on the cruisers already were replacing antiaircraft shells with armor-piercing shells in expectation of trading salvos with the Tirpitz.
The news of the scatter order was just starting to spread to the men on the merchant ships. The mariners watched in puzzlement as the cruisers and destroyers raced past them. At least one of the big warships cut through the still orderly convoy. The effect on the mariners’ morale was profound. Their protectors appeared to be running away. “Come back!” shouted a seaman on the American freighter Honomu. As the Keppel prepared to join the exodus, Broome sent a farewell message to Dowding on the River Afton. He might have been speaking to all the men being left behind.
Sorry to leave you like this. Goodbye and good luck. It looks like a bloody business.
Dowding replied:
Thank you. Goodbye and good hunting.
Some American and British sailors on the departing warships found it painful to look back. “We hate leaving PQ-17 behind,” wrote Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on the cruiser USS Wichita. “It looks so helpless now since the order to scatter came through. The ships are going around in circles, like so many frightened chicks. Some can hardly move at all.” Officers on the Wichita did not assume the cruisers and destroyers were racing to fight the Tirpitz. “We all feel we have run away,” Fairbanks wrote. “We cannot yet analyze the situation. Information is restricted. We are ‘high-tailing it’ westward. We could have been a great help [to the convoy] against the air and submarine attack. And what if there was a risk? What kind of high command have we that, with such a great force in operation, we cannot fight it out? Have the British become gun-shy? How can wars be won this way? Those are the angry questions heard throughout the ship.”
Soon the cruisers and destroyers were swallowed up by a fog bank.
The convoy’s small escort vessels began steaming away. Broome had concluded they also were supposed to scatter. He ordered them to “proceed independently to Archangel.” The only exceptions were the convoy’s two British submarines, whose commanders Broome instructed to act on their own, thinking they might get a chance to sink the Tirpitz. Broome’s order raised practical questions for the commanders of the small surface escort ships—and, arguably, moral questions as well. Most of the small escorts were antisubmarine vessels, equipped with sonar and depth charges to fight off U-boats. They had little or no defense against bombers. The antiaircraft ships, on the other hand, were equipped to defend themselves against planes but not U-boats. The captain of the antiaircraft ship Palomares—the highest-ranking officer remaining after Broome’s departure—recognized his ship’s vulnerability to U-boats and ordered two of the minesweepers to join the Palomares and make a dash for the Russian coast. His order infuriated some men on the minesweepers, who thought they should stay and protect the helpless merchant ships regardless of orders. “It seemed wrong that my anti-submarine minesweeper was being used only to escort a heavily armed antiaircraft ship,” the commander of one minesweeper wrote.
The commander of the second antiaircraft ship, the Pozarica, proposed gathering some of the merchant ships into a small convoy and trying to shepherd them to Russia. But the Palomares’s captain rejected that idea as a violation of the scatter order. At that point, the Pozarica’s captain followed the Palomares’s example and ordered three corvettes to join the Pozarica for its own dash to the coast. An officer on one of the corvettes pleaded with his captain to stay with the merchant ships: “My God, we can’t just leave these poor devils to their fate and shove off.” Another officer hurled a chair in anger. Other men on the corvettes complained that the commanders of the antiaircraft ships were selectively interpreting the scatter order to save their own lives. The reality was more complicated. Each antiaircraft ship had more than three hundred men aboard, and their captains did not expect to reach land safely. The Pozarica’s captain advised each of his men to “make peace with his Maker.” He said they might survive a fight with German destroyers but not with the Tirpitz. In any case, he vowed, “We will fight these ships to the last shell, and if need be, go down fighting.”
The fact remained, however, that the fastest and best-armed of the small escort vessels left the slower, utterly vulnerable merchant ships behind.*
The merchant ships and trawlers in convoy PQ-17 were the last to scatter. Many of their captains were still trying to figure out what to do next. Even the most cynical had never expected to be left in the middle of the Barents Sea. “Now it was every man for himself, and the Devil, in the shape of a U-boat or a dive bomber, take the hindmost,” wrote Walter Baker on the Ayrshire.
A coxswain on the trawler Northern Gem wrote:
To say that all of us on the Gem were stunned would be putting it mildly. I can remember the words that I said at the time. “What are we splitting up for, we’re better off as we are, on our own we have no chance at all.” The more we thought and talked about it, the more horrified we became. I was only twenty-two, and like many others of my age, was still young enough to want to live and come through this war, but now I felt that my time had come. It was probably only because I had a responsible position that I was able to keep my worst thoughts to myself. More than two-thirds of our crew had never been to sea before. . . . One of them acted up badly, constantly saying to everyone, “We’ll never get there. . . .” I literally had to shake him by the shoulders to get him to stop saying what most of us were thinking; by saying it out loud, he was making everyone feel much worse.
Confusion engulfed the Ironclad. “Having heard the expression ‘All hell broke loose’ used many times as a figure of speech, we found ourselves in the middle of the real thing,” Lieutenant William Carter wrote. Everyone on the Ironclad’s bridge agreed the scatter order meant the Tirpitz was coming. The codebook contained a diagram illustrating how to scatter a convoy—in a fan-shaped pattern, with ships veering out of formation at 10-, 20-, and 30-degree angles. Even so, Carter recalled, “Every ship was demanding further information and instructions.” Commodore Dowding set an example by moving the River Afton out of its position at the head of the middle column and steaming ahead alone. “The rest of us followed her example and the fan began to take shape, becoming increasingly ragged,” Carter wrote. Most of the ships were still blinking messages. The Shad continued to circle, but in a closer radius now that the destroyers and their 5-inch guns were gone. Carter imagined the German pilot looking down at the convoy and giddily radioing word to his superiors in Norway that convoy PQ-17 was breaking up.
Carter received a request from Phillip Moore, the Ironclad’s captain, to join him in his quarters. Moore appeared calm. He told Carter he had known many Germans and regarded them as “a logical people with a practical approach to problem solving.” He felt certain the Germans would expect most of the merchant ships to run for the nearest Russian soil, and a few to turn around and try for Iceland. Moore therefore proposed a maneuver he said was so illogical, it might not occur to the Germans: The Ironclad would head north into the polar ice field. “If we can get even a few feet into the ice pack,” the captain told Carter, “it will protect us from torpedoes.” Moore gave the order to point the Ironclad in the direction of the North Pole. Carter liked the idea, although not nearly enough to feel optimistic. Only an hour before, he had imagined Archangel lying just over the horizon. Now Archangel seemed “half a world away . . . but the odds were that we would never see it.”
Captain Salvesen and his fellow Norwegian officers on the Troubadour greeted the scatter order with a stream of curses. Everyone else on the bridge stood stunned. “Brought into the fire and then told there was no water,” Howard Carraway wrote. “Our hearts hit the deck with a dismal thud.” No one hurried to relay the news to the ordinary seamen. Jim North emerged from below deck to start his watch as a helmsman and wondered where all the ships were going. He jumped at the hoot of a ship’s claxon and watched as one of the British escorts approached the Troubadour. A British officer with a megaphone paraphrased the scatter order. North could make out little except “Disperse and good luck!” Shaken but still confused, he made his way up to the bridge to take his turn at the helm.
North heard the captain tell someone that the Troubadour’s only chance was to head into the ice field. The captain expressed confidence that his experience on seal-hunting ships would enable him to keep the Troubadour afloat. He told North to point the ship north into the ice field. North instinctively glanced at the compass, but the compass needle was spinning around. The Troubadour, like most of the merchant ships in convoy PQ-17, was equipped with only a magnetic compass. Only a few of the now departed escort vessels had gyrocompasses that were not affected by their nearness to the Magnetic North Pole.*
On the bridge of the Ayrshire, Lieutenant Gradwell turned to his first officer, Richard Elsden, and asked in a calm voice, “Now what the hell are we going to do?” The scattering ships had few options. Some were running southeast in the direction of the Murman coast of Russia, which was 400 miles away. Archangel was 600 miles away. Other ships in the convoy appeared to be fleeing due east, toward a large, crescent-shaped Russian island named Novaya Zemlya. Novaya Zemlya was less than 300 miles away, but on the charts it looked like a frozen wasteland. The trawler Northern Gem flashed a signal inviting the Ayrshire to follow it eastward. Gradwell declined. He did not think the Ayrshire could win a race with the Germans across the Barents Sea.
Gradwell and Elsden agreed the Ayrshire should head north into the ice field and lie low until the Germans quit looking for them. Then, with any luck, the Ayrshire could pick her way east along the edge of the ice field to Novaya Zemlya, and from there to Archangel. First, however, the Ayrshire had a fundamental problem: It was getting low on coal. It might have enough for a straight run to Archangel, but not for the long, roundabout voyage Gradwell now envisioned. He would need to beg some coal from one of the old coal-burning freighters, and he would need to do it quickly, before all the merchant ships scattered. At the same time, Gradwell decided to see if any of the merchant ships wanted to accompany the Ayrshire into the ice.
To Gradwell, the scatter order resembled the clueless acts by officialdom he was accustomed to fighting in courtrooms. No matter how sensible the order might have seemed to the Admiralty in London, it made no sense in this remote stretch of the Barents Sea. Without a doubt it would get men killed. It was a terrible mistake, and Gradwell had no intention of obeying the order and abandoning the merchant ships. His men on the Ayrshire never expected him to. “My father had a very independent nature,” his daughter, Mary Corrigan, recalled. “If he was told to do something he thought was wrong, he would not simply obey just because of authority. He used to say to us children, ‘You’ve got to think for yourself, you mustn’t rely on other people to think for you, because they don’t always know what they’re doing, and they aren’t there. You have to think on your feet.’” Gradwell ordered the helmsman to steer the Ayrshire toward the ice field, where a couple of the merchant ships were heading. A corvette signaled, “Where are you going?” Gradwell replied, “To hell, and the first one to come back, we hope.”
The Ayrshire caught up to the Troubadour near the edge of the ice barrier around midnight, as July 4 turned to July 5. Gradwell brought the trawler alongside the old freighter. He did not try to assume authority over Salvesen. As far as the merchant captains were concerned, the scatter order had obliterated any chain of command. Gradwell suggested the two vessels could simply help each other. The Ayrshire needed coal, which the Troubadour possessed in abundance. The Troubadour needed protection, and the Ayrshire had sonar, depth charges, and deck guns. Salvesen agreed readily to the partnership. The two vessels “sallied forth into the clear midnight sea,” Carraway wrote. The midnight sun hung just above the horizon. The fog, for a change, had vanished entirely. The bright sunshine lifted Carraway’s spirits, even though it made the ships easier for the Germans to spot. Carraway thought back to warm spring days in the South Carolina lowlands and wondered if he would ever see another one.
Less than an hour later, around 1:00 a.m. on the fifth, lookouts on the Troubadour and Ayrshire spotted another freighter heading north. It was the Ironclad. The Ayrshire approached and Gradwell invited the Ironclad’s captain to join the flight into the ice field. Moore quickly agreed. Soon the vessels encountered a fourth ship, the American freighter Silver Sword, whose cargo included several fully assembled fighter planes cabled to the main deck. The Silver Sword’s master, Captain Clyde W. Colbeth Jr. of Maine, agreed his vessel would join them too.
Carraway reflected that the four vessels comprising the new convoy were the dregs of convoy PQ-17—a fishing trawler and three rust-bucket freighters, with a total of four useful deck guns, plus the Troubadour’s three tanks. They were perhaps the last ships in the convoy that anyone would expect to survive its disintegration in the Barents Sea. But maybe together they would prove greater than the sum of their parts. Walter Baker on the Ayrshire wrote:
We were only a very small ship with a very small armament, but the faith those American sailors had in us was wonderful to see. . . . The idea of spreading out to make a less concentrated target might have seemed all right on paper but there is still truth in the old saying, “There’s safety in numbers.” So northward we steamed together making as good a speed as was possible. It was a lovely night here up on the roof of the world, with no darkness to draw a curtain between us and the enemy.
The chill in the air intensified as the four vessels neared the ice barrier. They angled northwest, in the general direction of Spitsbergen, and hunted for an opening in the ice large enough to admit them. The Ayrshire stopped to effect minor repairs on its rudder. Gradwell again took the opportunity to “splice the main brace” and the crew again ate corned beef sandwiches. Gradwell wanted to make sure they had full stomachs in case the Germans came quickly. He ordered all the 4-inch shells in the trawler’s magazine to be stacked on the gun platform, to avoid even a moment’s delay in reloading. He ordered the crew to pile all the Ayrshire’s depth charges on the bow, along with several drums of oil. If the Tirpitz appeared, Gradwell told the crew, he would try to ram the trawler into the giant battleship.
UNTIL THE SCATTER ORDER, the Germans had experienced mostly frustration in their efforts to wipe out convoy PQ-17. The U-boats had proven ineffective, often losing the convoy in the fog. The Luftwaffe had lost four bombers while sinking three ships—a decent but unexceptional rate of return. German reconnaissance planes, still hampered by clouds and fog, had been unable to pinpoint the locations of Allied carriers near the convoy. There was still no point in even asking Hitler to set the Tirpitz loose.
Crew members on the Tirpitz spent a restless night wondering if they might finally see action. “There was a film show that evening to relax the nerves a bit,” the French author Leonce Peillard wrote, “and then many of the crew came up on deck to admire the midnight sun. They had seen it go slowly down behind the snow-covered peaks, stop just as it was about to disappear, then rise again into the sky, more quickly this time, like a ball of fire. No one felt like turning in, and it took a good deal of admonition from the wiser heads, saying that they needed all the rest they could get before the big day. Even when they were in their hammocks, few got much sleep in their excitement and the lightness of the polar night.”
As the men on the Tirpitz tossed and turned, the German admirals received a startling message: Convoy PQ-17 was breaking up. It did not occur to the Germans to attribute the breakup to the idle Tirpitz. They assumed the Allies had been unnerved by the air attacks. The German High Command’s war diary said the convoy “was dispersed as a result of a heavy air raid on the evening of 4 July.” But the Germans did not need to understand the reasons why they had been handed such a magnificent gift. All they had to do was seize it.