As the merchant ships languished in Archangel, the crews’ behavior grew worse by the day. The vessels’ food supplies ran out, and the mariners were aghast at the local fare, which included yak stew and a tough, stringy meat vaguely labeled as “mutton.” Some of the Ironclad’s crew began stealing emergency food supplies from the ship’s lifeboats, including malted milk tablets, whose sweet taste appealed to the Russian women. Lieutenant Carter was appalled that the men were shortsighted enough to deplete rations they might need in order to stay alive. With the captain’s approval, Carter posted Armed Guard sentries at the top of the Ironclad’s gangplank to search every man leaving the ship. Almost immediately the sentries discovered a package of the malted milk tablets in the possession of the Kid, the ex-prizefighter who had been handcuffed during the mutiny in Iceland.
The Kid started swinging at the sentries and one of them hit him in the head with a billy club, knocking him out cold. He was locked up in a makeshift brig, where he gathered some strands of rope into a pile and set it on fire. “He really was a bastard when he had been drinking,” Carter observed. The next day, the Kid sobered up and acted chastened, but when Carter escorted him to a bathroom, he made a run for the gangplank. Carter hit him over the head with the barrel of his .45-caliber pistol and knocked him unconscious again. The Kid was dragged back to the brig. Carter thought he probably had saved the Kid’s life: At the base of the gangplank he would have encountered a poker-faced Soviet guard with a submachine gun.
The mood was no better on the Troubadour. The steward and the ship’s carpenter announced they would not sail home on the vessel. Even the dauntless Captain Salvesen declared he was finished with the Troubadour. “He gives no particular reason except that he . . . has had trouble enough,” Howard Carraway wrote. “I can see his point.” Carraway hoped the captain, the steward, and the carpenter were just blowing off steam. That seemed as good an explanation as any after months of frustration over the ship, the crew, the weird Arctic weather, the abandonment by the British, and the doleful life in Archangel. All three men ended up staying aboard the ship. The edginess on the Troubadour was real, however. The order to depart from depressing Molotovsk came just in time, on September 5.
First, Salvesen was ordered to sail the Troubadour across the mouth of the North Dvina River to Economia to load cargo for the voyage home. The order came so late in the day that darkness fell before the Troubadour got halfway there. The navigator lost his bearings, and Salvesen, worried about running aground again, decided to drop anchor and wait for daylight. The crew spent a frosty night watching the aurora borealis ripple across the sky and listening for the drone of German bombers that did not come. At first light, the Troubadour finished the trip to Economia, which looked depressingly like Molotovsk—a few dozen rough-hewn buildings clustered around a rail line and some docks. Several other surviving ships of convoy PQ-17 were already at Economia, including the Benjamin Harrison. The Troubadour took on a load of chrome ore and asbestos. The loading went smoothly, and on September 10 the Troubadour was ordered to Archangel to join homebound convoy QP-14.
The Troubadour followed a narrow, 10-mile-long channel to Archangel. The muddy banks on either side were piled high with more freshly cut lumber than the mariners had ever seen. As the ship drew close to Archangel, the mariners saw numerous bombed-out buildings, including a huge masonry structure the size of a hotel, which had been gutted by fire. The Germans had settled into a pattern of bombing Archangel several times a week. A first wave of bombers would appear over the city at dusk and drop incendiaries onto Archangel’s mostly wooden buildings. Then a second wave of bombers would pass over the city and drop high-explosive bombs, using the burning buildings as landmarks.
The Troubadour edged up to a coal pier in Archangel and topped off its bunkers with the grainy Russian coal, then made its way to the mouth of the North Dvina River. The weather turned colder, bringing rain mixed with light snow, and the wind quavered through the ship’s rigging. Soviet authorities came aboard to collect the mariners’ propusks. A small boat brought the Troubadour ten survivors from the sunken convoy PQ-17 freighter El Capitan to carry home to the United States as passengers.
On the morning of September 13, the Troubadour, Ironclad, and Silver Sword joined a line of merchant ships steaming downriver toward the White Sea and then the open ocean. The ships included all the other merchant ships that had survived convoy PQ-17—the Benjamin Harrison, Bellingham, Winston-Salem, Empire Tide, Ocean Freedom, and Samuel Chase—as well as nine ships from earlier convoys. The Ironclad was loaded with Russian manganese ore, which was used to harden steel. The Silver Sword carried chrome ore, pulp wood, and animal hides. The indomitable Commodore Dowding led the new convoy, and the escort force included antisubmarine vessels from convoy PQ-17, including the Ayrshire. The trawler secretly carried two tons of butter the crew had bought cheaply in Archangel to smuggle back to Britain, where butter was scarce. Lieutenant Gradwell had ordered the butter wrapped in sailcloth and stowed in the Ayrshire’s bilges to hide it from customs inspectors.
The Ironclad’s voyage with convoy QP-14 lasted only a few minutes. The ship’s rudder suddenly quit responding and the Ironclad nearly slammed into another vessel. Captain Moore ordered the anchor dropped, and the rest of the convoy passed the Ironclad and continued north. On the Troubadour, Carraway shook his head at the Ironclad and called it a “poor, unfortunate old tub”—a curious insult to be leveled from the Troubadour. A tugboat towed the Ironclad back to a dock. U.S. naval authorities boarded the ship and arrested five of the crew on suspicion of sabotaging the rudder. If they had done it to avoid sailing back through the Arctic on the Ironclad, they achieved their goal. They would be sent home weeks later as prisoners on a Navy warship.
The Troubadour immediately fell behind its new convoy. The ship could not keep up enough steam to maintain a speed of 8 knots. The firemen blamed the grainy Russian coal. The captain blamed the firemen. The Troubadour plodded along through bitter cold under clear skies. On September 14, the ships passed through the Gourlo into the open waters of the Barents Sea. Convoy QP-14’s route led east-northeast toward Novaya Zemlya, then northeast to the edge of the ice field, and then west to Hvalfjord.
The Troubadour briefly caught up with the other ships when they slowed to organize into convoy formation. Then the Troubadour’s engines inexplicably stopped. By the time the chief engineer got the ship moving again, convoy QP-14 was almost out of sight. One of the escort vessels signaled the Troubadour to hurry and catch up, adding that no escorts would drop back to protect it if it continued to straggle. Soon the convoy vanished over the horizon.
The men on the Troubadour knew they would never catch up; they would have to sail the Troubadour through the Arctic alone. That prospect overwhelmed one mariner, who began muttering to himself and “begging people to kill him,” Carraway wrote. The crew kept a wary eye on him, and also on the Uruguayan seaman who had threatened them at the start of the voyage. He was back on the ship after his hospital stay in Archangel. He no longer seemed agitated, and had resumed his shipboard duties, but how he would respond to the Troubadour’s latest crisis was anyone’s guess.
On the Troubadour’s second day in the open sea, a Junkers 88 bomber passed over the ship at high altitude. The pilot did not seem to notice the ship but the encounter reminded Carraway that the Troubadour could be attacked at any moment. He quietly transferred some of his personal items and cigarettes to his assigned lifeboat. If the Troubadour was sunk while sailing alone through the Barents Sea, the survivors could not count on being rescued quickly. They might be in the lifeboats for a long time.
As the Troubadour chugged west, the lookouts scanned the featureless surface of the sea with renewed urgency, looking for the slender wake of a U-boat’s periscope. The Troubadour was on the home stretch of its voyage, only four days out of Iceland. Stragglers like the Troubadour were the U-boats’ bread and butter, and the freighter was approaching the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which was a known haunt of U-boats. Carraway knew he should be afraid, but after everything he had been through, he could not seem to muster any fear. “I . . . believe that in some way, as in the past, we’ll make it,” he wrote to Avis, “even if, as before, it takes a sort of miracle to bring us through.”
On September 16, two days east of Svalbard, the Troubadour was engulfed by an Arctic blizzard. Carraway was delighted: He much preferred nature’s violence to that of the Nazis. Gale-force winds plastered ice and snow against the windward side of the hull and the deckhouse. Then the wind abruptly ceased and the snow began “drifting down by the hatful,” piling up on the ship’s decks. Carraway wished the snow would keep falling until the Troubadour reached Iceland, blinding every U-boat captain for miles around. But after two days, just as the Troubadour was passing south of Svalbard, the storm gave way to calm, hazy weather—not ideal for U-boats, but suitable enough.
At five o’clock in the morning on September 18, Carraway was jolted out of his bunk by the hooting of the U-boat alarm. But the lookouts had merely spotted an ice floe. Carraway went back to sleep and did not awaken until just after noon. He was making his way across the main deck to the galley when he noticed a disturbance in the water about two miles off the Troubadour’s port side. The smooth sea erupted in a series of small bursts. At first, Carraway thought a whale was spouting. Then he realized the bursts were the splashes of a torpedo. It was heading straight for the Troubadour’s stern. Carraway shouted a warning to the helmsman to turn the ship. By the time Carraway and two of his Armed Guard men reached the 4-inch gun on the stern, the torpedo was only 20 yards away. He yelled at the men to abandon the gun and save themselves. “We all fell flat on our faces at the starboard rail and waited to be blown to bloody hell.” As Carraway lay on the deck, he looked into the water and saw the torpedo zoom past: “I could see it entirely too plainly—the markings, the copper bands about it, the screw spiraling up the water and everything else, and it didn’t miss that rudder more than 18 inches, I don’t believe, and if the rudder hadn’t put over when it did it would have gone right up in my face, that is within 15 feet of my face.”
A short distance away from Carraway stood Jim North, who had gone out to the stern to smoke a cigarette. North had just taken his first drag when he saw the torpedo churn past the Troubadour, close enough that he could have hit it with a rock. The torpedo was gone before North had time to be frightened of it. He thought back to his narrow escape on the outbound voyage, when a torpedo had come straight at him but then malfunctioned and sunk. Torpedoes seemed to seek him out and then spare him.
Carraway saw the wake of the U-boat’s periscope. He gave the order to fire the 4-inch gun, but it jammed. By the time his men got it clear, the periscope had disappeared. Every man on deck scanned the water’s surface. The Troubadour was in a lonely stretch of ocean. Salvesen swung the Troubadour north toward Spitsbergen, whose snowy mountains loomed above the sea mist. The radioman sent a distress call and repeated it over and over. No one responded. The minutes ticked past. Every ripple on the sea looked like the tip of a periscope. Never on the voyage had the Troubadour seemed in greater danger. Finally, a message came from Spitsbergen that help was on the way. Some of Carraway’s Armed Guard men wept with relief. One seized his hand and would not stop shaking it. Carraway knew exactly how they felt but told them to get back to their guns and keep their eyes on the sea.
Within five minutes, an Allied plane flew in low and circled the spot where the periscope had been seen. There was no sign of the U-boat. The plane dropped a message on the Troubadour’s deck saying a British destroyer was coming to escort the freighter to Iceland. The destroyer arrived quickly and led the Troubadour to an anchorage at Spitsbergen. Three other destroyers and a British tanker were waiting there. The four destroyers formed a protective screen around the tanker and the Troubadour, and the vessels set out for Iceland.
Fifty miles ahead of the Troubadour, its former convoy, QP-14, steamed through snow squalls in the darkness, pursued by U-boats. The Silver Sword—the only one of the three Ghost Ships still in the convoy—developed engine trouble and fell behind the other ships. The Ghost Ships seemed destined to sail on a knife-edge. On the morning of September 20, a U-boat sank a British minesweeper escorting the convoy, killing six sailors. A few hours later, men on the Silver Sword saw a torpedo streak across the freighter’s wake. Before they could spread the alarm, three more torpedoes crashed into the ship, mortally wounding a crewman and setting the Silver Sword afire. The captain ordered the crew into the lifeboats, where they were quickly picked up by the rescue ships Rathlin and Zamalek. Later that night, U-boats sank a British oiler and two freighters. One of the freighters was the convoy PQ-17 survivor Bellingham; the other was the British freighter Ocean Voice, which Commodore Dowding had chosen as his new flagship. Dowding survived a second icy dunking. U-boats crippled the British destroyer Somali, which was taken in tow by a second destroyer. The Somali later broke in half and sank, taking the lives of forty-seven British sailors, after the towline snapped in a storm.
The same storm lashed the Troubadour and its escort of destroyers. The freighter rolled in steep, breaking seas. Green water slammed into the bulkhead directly below the bridge. Jim North had to stand lookout on the wing of the bridge because he would have been swept off the bow. The Troubadour slid down the backs of huge waves into deep troughs and then climbed up equally huge waves. Carraway went below at the end of his watch and clung to the frame of his bunk to keep from being hurled out of it. His toiletries bag flew across the room and hit him in the face, leaving him with a black eye. He still preferred facing Mother Nature to facing the Germans.
The Troubadour’s little convoy finally reached Hvalfjord on the night of September 27, exactly three months after setting out from there for Russia. Carraway reflected that convoy PQ-17’s departure “seems only a day or so ago, and I can remember every detail of the leaving.” He found it strange to see the anchorage in the dark for the first time. Hvalfjord was much less crowded with ships than it had been in June. The Troubadour’s radio picked up stations from London and Boston. News reports characterized convoy PQ-18 as having been a success, with “most” of the merchant ships getting through. In fact, the Germans had sunk thirteen of the convoy’s forty merchant ships, while losing three U-boats and a staggering forty-one planes, most of them dive-bombers. The Tirpitz had stayed in port. Raeder had hatched another aggressive plan to attack the convoy with the cruisers Admiral Scheer, Admiral Hipper, and Köln, while keeping the Tirpitz on standby, but he abandoned that plan after a telephone call from Hitler. The British Admiralty reconfigured the escort force to prevent convoy PQ-18 from turning into a disaster like convoy PQ-17. A British escort carrier accompanied convoy PQ-18 as far as Bear Island, keeping the Shad away. Sixteen Allied destroyers, which had been trained to fight as a unit, escorted the convoy all the way to Archangel.
There had been no discussion of scattering convoy PQ-18. The British never scattered another convoy. And although the captains of the small escort vessels of convoy PQ-17 received official commendations, the senior British naval officer in North Russia made it clear he did not think much of their having abandoned the merchant ships and banded together for their mutual safety while fleeing to Novaya Zemlya after the scatter order: “It would be preferable if . . . [the small escorts] had attached themselves singly to the most valuable ships of the convoy and remained with them,” he wrote. Another British officer in Archangel wrote that destroyers were the only escorts powerful enough to mount an effective defense for a convoy, and that “the departure of all destroyer escorts of Convoy PQ-17 has had severe damaging effect on morale of British and American merchant crews . . . especially the latter.”
ON THE SAME DAY the Troubadour steamed back into Hvalfjord, September 27, Roosevelt and Churchill puzzled over how to break the news to Stalin that the next Arctic convoy, PQ-19, would not be sent as scheduled in October. Convoy PQ-18 had needed every one of its seventy-seven escort vessels to reach Archangel without severe losses. Now, most of those escorts would be needed for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, which was scheduled for November 8. Churchill said convoy PQ-19 could not possibly sail as scheduled unless Operation Torch was postponed, which was out of the question. Roosevelt agreed but added that delaying convoy PQ-19 would be “a tough blow for the Russians.” The Red Army and the German Sixth Army were fighting house by house in the smoking ruins of Stalingrad. That battle could very well determine the outcome of the war on the eastern front, and perhaps the outcome of the war in Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill were keenly aware that America and Britain were still on the sidelines.
Roosevelt suggested not telling Stalin the bad news about convoy PQ-19 right away: “I can see nothing to be gained by notifying Stalin sooner than is necessary and indeed much to be lost.” He suggested that rather than tell Stalin they were postponing the convoy, they should tell him they had decided to divide it into small groups of ships and send them over the next few months. Churchill agreed to try sending smaller convoys, but he persuaded Roosevelt that Stalin should be told the truth: Operation Torch required so many escort vessels that the big PQ convoys could not resume until at least January 1943.
Stalin’s reply was curt: “I have received your message of October 9. Thank you.” Roosevelt told Churchill not to worry because the Soviets “do not use speech for the same purposes as we do.”
Stalin saved his comments for the Soviet public. In an open letter to Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, he criticized the Western democracies for offering Russia little help: “As compared with the aid which the Soviet Union is giving to the Allies by draining upon itself the main forces of the German Fascist armies, the aid of the Allies to the Soviet Union has so far been little effective.” Stalin added that America and Britain needed to “fulfill their obligations fully and on time,” and berated them for failing to open a second front in France.
Taking Stalin’s cue, Soviet military and government officials turned the expression “second front” into a bitter joke. They held up little cans of food delivered by the convoys and said, “Look, here is the second front.” In Moscow, they pointed to the second row at the Bolshoi Ballet, which was reserved for senior Allied representatives with complimentary passes. That row of mostly elderly, balding gentlemen was mocked as the “second front” or the “balding front.” As far as the Soviets were concerned, they were getting no help from their Western allies except the on-again, off-again Arctic convoys.
AFTER EIGHT DAYS IN HVALFJORD, the Troubadour sailed for the United States in yet another convoy. The weather turned rough and the Troubadour as usual fell behind. The seas got so big that Salvesen gave up trying to catch the convoy and turned the Troubadour into the wind to ride out the storm. So much seawater found its way into Carraway’s room that he collected his soggy belongings and moved into one of the crew’s common areas. “But just think!” he wrote to Avis. “It’s hardly two weeks, with good luck, before I’ll be seeing you again. It’s so much like a dream that I can’t quite fathom it, can’t believe that I’m going back to you, and that you’re my wife.” His diary entry was barely legible because the Troubadour was rolling and bucking so wildly.
In the middle of a particularly violent roll, one of two brothers who had joined the Troubadour in Archangel as coal passers fell into the coal bunker from the top of a 25-foot ladder, breaking a leg and fracturing his skull. Salvesen immediately ordered the Troubadour to leave the convoy and rush the injured man to the nearest hospital, which was in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Carraway admired the captain’s compassion but reflected that the injured coal passer was only one of seventy-five men on the ship, including the survivors of the El Capitan, whose lives the captain was endangering by ignoring orders and pulling the Troubadour out of the convoy. Carraway wondered if the captain had disobeyed orders partly out of a festering anger at the British over the abandonment of convoy PQ-17.
The injured man’s brother refused to leave his side, so Jim North was ordered to take a shift as a coal passer. The job entailed shoveling coal into a wheelbarrow, steering the full barrow across the dimly lit coal bunker, and then dumping the coal down chutes into piles where the firemen could shovel it into the ship’s boilers. When the firemen ran low on coal, they banged their shovels on the coal chutes. North found the work exhausting. Every time the Troubadour rolled, his wheelbarrow tipped over and he had to fill it again. He soon fell behind. The firemen banged their shovels and bellowed curses up the coal chutes. North hated being cooped up in the windowless coal bunker, blind to everything around him. Twice on the voyage he had watched torpedoes head straight at him; now he imagined a third torpedo heading at him while he was unable to see it coming. After a few hours, a huge Norwegian seaman squeezed into the coal bunker to tell North to take a lunch break. North misunderstood and cursed at him. The big Norwegian just grinned, picked up North, and carried him to the mess deck.
The Troubadour dropped off the injured coal passer at St. John’s and resumed its voyage south. The weather turned warmer and calmer. The Troubadour was assigned to a slow convoy. For the first time, it managed to keep up. The voyage began to feel almost routine. Carraway concentrated on writing reports, inventorying supplies, and packing up his gear to leave the ship in New York City.
At around 4:00 p.m. on November 3, the Troubadour steamed into New York Harbor. There was no cheering crowd to celebrate the end of the ship’s extraordinary voyage, which came as no surprise to the crew. The comings and goings of merchant ships, no matter how perilous and dramatic their voyages had been, were largely ignored by the American public. The day’s front-page headlines in The New York Times announced a naval battle in the Pacific off the island of Guadalcanal, where the U.S. Marines were engaged in a desperate fight with the Japanese; and the equally desperate efforts by the Red Army to hold off the Nazis in the devastated city of Stalingrad. A story inside the paper quoted a Russian academic telling an audience in Moscow that the Soviet Union would have to fend for itself until the West stopped playing political games and opened a second front in France.
But the most significant development in the war was nowhere in the paper. As the Troubadour was docking in New York, seventy-five thousand American soldiers were secretly on their way across the Atlantic to launch Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. A smaller force of British troops had sailed simultaneously from the west coast of Britain. The invaders would cross the ocean undetected by the Germans and splash ashore on the beaches of North Africa four days after the Troubadour’s unheralded homecoming. Operation Torch would open a new, muscular phase of America’s war against the Nazis, which ultimately would relegate the Arctic convoys—and the awkward, passive period of U.S. military history they represented—to a footnote in America’s history books.
Carraway, of course, knew nothing about Operation Torch as he walked off the Troubadour for the last time. All he cared about was finding a pay phone. After a couple of calls, he located Avis in Chicago, where she was staying with her parents. She caught the next train to New York. Carraway would spend a luxurious twenty-four-day leave with her before having to report back to the Armed Guard. The Navy had decided Carraway’s experiences in convoy PQ-17 qualified him as an expert. He would spend the rest of the war teaching gunnery to Armed Guard recruits at a training center in Little Creek, Virginia. Carraway would never go back to sea.
Jim North, along with the rest of the Troubadour’s merchant crew, stayed aboard the ship until it reached Philadelphia, where its voyage officially ended. North spent his last day on the Troubadour reading a stack of letters the captain had picked up for him in New York. The letters were all from North’s family, covering the ninety-nine days he had been incommunicado. The letters reminded him that he had been gone a long time. His father had bought a farm in Arkansas, and then joined the Merchant Marine and gone to sea. His little sister had graduated from high school, survived a burst appendix, and gotten married. His grandparents had sold one farm and bought another. Even though North had not written to anyone, his mother had written him faithfully once a week. He decided to visit her in New York as soon as he got off the Troubadour. First, he had to figure out how to escape from the ship in one piece.
Merchant mariners such as North were always paid off in cash at the end of voyages. The law required cash payoffs to protect mariners from unscrupulous shipowners offering worthless IOUs. But a mariner getting off a ship in a strange port with a wad of cash was a robbery waiting to happen. North worried mainly about being robbed by his shipmates. He had learned to get along with them but knew better than to trust them. On the night before the crew was to be paid off in Philadelphia, North walked through the city and mapped out the fastest route from the docks to the train station. Then he returned to the Troubadour and packed his seabag. Most of his clothes no longer fit him because he had gained weight on the voyage. He discarded all his belongings except a hunting knife, a half carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes, his woolen long johns, his blue watch cap, and the red sweater with the letter N that had attracted the taunts of the Gum-Gum Boys in Molotovsk.
The next morning, North collected his pay, which came to $1,500 in cash plus a $500 bonus check from the Soviet government. He shook hands with Salvesen but did not say goodbye to anyone else. He raced off the Troubadour “like it was on fire” and ran for the train station, looking back over his shoulder every few seconds. He was pleasantly surprised that none of his shipmates were chasing him. After pausing to catch his breath, North bought a ticket for New York. He would sail cargo ships for the rest of the war, with no real excitement. Before joining any ship, he always made sure it was not going to Russia.
FOR CARTER AND THE IRONCLAD, still stuck in Archangel, the worst of the Murmansk Run was yet to come.
The Ironclad’s rudder was easily repaired after the sabotage, but getting the old freighter back to the States was a low priority for everyone except its crew. All the dock space in and around Archangel was needed for newly arrived convoy PQ-18 ships, so the Ironclad was moved ten miles up the North Dvina River to a dock at a lumber mill. The weather grew colder. Every day more ice filled the river. “Unexpected cold snap has completely tied up large ship traffic in Archangel port for past five days,” the U.S. naval attaché in Archangel reported on November 13. Carter knew if the Ironclad did not leave Archangel soon it would have to spend the winter there. To his relief, the ship was assigned to homebound convoy QP-15, along with many of the convoy PQ-18 ships. A Russian tanker came upriver to fill the Ironclad with fuel oil for the voyage. The Ironclad’s chief engineer noticed that the tanker’s oil was full of grit and water, which might wreck the old Ironclad’s engines. Moore demanded cleaner oil for his ship. By the time the tanker returned, the convoy had sailed without the Ironclad.
Soon afterward, British authorities in Archangel decided to move the Ironclad to Murmansk, from whose ice-free harbor the ship could sail home at any point during the winter. The North Dvina River was already frozen solid. A tugboat with a reinforced bow for icebreaking arrived to lead the Ironclad into the White Sea, which was only starting to freeze. The tug broke a path through the river ice and the Ironclad stayed close behind. A few miles downriver from the lumber dock, Carter saw an indigenous Sami hunter guiding a sled pulled by a caribou. The man tried to cross the frozen river in front of the ships before they broke a path that would block his way. He lost the race but waited patiently as the tug and Ironclad passed. Twenty minutes later, Carter looked back and saw the sled gliding smoothly across the ice, which already had refrozen behind the ships. Carter reflected that steamships like the Ironclad were mere curiosities to the Sami, who “had been using the same animals to do the same things in the same way for hundreds of years before the steam engine was even invented.”
At the mouth of the North Dvina River, a Soviet trawler arrived with a pilot to guide the Ironclad through the White Sea. Nightfall brought light snow and then heavy snow. A few lighthouses flashed on shore, but no two were close enough together for the Ironclad to use their beams to fix its position. The pilot on the Russian tug flashed signals, but Moore could not understand them. No one on the Ironclad’s bridge was sure where the ship was. The captain decided to reverse course and wait until the snow stopped. It fell even harder, blotting out the trawler and everything else. “Our world was the Ironclad, surrounded by a moving white veil of snowflakes,” Carter wrote. He hoped this was “just one more bump in the long bumpy road that we had traveled already.” But the Ironclad was at the end of that road.
Around 11:30 p.m. on November 24, the Ironclad caromed off an unseen rock in the fog, then struck another rock and stopped dead. The captain decided to drop anchor and wait for daylight before trying to assess the damage. In the meantime, a rising tide lifted the ship just enough to bounce it up and down on more rocks. First light revealed to the crew’s surprise that the Ironclad already had passed all the way through the White Sea and the Gourlo into the Barents Sea. Unbeknownst to the ship’s officers and crew, the old freighter had been creeping through a maze of rocks. The rocks that had pierced her hull were only 500 yards from shore. The land rose into a steep cliff with a flat top. Atop the cliff stood dozens of Sami men and women, smiling and waving at the Ironclad’s crew as though “delighted we had stopped in for a visit.”
There the Ironclad stayed through Thanksgiving Day. The steward scrounged together a dinner of canned salmon in lieu of turkey and stuffing. The Ironclad’s pumps labored to keep up with leaks that the rocks had opened in the hull. Finally, two tugs towed the crippled freighter all the way back through the Gourlo and the White Sea to an oil dock at Molotovsk. The Ironclad’s stern had settled so deeply that men could lean over the ship’s rail and dip their hands in the water. The Ironclad was running out of fuel to keep up its steam; once she ran out of steam, the pumps would quit working and the ship would fill up with water and sink. The Russians at the oil dock could not find a fuel pipe long enough to extend to the ship. When the fuel started running out, the Ironclad’s crew sawed up the ship’s wooden hatch covers and threw them into the boilers. It was no use. On December 8, the pumps stopped and the Ironclad settled onto the bottom with “a great swoosh of air.” The main deck was still above water, but the damage to the hull was so serious that it would require repairs in a dry dock. No dry dock on the White Sea would be usable until the ice melted in the spring. The Soviets faulted Moore for reversing the Ironclad’s course in the blinding snow, but Carter blamed “whoever arranged the schedule so that we reached the area of maximum danger in complete darkness.”
In any case, U.S. naval authorities in Archangel wanted nothing further to do with the Ironclad. They suggested turning over the ship to the Russians and bringing home its crew “at the first opportunity before general mutiny or loss of life occurs.” The risk was all too real. Only a few days earlier, a fireman on another American freighter in Archangel had hung a weight around his neck and jumped overboard. He was at least the third American mariner to commit suicide in North Russia.
While arrangements were being made to transfer ownership of the Ironclad to the Soviets,* the officers and crew were split up and billeted on whatever Allied vessels in Archangel had room for them. Carter and three of his Armed Guard men were sent to the Liberty ship Richard Bland. The Richard Bland had originally sailed with convoy PQ-17 out of Hvalfjord but had been forced to turn back after hitting rocks. After being repaired, she had arrived in Archangel on Christmas Day 1942, with convoy JW-51A—the first of the small convoys Roosevelt and Churchill had sent in place of PQ-19. The Allies had permanently dropped the “PQ” convoy designations and replaced them with the “JW” designation, which had been chosen at random. The designation for homebound convoys had been changed from QP to RA. Exactly when the Richard Bland would sail for home was unclear. For Carter, the cold, gray Russian winter dragged on.
One day in January 1943, Carter was playing bridge on the ship when he heard short bursts of a submachine gun from the direction of the docks. He and his bridge partners leapt up from the game and looked down from the main deck. The body of a work-camp prisoner lay in the snow. The prisoner had been part of a group pushing a railcar when he had slipped on the ice and fallen beneath a wheel, which had severed his leg below the knee. Instead of rushing him to a nearby medical facility, a guard had simply shot him. None of the other guards or prisoners seemed fazed. Carter assumed it was business as usual. “Life in Russia was cheap and uncertain,” he wrote. On another occasion, Carter was walking along the dock and saw messmen from an Allied freighter discarding spoiled oranges onto the ice. The oranges were so rotten that they had turned a putrid bluish-gray. Nevertheless, a group of prisoners ran out onto the ice and scooped them up. So many prisoners joined the scramble that the ice cracked beneath their weight and they plunged into the water. They struggled ashore and the guards ordered them back to work, soaking wet in the freezing cold. “From this episode,” Carter wrote, “I came to realize that I needed to refine my own definition of ‘hungry.’”
To break the monotony, Carter occasionally took the train into Archangel and stayed at the Intourist Hotel, where the food was still good. The hotel proprietors turned off the heat every night at 8:00 p.m. to save fuel, which left the guest rooms freezing cold. Guests congregated in the hotel’s large unisex bathrooms, where the heat was kept on. People stood in line to bathe in six large tubs. Privacy was nonexistent. Whoever was next in line for a tub scrubbed the back of the person bathing. Milling around among the bathers were dozens of fully clothed people who were simply enjoying the warmth. “I am unable to summon the literary skills to provide an accurate word picture of that scene,” Carter wrote.
Outside, the Russian winter introduced Carter to entirely new forms of cold weather. “The frosts,” for example, were dense banks of fog formed by ice particles. The particles attached themselves to ships’ rigging in bladelike extensions that grew outward in the opposite direction of the wind. The ice crystals were delicately beautiful but sharp enough at their edges to draw blood. Carter shaved off an incipient beard after a frost transformed it into an uncomfortable mask of ice.
Carter refused to let the Archangel winter get him down. He resolved to learn the Russian language and carried around a spiral notebook so he could jot down new words. Some of the Russians admired his efforts and risked the scrutiny of the NKVD to help him. Within a few months, Carter had a working vocabulary of roughly eight hundred Russian words and could keep up with basic conversations, though the Russian Cyrillic alphabet remained a mystery to him. He was charmed by glimpses of traditional Russian culture amid the Soviet paranoia. Many Russians secretly observed Christmas as a celebration of the New Year. They decorated fir trees with dried flowers. At a “New Year’s” party, a young woman steered Carter into the company of an ancient Russian man, who took him by the arm and led him three times around the holiday tree. The ritual symbolized the passing of wisdom from the aged to the young, and the trips around the tree represented wishes for health, wealth, and happiness. The ceremony was especially touching because it was so hard to imagine those wishes coming true for anyone in wartime Archangel.
By mid-January 1943, the ice in the White Sea had frozen solid, but the British decided to move all Allied ships from Archangel to Murmansk, with the help of formidable Soviet icebreakers with powerful engines and propellers on both ends. The Richard Bland and a half dozen other vessels followed the icebreakers through the gray, frozen landscape into the Barents Sea and then up the Kola Inlet to Murmansk. The Germans did not bother them on the voyage, but as soon as the Richard Bland dropped anchor at Murmansk, German bombers attacked the city. Carter got plenty of practice firing the ship’s 20mm antiaircraft guns. He didn’t shoot down any planes, but no bombs hit the Richard Bland. The British announced she would leave Murmansk for the United States in the last homebound convoy of the winter. Carter and his shipmates thought they had caught a lucky break. They could not have been more wrong.