NOTES ON SOURCES

PROLOGUE: THE SPINNING NEEDLE

My description of the news of the scatter order reaching the Troubadour was based mainly on interviews with James Baker North III, a survivor of convoy PQ-17. I interviewed North at his home in Santa Barbara, California, in 2017. He also provided me with a copy of a 33-page account he wrote in 1992 of his experiences in convoy PQ-17. North, as the story explains, prospered after the war in real estate in Santa Barbara, where he now lives in a house anchored like a ship into the dry hills overlooking the Santa Barbara Channel. He was gracious enough to spend two days talking with me and share documents and photos relating to convoy PQ-17.

North’s descriptions of the events immediately after the scatter order jibe with those of the Troubadour’s Navy Armed Guard commander, Ensign Howard Carraway, who chronicled the voyage of convoy PQ-17 in a diary he kept aboard the ship. Carraway’s diary entries for the voyage of the Troubadour in convoy PQ-17 extend for more than 320 handwritten pages, and were provided to me by his son Mac Carraway of Bradenton, Florida. Mac also shared his father’s story with me in interviews by phone and in person in Bradenton in 2017.

The background material about the dangers posed by the Germans and the Arctic environment and the involvement of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin in the Arctic convoys came from numerous sources that are described later in these notes on sources.

Captain Maksym Melnikov, a Russian merchant captain, confirmed North’s description of the behavior of magnetic compasses near the Magnetic North Pole.

CHAPTER ONE: THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

My description of the scene at Hvalfjord and the mood of the men on the ships was drawn from my own visit to Hvalfjord in August 2018, Ensign Howard Carraway’s diary, and other accounts by survivors of convoy PQ-17 and other Arctic convoys that set out from Iceland. Those accounts include the former merchant mariner Robert Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell (1969), which I think is one of the best books on the Arctic convoys in general. Carse wrote lively, no-nonsense descriptions of the mariners and their ships. It’s hard to single out a particular section of his book, but pages 25–30 are a good place to start. Other descriptions of Hvalfjord are on pages 19–20 of Bernard Edwards’s The Road to Russia (2002); pages 15–19 of Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s I Was There: On Convoy PQ-17, the Convoy to Hell (although the book’s title initially put me off, I found the authors’ account extremely well researched and highly informative); and pages 5–6 of Walter John Baker’s wonderful book The Convoy Is to Scatter (2011). Baker compares Hvalfjord to a Gustave Doré drawing of hell. Michael Walling’s Forgotten Sacrifice (2012) contains good details about the rigors of sailing the Arctic.

The brief account of a storm blowing the cruiser USS Wichita around the harbor at Hvaldfjord came from Walling’s Forgotten Sacrifice, page 46.

My description of Carraway’s personality and his life up until convoy PQ-17 came from my interviews with his son Mac.

The checkered history of the Troubadour came from Carraway’s diary; Carraway’s reports to the Navy in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Record Group 38, kept at the Archives II branch in College Park, Maryland. Records Group 38 contains the files of the chief of naval operations and the Tenth Fleet antisubmarine command, and thus many of the documents relating to merchant ship sinkings in World War II; other records on individual ships in NARA Records Group 178, which also is kept in College Park; and from a feature article in the Times-Union and Journal of Jacksonville, Florida, on December 12, 1976, which recounted the ship’s history in considerable detail. The occasion for the article was the publication of a young adult book on convoy PQ-17 by Theodore Taylor, Battle in the Arctic Seas, which drew from Carraway’s diary. Taylor was a fine writer. He is probably best known for his young adult novel The Cay, which concerns the U-boat war in the Caribbean.

The description of the Troubadour’s Captain Salvesen and the Norwegian third officer’s vow to seek revenge against the Germans came from Carraway’s diary.

I got my information about the crew of the Troubadour from a crew manifest I found online at Ancestry.com, from Carraway’s diary, and from James Baker North III, whose rich and often hilarious descriptions of his shipmates were indispensable to me.

My account of North’s life before convoy PQ-17 and his early experiences on the Troubadour came from my interviews with North and from North’s 1992 written account of the voyage.

Although the history of America’s long relationship with Russia is available from numerous sources, I found a very helpful synopsis of it on pages 55–64 of Albert L. Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (2004). Weeks’s slim book offers valuable perspective to anyone trying to understand the Arctic convoys.

My brief account of the feckless Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918–19 was based primarily on E. M. Halliday’s When Hell Froze Over (2000), which manages to convey the absurdities of the enterprise without ever making light of it. I also examined government documents on the intervention at www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/b063276.pdf.

Churchill’s comment that the West would regret not strangling Bolshevism at birth came from Halliday’s When Hell Froze Over, page 284, as did Khrushchev’s comment on how the intervention affected U.S.-Soviet relations in the Cold War.

My descriptions of Joseph Stalin and his history leading up to Operation Barbarossa in 1941 came from numerous sources, including three biographies of Stalin, Robert Service’s Stalin (2005), Oleg Khlevniuk’s Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2015), and Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), which is the second volume of a planned three-volume biography. Two books by British authors, Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War (2006) and Richard Overy’s Russia’s War (1997), offer great perspective and vivid details about Stalin and his rule of the Soviet Union before (and during) World War II. The quote about Stalin’s penchant for butchery came from Service’s Stalin, page 12. Stories about Stalin’s cruelty abound. On page 47 of Ivan’s War, Merridale quotes a woman who knew Stalin as a boy describing how she recalled watching him swim a swollen river to a small island where a calf was marooned by the floodwaters. The woman had expected Stalin to rescue the calf, but instead he broke its leg.

Merridale also uncovered a suicide note written by a young Red Army officer that vividly illustrates the horror and despair Stalin wrought with the purges of the Great Terror: “I love my country and would never betray it. I believe in an even better future, when a bright sun will shine on all the world. But here there are enemies who sit and threaten every step an honest commander tries to take. I have decided to take my own life, even though I am but twenty-one years old.”

My big-picture explanation of how Stalin’s rule created opportunities for some Soviet citizens is based on Merridale’s Ivan’s War, pages 35–37. Almost every Russian I met told me a family story of suffering or advancement as a result of the changes Stalin forced on Soviet society.

The Gulag had absorbed 1.67 million people by the time the Soviet Union entered the war, Merridale writes on page 145 of Ivan’s War. I’ve seen conflicting figures but choose hers.

Churchill’s comment about Poland and Romania not knowing whether they feared the Nazis or the Soviets more came from the first volume of Churchill’s history of World War II, The Gathering Storm (1948), page 313. Reading Churchill’s account of the war was one of the great pleasures of researching this book. Overy’s Russia’s War (1997) further addresses the difficulties of the West forming an alliance with Stalin, on pages 44–46.

My description of the signing of the nonaggression pact and of Hitler’s purported boast that “Europe is mine” came from Overy’s Russia’s War, page 49. Stalin’s aside to Khrushchev that he had outsmarted Hitler came from the same book, page 50.

Churchill’s “sinister news” quote, along with his expression of doubt about the staying power of the nonaggression pact, came from his The Gathering Storm, page 351.

My point about the Soviets and Germans working together on a mobile poison-gas wagon came from Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver, page 90. The fact that the Soviets gave weather reports to German bombers over Britain came from Overy’s Russia’s War, page 53. Charles Emmerson’s The Future History of the Arctic (2010) points out that remote Arctic weather stations were critical to both the Allies and the Germans in predicting the weather over the battlefields of Europe. Jak P. Mallmann Showell’s Swastikas in the Arctic: U-boat Alley Through the Frozen Hell (2014) describes some of the grim battles over those weather stations. Showell’s book describes the war in the Arctic from the U-boats’ perspective. At least half a dozen books about the Arctic convoys have “Hell” in their titles.

The report of Stalin “cursing like a cab driver” after hearing of France’s defeat and Britain’s retreat came from Overy’s Russia’s War, page 59.

My description of Stalin’s multiple warnings about a German invasion and his too-late decision to act on them is recounted in numerous books. The most detailed account I found was in Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941, pages 895–99.

The detail about the wiring of the Bolshoi Theater to explode came from Merridale’s Ivan’s War, page 128. The details of the German occupation of Tolstoy’s and Tchaikovsky’s properties came from Overy’s Russia’s War, page 124.

My description of Churchill’s efforts to extend a hand to Stalin came from his The Gathering Storm.

I reviewed the letters between Churchill and Stalin and between Churchill and Roosevelt at the U.K. National Archives at Kew in southwest London. Other excellent sources of letters written by the three men to one another are the compilations Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (1975), edited by Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas; and My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (2005), edited by Susan Butler. Churchill also includes many of his letters to Roosevelt and Stalin in his five-volume history of World War II.

Roosevelt’s emissary Harry Hopkins not only was impressed with Stalin’s determination but with Stalin personally. “No man could forget the picture of the dictator of Russia,” Hopkins wrote, “an austere, rugged, determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, stout baggy trousers, and a snug-fitting blouse. He wore no ornament, military or civilian. He’s built close to the ground, like a football coach’s dream of a tackle. He’s about five feet six, about one hundred and ninety pounds. His hands are huge, as hard as his mind. His voice is harsh but ever under control. What he says is all the accent and inflection his words need.” I found Hopkins’s description of Stalin in Butler’s My Dear Mr. Stalin, pages 35–36.

The references to Life magazine’s optimistic portrayal of the NKVD and another magazine’s likening Stalin to an Italian gardener came from Amos Perlmutter’s FDR & Stalin (1993), pages 105–6.

Former president Herbert Hoover’s disparaging comments about America forming an alliance with the Soviet Union came from Dennis J. Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin: America’s Ambassadors to Moscow (1998), page 127.

My information about Stalin’s continuing overtures to Hitler after Operation Barbarossa came from my correspondence with Dr. Mikhail Suprun, a Russian historian in Archangel, in March 2018.

The detail about the Soviets turning churches into barns and pigsties came from Merridale’s Ivan’s War, page 33.

I stumbled onto the movie Days of Glory while channel surfing one night and watched it almost in disbelief. Pravda’s about-face was described in Merridale’s Ivan’s War, page 132.

Roosevelt’s “Step on it!” memo came from Butler’s My Dear Mr. Stalin, page 39.

The statistic of the Soviets losing twenty men for every German they killed came from Overy’s Russia’s War, page 137.

The Grand Alliance was the title Churchill gave to the third volume of his five-volume history of World War II.

The Leningrad diary entry came from Merridale’s Ivan’s War, page 98.

CHAPTER TWO: HELLISH GREEN

My account of the White Horse whisky mutiny came from pages 131–46 of Lieutenant William Carter’s Why Me, Lord? (2007).

Particulars of Carter’s background came from interviews with his son Richard Carter of Dover, Delaware, and from Why Me, Lord? My description of the Ironclad’s history came from NARA Records Groups 38 and 178 and from Why Me, Lord?

The rigors of the Persian Gulf route to the Soviet Union were described to me in an interview in May 2017 with Captain Hugh Stephens, a professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Maritime Academy in the Bronx, who twice during World War II made voyages to the Soviet Union, once via the Persian Gulf and once through the Arctic.

My descriptions of the landmarks along the Arctic convoy route, such as Jan Mayen Island and Bear Island, are based partly on David McGonigal and Dr. Lynn Woodward’s The Complete Encyclopedia of Antarctica and the Arctic (2001), pages 178–83. I also found a great deal of information about the Arctic climate and ecology in E. C. Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic (1994); John McCannon’s A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (2012); and Charles Emmerson’s The Future History of the Arctic (2010).

My description of the foul weather on the Barents Sea came from Chris Mann and Christer Jörgensen’s Hitler’s Arctic War (2002), page 9.

The account of the Arctic storm and its “grey pavements of water” came from B. B. Schofield’s The Russian Convoys (1964), page 197. Schofield’s book is another one of my favorites about the Arctic convoys.

Stephens described the wind sounding like a shrieking woman. My descriptions of the impact of the bitter cold on men and ships came from numerous sources, including interviews with James Baker North III, Stephens, and other survivors of the voyage, as well as from several books. Michael Walling’s Forgotten Sacrifice (2012) offers several unusual details on page 48, including the fact that the extreme cold could freeze nose hairs into needles of ice. Robert Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell (1969) describes on page 17 how the cold could cause eyelashes and eyebrows to freeze and fall off.

The capsizing of a British escort vessel from ice buildup on the superstructure is described in numerous books. Walling’s account on pages 66–67 of Forgotten Sacrifice is more detailed than most.

Everyone I asked gave me a slightly different answer about how long a mariner could survive in the icy Arctic waters. I used Russian cruise ship captain Maksym Melnikov’s estimate that a person would be incapacitated in twenty minutes and dead in thirty because Melnikor, as master of a cruise ship carrying hundreds of people through those waters, had to make it his business to know. In addition, accounts from the rescue ships in convoy PQ-17 suggest that survivors pulled from the water within twenty minutes had a much better chance of surviving than those who had been immersed longer.

My information about Arctic mirages came from Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic (1994), pages 20–23, and also from personal observation. While sailing through the Arctic in July 2017, I saw numerous such mirages, which were unlike any I had ever seen elsewhere.

The British mariner’s description of the changing balance between light and darkness in the Barents Sea came from Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell, page 18.

The mariner Donald Murphy’s description of the “hellish green” Arctic light came from Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), a collection of firsthand accounts edited by Mark Scott. I first heard about this book from Dr. Mikhail Suprun in Archangel, who highly recommended it. It’s a wonderful collection of accounts, and I too recommend it to anyone with a keen interest in the Arctic convoys.

Churchill’s The Gathering Storm (1948) provides an excellent summary of the Germans’ invasion of Norway and the belated British effort to dislodge them. For a more detailed reading of the Nazi invasion of Norway, I suggest Chris Mann and Christer Jorgensen’s Hitler’s Arctic War (2002), pages 32–62.

My description of the Tirpitz came from David Brown’s Tirpitz: The Floating Fortress (1977), Leonce Peillard’s Sink the Tirpitz! (1968), Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge’s The Sea War: The German Navy’s Story 1939–1945 (1957), and Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander’s Tirpitz: The Life and Death of Germany’s Last Super Battleship (2009).

I visited the otherworldly North Cape of Norway in July 2017. While the North Cape is a touristy place in summer, standing at the edge of the cliff and gazing north across the Barents Sea toward the North Pole is still an extraordinary experience.

Anyone looking to reconstruct the history of the early Arctic convoys probably ought to start with Bob Ruegg and Arnold Hague’s Convoys to Russia 1941–1945 (1992), a no-frills, authoritative listing of the convoys, the ships participating in them, and their fates. B. B. Schofield’s The Russian Convoys (1964) and Paul Kemp’s Convoy! Drama in Arctic Waters (2004) also are good sources of information about the early PQ convoys.

Negley Farson’s observation about the polar ice hemming in the convoys came from the Daily Mail of London on June 16, 1942. Farson had sailed on a merchant ship in Arctic convoy PQ-12 and homebound convoy QP-10.

Hitler’s changing attitudes toward the Arctic convoys are reflected in the German Navy’s summaries of the Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs for 1941 and 1942, which I reviewed at the U.K. National Archives. Kemp points out on pages 25–27 of Convoy! that Hitler’s initial lack of interest in stopping the convoys was based on his thinking that the Soviets would be conquered quickly and that the convoys could not save them.

The best account I found of the horrific HMS Matabele sinking was in Frank Pearce’s Running the Gauntlet (1989), pages 30–33.

My account of the Tirpitz’s fruitless attempt to attack convoy PQ-12 came primarily from Zetterling and Tamelander’s Tirpitz: The Life and Death of Germany’s Last Super Battleship, pages 37–44.

The description of the frostbitten mariner who had his legs amputated without anesthetic came from Walling’s Forgotten Sacrifice, page 83.

The story of convoy PQ-14’s struggles in the storm came from a report of the British vessel Hopemount at the U.K. National Archives.

Admiral Sir Stuart Bonham-Carter’s warning about sending convoys through the Arctic in twenty-four-hour daylight came from Pearce’s Running the Gauntlet (1989), page 79.

Admiral Sir Dudley Pound’s comment about the Arctic convoys being a “millstone” came from Robin Brodhurst’s biography of Pound, Churchill’s Anchor (2000), page 238.

Roosevelt’s stinging reply to Churchill’s message to Harry Hopkins came from Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston (2004), page 210.

Churchill rather dispassionately described being pressured by Roosevelt to send convoys through the Arctic despite the growing danger in The Hinge of Fate (1950), pages 258–60.

The brief description of the failed Soviet offensives against the Nazis in February and March 1942 and the German gains in Ukraine came from Richard Overy’s Russia’s War (1997), page 122, and Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War (2006), pages 150–52.

Captain S. W. Roskill’s assessment of the Soviet’s indifference to the dangers of the Arctic convoys and the political pressure on Churchill came from Roskill’s definitive Royal Navy history of the war, The War at Sea 1939–1945, volume II (1956), page 397.

Ensign Howard Carraway’s diary described the betting pool organized by the Troubadour’s Armed Guard unit.

North told me the story about his ill-fated shore visit in one of our interviews. Talking with North reminded me that no matter how many written accounts exist of an event, there is really no substitute for talking with someone who was there. Sadly, that soon will no longer be possible for the events of World War II.

Carter’s explanation of how fallout from the White Horse whisky mutiny kept the Ironclad from sailing in convoy PQ-16 came from page 145 of Why Me, Lord?

CHAPTER THREE: KNIGHT’S MOVE

My recounting of the Carlton’s previous attempts to reach Russia is based on documents in NARA Records Group 38. Theodore Taylor’s Battle in the Arctic Seas (1976) describes the ship’s reputation among mariners as a “Jonah” on page 7.

The description of the relentless air attacks on the Liberty ship Richard Henry Lee in convoy PQ-16 came from John Gorley Bunker’s Liberty Ships: The Ugly Ducklings of World War II (1973), pages 63–64.

Ensign Howard Carraway described his worries about his emotionally troubled shipmate in his diary.

My information about Lieutenant Leo Gradwell came primarily from telephone interviews and email exchanges with his three children, Mary Corrigan, Christopher Gradwell, and the late Andrew Gradwell, who died in January 2018. Each of Gradwell’s children remembered something different about their unique father. Mary Corrigan sent me a large trove of photos and documents relating to her father’s wartime experience, including copies of his Certificate of Competency as a Master of Pleasure Yachts and a handwritten, unpublished account by Gradwell of the latter part of convoy PQ-17’s voyage.

Carraway described in his diary how he received news reports about the fate of convoy PQ-16 and the American victory at the Battle of Midway.

Both sides in the Atlantic war used coded birth notices to inform men at sea that they had become fathers. Timothy P. Mulligan notes on page 184 of his book Neither Sharks Nor Wolves (1999) that the commander of the German U-boat force, Admiral Karl Doenitz, personally sent coded birth announcements to his submariners at sea, referring to a newborn son as a “U-boat with periscope” and a newborn daughter as “a U-boat without periscope.”

I found the information about the ships and structure of convoy PQ-17 from NARA Records Group 38, which has a large file on the convoy as well as an oral history by Carraway and photographs he took on the voyage, some of which are included in this book.

The footnoted reference to “Roosevelt’s eggs” came from Albert L. Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (2004), page 122.

I obtained records about the never-say-die Soviet tanker Azerbaijan from the Northern Maritime Museum in Archangel, Russia, through the museum’s department head of Scientific Research, Ivan Katyshev, whom I met briefly in Archangel and corresponded with afterward. The British war correspondent Godfrey Winn’s comment about the blond female bosun came from his book PQ-17 (1948), a very personal account of his experiences on the voyage aboard a British antiaircraft ship.

Admiral Sir Dudley Pound’s instructions to his commanders to keep convoy PQ-17 moving even if it was suffering losses came from Robin Brodhurst’s Churchill’s Anchor (2000), page 240.

Captain Jack Broome described the Royal Navy’s success in scattering a convoy in the North Atlantic in his informative book Convoy Is to Scatter (not to be confused with Walter John Baker’s The Convoy Is to Scatter), pages 81–82. Broome used the signals exchanged by the British during the convoy as the basis of his book, which provided a good perspective of how the disaster unfolded.

My description of Admiral Sir John Tovey’s suggestion that convoy PQ-17 be used as bait for the Tirpitz came from David Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), which is one of the best-known British accounts of the convoy. After the first edition was published, Irving and his publisher were sued for libel by Broome, who argued that the book cast him in an unfairly bad light. A court found in Broome’s favor and awarded him substantial damages. Since then, Irving has become better known as a denier of the Holocaust. But his extensive research and legwork in tracking down and interviewing key figures in the story of convoy PQ-17 while they were alive makes The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 valuable in understanding the disaster.

The Admiralty’s plan for protecting convoy PQ-17 through three separate escort forces makes for confusing, jargon-heavy reading for laymen. I found one of the clearest descriptions of the plan on pages 88–89 of David Wherrett’s From Yorkshire to Archangel: A Young Man’s Journey to PQ-17 (2017), which Wherrett wrote as a tribute to his father, who survived the convoy.

German admiral Erich Raeder described his dealings with Hitler about Operation Knight’s Move in the Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs for 1942, which I reviewed at the U.K. National Archives. My background information about Raeder and his relationship with Hitler came mainly from page 5 of Anthony Martienssen’s Hitler and His Admirals (1948) and from page 115 of Leonce Peillard’s Sink the Tirpitz! (1968). Hitler’s comment about being a hero on land but a coward at sea came from page 2 of Martienssen’s book.

Raeder expressed his loathing of Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the war, saying of him: “The personality of Goering had a disastrous influence on the fate of the German Reich. Unimaginable vanity and unrestrained ambition were two of his principal characteristics; he had a craving for cheap popularity and effect, and was distinguished for dishonesty, ignorance and selfishness. He ignored the interests of State and people, and was both avaricious and extravagant—an effeminate and unsoldierly character.” Goering was sentenced to death at Nuremberg but committed suicide on the eve of his scheduled execution by ingesting a cyanide capsule; Raeder was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released after nine years at the age of seventy-nine, due to his deteriorating health.

Churchill described his bizarre visit from the suspicious Vyacheslav Molotov in The Hinge of Fate (1950), pages 331–37. Readers unfamiliar with Molotov the person may be familiar with a crude weapon named for him, the Molotov cocktail—a container of flammable liquid stuffed with a burning fuse and hurled at the enemy. The Finns invented the Molotov cocktail during their brief war with the Soviet Union in 1939–1940 and named it for Molotov as a taunt. The Soviets subsequently made wide use of Molotov cocktails against the Nazis.

The description of the “hammer” as a “schoolmasterish” figure came from a story on Molotov’s resignation as foreign minister in The New York Times, June 2, 1956.

My account of Churchill’s second wartime visit to America came primarily from The Hinge of Fate, pages 374–86. Churchill described his discussion with Roosevelt about the atomic bomb on pages 374–75, his wariness about Roosevelt’s car with hand brakes on page 377. Churchill’s books on the war make it clear that he had a habit of offering advice to his pilots, ship captains, and drivers. He spent part of his visit to Hyde Park riding with Roosevelt in the president’s car, which was rigged with special equipment to allow Roosevelt to control the brake and gas pedal with his hands. Roosevelt kept stopping at scenic overlooks on cliffs overlooking the Hudson River, and Churchill kept glancing nervously at the hand brakes, hoping they were reliable. He refrained from mentioning his concerns to the president.

Churchill described receiving the shocking telegram about Tobruk on pages 382–83 of The Hinge of Fate. He described his and Ismay’s discouraging look at live-fire exercises by green U.S. troops in South Carolina on page 386.

Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston (2004) added several telling details to Churchill’s description of his visit to America, on page 187, and described the apparent assassination attempt on the prime minister in Baltimore.

Wartime Murmansk was described by numerous mariners who spent time there. The author and former mariner Felix Riesenberg offered a wonderful description on pages 131–32 of Sea War (1956): “Ten patched docks creaked and groaned under a glut of war cargo; sidings were walled by high stacks of bales, cases and barrels; overloaded freight trains were backed up for miles. The waterfront became a dirty sludge at noon when snow melted under the blast of bomb explosions and the grind of heavy machinery; at night it refroze into deep warped ruts of ice and shale. Soot and oil smudged the city, then blizzards howled down out of Barents Sea to whiten it again.”

The description of the thunderous Russian antiaircraft barrage from Murmansk came from page 123 of Graeme Ogden’s My Sea Lady (2013). Ogden was the commander of the HMT Lady Madeleine, an armed trawler similar to the Ayrshire. Ogden’s book described his own convoy experience, which did not include convoy PQ-17, but he did include a short description of the Ayrshire’s adventures in convoy PQ-17, as told to him by Gradwell and the Ayrshire’s first officer, Richard Elsden. Before he died, Gradwell told his children that Ogden’s account of convoy PQ-17 was the only accurate one he ever read in a book. My Sea Lady also provides a great deal of background on armed trawlers.

The information about Swedish intelligence sources giving the British a copy of the Knight’s Move plan came from Brodhurst’s Churchill’s Anchor, page 238. The officer’s comment that the Royal Navy regarded the plan as merely a “rumble of distant thunder” came from Wherrett’s From Yorkshire to Archangel, page 111. The officer he quotes is Broome.

Carraway’s description of the “mutiny” on the Troubadour came from his diary. James Baker North III, who was a participant, gave a very different account of the work stoppage in his interviews with me. Carraway’s account of his and the captain’s efforts to have the troubled Uruguayan seaman removed from the ship came from Carraway’s diary.

The account of the final convoy conference in Hvalfjord came from several sources, but primarily from Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, pages 69–72, and from Broome’s Convoy Is to Scatter (1972), pages 107–9.

Theodore Taylor’s evocative description of the convoy’s departure came from page 47 of Battle in the Arctic Seas. North’s description of missing the departure while stowing the anchor chain came up in one of our interviews. Carraway’s reflections on the convoy’s departure came from his diary.

CHAPTER FOUR: FIRST BLOOD

I found a reference by Caesar to convoys in his account of the invasion of Britain. The account I read is on page 4 of a collection of war stories edited by Ernest Hemingway and entitled Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (1955).

The description of the convoy sailing out of Hvalfjord came primarily from Ensign Howard Carraway’s diary. Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s comparison of the merchant ships to “dirty ducks” came from his war diary, part of which is reprinted in his book A Hell of a War (1993), on pages 132–33. Fairbanks was a Hollywood screen idol serving as a flag lieutenant on the American cruiser USS Wichita, which was part of convoy PQ-17’s distant covering force. Although Fairbanks understood Iceland’s strategic importance to America and Britain, he did not like the place. He quoted a fellow U.S. Navy officer as saying, “Well, I can understand why we are here in Iceland, and I can understand why the British are in Iceland, but I’ll be goddamned if I understand why the Icelanders are in Iceland!”

The mariner’s view that people on shore were happy not to be accompanying convoy PQ-17 came from Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell (1968), pages 26–27.

Maksym Melnikov talked with me about fog while he was guiding the cruise ship M/S Nautica through fog on the way to Murmansk in July 2017. The description of the Arctic fog as “slimy” came from an oral history by the Ayrshire’s first officer, Richard Elsden, which I accessed on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London, at www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=pq-17. The museum, which I visited in July 2017, contains other oral histories by men in convoy PQ-17, as well as a diary kept by an anonymous crew member of the Ayrshire. One of the things I liked best about the museum was that it includes many physical remnants of the sea war in World War II, including a pair of imposing 15-inch guns like those on the Tirpitz; one of those guns’ man-sized shells; and a cluster of incendiary bombs similar to the ones German bombers dropped on ships and on Murmansk and Archangel.

Commander Jack Broome’s assessment of the Arctic fog came from his Convoy Is to Scatter (1972), page 185.

David Wherrett’s From Yorkshire to Archangel (2017) was a great source of details about the operation of the convoy PQ-17 rescue ships, mainly because Wherrett’s father served on one of those vessels, the Zamalek. Wherrett provides a good general description of the ship’s operations on page 67. The detail about the Admiralty sending three rescue ships along with convoy PQ-17 mainly so that they could bring home a large number of Allied mariners already stranded in North Russia came from a document I found at the U.K. National Archives. The detail about the Zamalek putting to sea with dockyard workers still laboring to get it ready came from David Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), page 70.

Carraway described engaging the tanks in the Troubadour’s deck cargo in the defense of the ship in his diary. He was not the only Navy Armed Guard commander to recognize that tanks offered a chance to improve a ship’s weaponry. David A. Schwind’s Blue Seas, Red Stars: Soviet Military Medals to U.S. Sea Service Recipients in World War II (2015) describes how the Armed Guard commander of the Liberty ship Benjamin Harrison removed some machine guns from the tanks on his ship and mounted them on the vessel where they would be more effective against planes. Schwind offers detailed descriptions of the brave acts that earned Soviet medals and orders for 217 members of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine during the Arctic convoys.

Lieutenant William Carter described the Ironclad’s inadequate guns on pages 104–8 of Why Me, Lord? (2007). He described his approach to shooting at planes on pages 158–59.

Walter John Baker’s reflections on the weird beauty of the ice came from his The Convoy Is to Scatter (2011), page 10. Godfrey Winn’s “batik” comment about the ice came from his book PQ-17 (1948), page 76.

My account of the Richard Bland and the Exford being forced to turn back after hitting ice and rocks, respectively, came primarily from NARA Records Group 38, and from Commodore Jack Dowding’s extensive and fact-filled final report on convoy PQ-17, which I found at the U.K. National Archives.

The description of the antiaircraft ships serenading the Americans with “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “Pistol Packin’ Mama” came from Carter’s Why Me, Lord?, pages 154–55.

My account of the bombing of Murmansk came from Maksim I. Starostin’s Krigsdagbok fra Murmansk (War Diary from Murmansk) (2017), pages 274–77, which was translated for me from Norwegian to English by my Norwegian friend Hilda Oppedal. Hilda, an experienced tour guide, also showed me around Bergen.

The senior British naval officer’s warning on Murmansk is at the U.K. National Archives.

Francis Brummer’s description of the first German plane locating convoy PQ-17 came from his diary, printed in Donald Vining’s American Diaries of World War II (1982), page 134.

Winn’s colorful description of the Shad came from PQ-17, page 76.

My description of the U-boats’ challenges in operating in calm seas and twenty-four-hour daylight came from pages 71–73 of Jak P. Mallmann Showell’s Swastikas in the Arctic: U-boat Alley Through the Frozen Hell (2014).

Carraway wrote in his diary about his initial fear at manning the Troubadour’s guns during the first air-raid alarm.

Carter’s observations about the sun’s movement came from Why Me, Lord?, page 150.

Admiral Raeder’s instruction that the U-boats ignore homebound convoy QP-13 and concentrate on convoy PQ-17 is among intercepted German signals at the U.K. National Archives.

The message concerning the “whale without a tail” came from NARA Records Group 38. In my research for this book and my previous book, The Mathews Men (2016), I found numerous reports of whales being mistaken for U-boats and bombed.

My description of the first attack by German aircraft on the convoy came mostly from Carraway’s diary and Carter’s Why Me, Lord? Winn’s comment that he reluctantly admired the German pilot’s rescue effort came from PQ-17, page 85.

Carraway’s assessment of the Troubadour’s performance during the first air attack and his description of the aftermath of the attack came from his diary.

Baker’s description of his argument with a shipmate over Communism and Stalin came from The Convoy Is to Scatter, pages 21–22.

My description of Churchill’s defeat of the no-confidence vote in Parliament came mainly from The Hinge of Fate, pages 391–409.

I found the detail about Roosevelt taking along Jane’s Fighting Ships as reading material at Shangri-La in Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston (2004), page 188.

The account of the Tirpitz moving through the Inner Leads came from Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander’s Tirpitz: The Life and Death of Germany’s Last Super Battleship (2009), pages 121–24. My background about Admiral Schniewind came from Anthony Martienssen’s Hitler and His Admirals (1948), page 15. The detail that Schniewind was nicknamed “the Undertaker” by his men came from Theodore Taylor’s Battle in the Arctic Seas (1976), page 34.

I found helpful descriptions of the various German aircraft that attacked convoy PQ-17 in John C. Fredriksen’s International Warbirds: An Illustrated Guide to World Military Aircraft, 1914–2000 (2002).

My information about the challenges of flying in the Arctic came from page 198 of Adam R. A. Claasen’s Hitler’s Northern War: The Luftwaffe’s Ill-Fated Campaign, 1940–1945 (2001), which examines the war in the Arctic from the perspective of the German air force.

The quote about the majestic icebergs and polar bears came from an account by John Beardmore, the navigating officer of the British corvette HMS Poppy. I found Beardmore’s account online at www.cbrnp.com/RNP/Flower/ARTICLES/Poppy/Beardmore-1.htm, a website devoted to Flower-class corvettes.

Carraway’s observations of the icebergs and pancake ice, as well as the ominous sight of the wreckage in the water, came from his diary. Several mariners described seeing the bomber frozen in a mass of ice, but their accounts varied as to whether it was a British or German plane.

My information about Lord Haw-Haw’s July 3 taunt of convoy PQ-17 came from Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, page 116. Mariners on many ships in the convoy listened to Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts, although some captains forbade it. Lord Haw-Haw’s real name was William Joyce. A New York native, he had spent much of his young life in Ireland and Britain. He joined the British Nazi Party and later emigrated to Germany, where he began his propaganda broadcasts. After the war, Joyce was captured and then hanged.

Carraway’s comments on the Ayrshire and the comfort of the fog came from his diary. So did my account of Carraway’s unsuccessful effort to catch a glimpse of Bear Island.

CHAPTER FIVE: FIREWORKS

S. J. Flaherty’s quote came from his book Abandoned Convoy (1970), page 20. The information and quote about men accepting discomfort in order to protect their lives came from Walter John Baker’s The Convoy Is to Scatter (2010), pages 34–35.

Ensign Howard Carraway’s account of the Heinkel 115s’ attack on the convoy came from his diary.

The description of the sinking of the Christopher Newport came primarily from the reports of survivors and of the ship’s Armed Guard commander in NARA Records Group 38. The Armed Guard commander’s report contains details of the heroics of the gunner Hugh Wright, as does David A. Schwind’s Blue Seas, Red Stars: Soviet Military Medals to U.S. Sea Service Recipients in World War II (2015), page 133. Blue Seas, Red Stars also describes Paul Webb being hurled against a smokestack by the force of the torpedo explosion. My account of the Christopher Newport’s captain trying to bring a gun aboard the rescue ship Zamalek came from Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell (1968), page 47.

Baker described how Gradwell was tempted to try to board the abandoned Christopher Newport, and how the crew of the Ayrshire was glad he reconsidered, on pages 29–30 of The Convoy Is to Scatter. The British submarines were unable to sink the derelict Christopher Newport; a U-boat finally did.

Godfrey Winn described the practice of marking off a sunken ship on the convoy chart in PQ-17 (1948), page 93.

Lieutenant William Carter described the unsettling “bombs through the fog syndrome” and his discovery that he could handle the rigors of combat on page 163 of Why Me, Lord? On the following page, he described approaching his traumatized shipmate but not knowing how to help him.

Men on several different ships in convoy PQ-17 recounted the story of the German pilot of the Shad obligingly reversing course when men on the ships complained to him that watching him circle them made them dizzy. I thought the story was apocryphal at first but decided to include it after reading so many accounts of it. Baker wrote about the Shad firing a burst into the water near the Ayrshire on page 24 of The Convoy Is to Scatter.

Carter and other mariners described the hoisting of new American flags to celebrate the Fourth of July. My description of the initial British confusion over the lowering of the old flags came from Winn’s PQ-17, page 96. Lund and Ludlam’s praise for the raising of the new flags as a “splendidly defiant gesture” came from I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell, page 48. Winn reflected on the newness of war to the Americans in PQ-17, page 96. Carraway reported in his diary having “a wee drop” of Scotch with Salvesen to celebrate the Fourth.

The congratulatory holiday messages between the American and British warships came from the Arctic convoys files of NARA Records Group 38 and the U.K. National Archives.

The messages from the Admiralty to the commanders in the field came from the files of the U.K. National Archives.

The Germans’ initial confusion over the whereabouts of the Allied carriers is described in the final German report on Operation Knight’s Move, a copy of which is contained in the files of the U.K. National Archives.

My accounts of the determined attack by the Heinkel 111 bombers came mostly from Carraway’s diary and Carter’s Why Me, Lord? Several mariners said the planes looked like a swarm of bugs when they first appeared on the horizon.

Much of my description of the USS Wainwright’s assault on the Heinkel 111 bombers came from my interviews with James Baker North III, and from Carraway’s diary. The diary also described the Armed Guard men on the Troubadour cheering the destroyer as it passed the Troubadour.

My background information about the courageous German pilot Lieutenant Hennemann came from David Wherrett’s From Yorkshire to Archangel (2017), pages 128–29. Dowding’s comment about Hennemann came from his final report on Convoy PQ-17 in the UK National Archives.

The details about the optimistic castaway shouting “On to Moscow!” and some of the Navarino survivors originally thinking they had been left behind came from Paul Kemp’s Convoy! Drama in Arctic Waters (2004), pages 71–72. The detail about the surgeon on the rescue ship Zamalek completing an operation under fire came from Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell, pages 60–61; the detail of the young Filipino seaman claiming to have been blown high enough into the air that a plane passed beneath him came from the same book, page 63.

Kemp’s excellent summary of the first-aid treatment for men pulled from the freezing water came from pages 131–32 of Convoy! Robert Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell (1969) also provides great details about the operation of the rescue ships on pages 146–48, including the detail that the Rathlin’s rescue swimmer was a peacetime swimming champion who always carried a knife for self-protection when he entered the water.

The mariner’s description of the frostbitten seamen recuperating in Archangel came from an account by American seaman Donald Murphy, on page 136 of Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott.

Richard Elsden’s account of the trawler Ayrshire dropping back to pick up survivors came from his oral history, which I accessed online from the website of the Imperial War Museum in London. I found Lieutenant Leo Gradwell’s flippant comment to the corvette officer in David Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), page 149. Irving interviewed Gradwell before the latter’s death.

I told the story of the Azerbaijan’s phoenixlike resurrection by examining a variety of sources, including documents I obtained from the Northern Maritime Museum in Archangel; Carraway’s diary; Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell, pages 63–64; Winn’s PQ-17, 101–2; and Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, page 150.

Baker’s reflection after the air attack is from The Convoy Is to Scatter, page 33.

Carter’s assessment of the convoy’s effort against the German bombers came from page 171 of Why Me, Lord? Carraway’s assessment came from his diary. The details about the Icelandic seamen’s activities during the air raid on the Ironclad came from Richard Carter, who met children of two of the men during a visit to Iceland in 2018. North offered his views during my interviews with him. Baker recounted the “splicing of the main brace” and the dinner of corned beef on page 42 of The Convoy Is to Scatter. Francis Brummer’s confession that he forgot to swallow his food came from one of his three entries in Scott’s Eyewitness Accounts, page 49. Commander Jack Broome’s assessment that convoy PQ-17 could get anywhere as long as the ammunition lasted came from his Convoy Is to Scatter (1972), page 167.

CHAPTER SIX: SCATTERED

My account of Pound’s fateful decision to scatter the convoy was pieced together from a number of sources, starting with the Admiralty files at the U.K. National Archives. The most complete account I found was in Robin Brodhurst’s biography of Pound, Churchill’s Anchor (2001), pages 242–48, including on page 246 the colorful description by Admiral Eccles of how Pound announced the decision. The British author Hugh Sebag-Montefiore helped me understand how the time lag in breaking the Germans’ Enigma-coded messages in the summer of 1942 played into Pound’s decision.

The description of Pound’s background came from Brodhurst’s book and also from Pound’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

I was in the seventh grade when I first read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” but I’ve always remembered its lesson of paying attention to the absence of clues as well as the presence of them. I thought of the story immediately the first time I read in detail about the information Pound had at his disposal when he made the decision to scatter the convoy. In “Silver Blaze,” Holmes deduced—SPOILER ALERT!—that the murderer who stole a famous racehorse was the horse’s trainer. Holmes reasoned that the trainer’s familiar presence would not have caused the stables’ watchdog to bark, whereas a stranger’s presence would have.

Pound’s fateful series of three signals is at the U.K. National Archives.

I focused on Commander Broome’s reaction to the signals because he explained it so clearly in his Convoy Is to Scatter (1972), and because his decision to withdraw the six destroyers from convoy PQ-17’s core escort force seems so critical to what happened. Of course, it’s impossible to say with certainty how the scattered ships of the convoy would have fared if Broome’s destroyers had stayed with them rather than racing west with the cruisers. I also relied on The Times of London’s accounts of the trial of Broome’s libel case against David Irving in January and February 1970. Broome and other key figures in the convoy PQ-17 disaster testified during the trial.

The story of the Walrus’s flight is from Convoy Is to Scatter, pages 175–76.

Broome’s quote about the hoisting of the pennant meaning the end of the convoy came from page 187 of Convoy Is to Scatter.

My account of Broome’s conversation with Commodore Dowding about the scatter order came mainly from Convoy Is to Scatter, pages 187–93; Dowding’s final report on the convoy, in the Admiralty files of the U.K. National Archives; and The Times’s coverage of the libel case in 1970. Broome’s farewell message to Dowding and Dowding’s reply message are in the Admiralty files at the U.K. National Archives.

Lieutenant Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s reaction to the scatter order and his quote about the “frightened chicks” came from A Hell of a War, pages 140–41.

My description of the difficult choices faced by the commanders of the small escorts, and the anger that resulted, came from several sources, including Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), pages 175–76; Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell (1968), pages 99–100; and Godfrey Winn’s PQ-17 (1948), pages 107–9 and 113–15. Winn had a front-row seat for this drama-inside-a-drama because he was aboard the antiaircraft ship Pozarica. The detail about the anger of the Poppy’s officers came from Winn’s PQ-17, pages 99–100. The detail about an officer on another corvette hurling a chair in anger came from Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, page 176.

I read Jan de Hartog’s novel The Captain after Broome recommended it in his book Convoy Is to Scatter. On pages 357–58 of The Captain, de Hartog’s Dutch protagonist engages in a furious, angry argument with a subordinate about whether or not to go back for the survivors. (The Scottish author Alistair MacLean wrote his debut novel, HMS Ulysses (1955), about a convoy on the Murmansk Run, though his book is not based on convoy PQ-17.)

Walter John Baker’s “Devil . . . take the hindmost” comment is from The Convoy Is to Scatter (2011), page 44.

The poignant words from the sailor on the trawler Northern Gem came from an account of the convoy by the trawler’s coxswain S. A. “Sid” Kerslake, at www.pq17.eclipse.co.uk. The website offers a number of firsthand accounts of the convoy.

Lieutenant William Carter’s description of the reaction to the scatter order on the Ironclad and the process of scattering came from page 174 of Why Me, Lord? The account of the Ironclad captain’s reasoning for heading north into the ice field is based on pages 175–76.

My account of the reaction to the scatter order on the Troubadour came from my interviews with James Baker North III and from Ensign Howard Carraway’s diary.

The description of Gradwell’s and Elsden’s response to the scatter order came from Elsden’s oral history, which I accessed online from the website of the Imperial War Museum in London; and from Graeme Ogden’s My Sea Lady (2013), pages 155–56.

My description of how Lieutenant Leo Gradwell’s response to the scatter order grew out of his healthy skepticism of official decisions came from interviews in 2017 with his children. Mary Corrigan said the Americans on the Troubadour, Ironclad, and Silver Sword were fortunate that, of all the British escort commanders they might have encountered when convoy PQ-17 broke up, they encountered her father.

Gradwell’s quote about heading “to hell” came from Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, page 177.

The account of Gradwell’s approaching the Troubadour to propose a partnership came primarily from Carraway’s diary.

Walter Baker’s quote about the partnership came from The Convoy Is to Scatter, pages 47–48.

The details about Gradwell’s preparations, including stacking the depth charges on the trawler’s bow in order to attack the Tirpitz, came from Ogden’s My Sea Lady, page 156.

The description of how the restless crew of the Tirpitz spent the night of July 4 came from page 110 of Leonce Peillard’s Sink the Tirpitz! (1968).

My account of the Germans’ reaction to the scattering of convoy PQ-17 is based on the German Navy’s report on the attack on convoy PQ-17, which is at the U.K. National Archives; Jak P. Mallmann Showell’s Swastikas in the Arctic: U-boat Alley Through the Frozen Hell (2014), pages 68–71; Adam R. A. Claasen’s Hitler’s Northern War: The Luftwaffe’s Ill-Fated Campaign, 1940–1945 (2001), pages 214–15; and Lawrence Paterson’s Steel and Ice: The U-boat Battle in the Arctic and the Black Sea 1941–1945 (2016), pages 103–8.

CHAPTER SEVEN: INTO THE ICE

James Baker North III described steering the Troubadour into the ice in his interviews with me.

I based my description of the Arctic ice field on information in E. C. Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic (1994), pages 65–69; the U.S. Hydrographic Office’s Arctic Pilot (1917); and David McGonigal and Dr. Lynn Woodward’s The Complete Encyclopedia of Antarctica and the Arctic (2001), pages 66–71. I also interviewed Dr. Victoria Hill, an Arctic researcher at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, who has made several trips into the Arctic and once was briefly trapped by the ice while aboard a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker. The Arctic Pilot’s warning about the dangers of sailing into leads in the ice came from page 26 of that publication; its advice about shooting into the fog to detect icebergs appears on page 31.

The Arctic Pilot describes the phenomena of ice blink and water sky on page 31. Harold Gatty’s The Raft Book (1943) also describes them on page 42. Gatty’s book is full of fascinating facts about using clues from nature to navigate and survive in all latitudes.

I elaborated on the particulars of Arctic mirages in this chapter using Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic, pages 20–23, as well as my own experiences while sailing in Arctic waters. Pielou notes that a rare form of mirage sometimes enables people to see objects on the horizon that are, in fact, much farther away. The mirage was first noticed by sailors near Novaya Zemlya, who saw the sun a full two weeks before it crested the horizon at the end of a long, dark Arctic winter. For that reason, the rare mirage is known as the Novaya Zemlya effect.

I obtained the information about the seal-hunting casualties from an exhibit at the museum of the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society in tiny Hammerfest, Norway. As far as I’m concerned, no one visiting Hammerfest should miss this quirky, hole-in-the-wall museum.

The description of the four vessels’ entry into the ice field came mostly from Carraway’s diary but also from Graeme Ogden’s My Sea Lady (2013), pages 155–56. My description of the SOS calls crackling over the Troubadour’s radio came primarily from Carraway’s diary, though other survivors of the convoy recounted the experience of listening to those calls.

The chilling plea of the mariner on the Empire Byron whose legs were trapped in the wreckage came from Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell (1968), page 83. The detail of the British seaman whose life was saved by the intense cold came from Lawrence Paterson’s Steel and Ice (2016), page 106. The message from the commander of the U-703 to his headquarters came from David Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), page 190. The description of the Empire Byron lifeboat survivors’ ordeal came from Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There, pages 158–159.

I found a description of the encounter between the Empire Byron survivors and the commander of the U-703 in Robert Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell (1969), pages 162–63.

Commander Jack Broome described his and other British officers’ slowly dawning realization that they were not racing toward a fight with the Tirpitz but racing to try to avoid such a fight in Convoy Is to Scatter (1972), pages 203–11.

My information about the debate among the junior officers on the British destroyer Offa came from Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell, pages 72–73. The passage from the USS Wichita’s onboard newspaper came from page 77 of the same volume.

Details of the Peter Kerr’s and Honomu’s sinkings came from their respective files in NARA Records Group 38.

Hitler’s decision to finally unleash the Tirpitz is described in Anthony Martienssen’s Hitler and His Admirals (1948), pages 152–53; in the German documents in the U.K. National Archives; and in Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander’s Tirpitz: The Life and Death of Germany’s Last Super Battleship (2009), pages 135–36. Martienssen’s account is by far the most detailed.

Brummer’s comparison of the icebergs in the polar ice field to the mountains of northern Arizona came from one of his entries in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott, page 40. Carraway’s observations about sailing in the ice field came from his diary; North’s observations came from my interviews with him. Elsden’s account of his “morale-boosting” mission came from his oral history, which I accessed online from the website of the Imperial War Museum in London; Walter John Baker’s comment about the can opener came from page 51 of The Convoy Is to Scatter (2011).

North explained to me in our interviews why the Troubadour carried such a large quantity of white paint. He also described the painting process, the messmen’s complaining, the problems with the goggles, and his narrow escape when an ice floe upset the scaffolding on which he was standing. Carraway also described the painting of the ships at length in his diary.

Carraway’s diary described Lieutenant Leo Gradwell’s visit to the Troubadour and Gradwell’s suggestion to further camouflage the ships by spreading white linens across the decks and tying them to the masts.

I obtained the SOS messages from the various ships from John Gorley Bunker’s Liberty Ships: The Ugly Ducklings of World War II (1973), page 66. Bunker got the messages from the log book of the Samuel Chase, but the Ghost Ships’ radios would have picked up those messages too.

My description of the Ayrshire crewmen’s visit to the Silver Sword is based on pages 53–55 of Baker’s The Convoy Is to Scatter.

The account of the castaway breaking out into an Al Jolson standard came from Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, page 235.

The captain of the Pan Kraft’s candid explanation for abandoning his ship came from Commodore Dowding’s final report in the files of the U.K. National Archives. Dowding added, “It is to be regretted that . . . several ships were abandoned ‘without just cause,’ and lack of determination, although the odds were very heavily against them.” Dowding pointed out in the mariners’ defense that many of them had never experienced combat before being thrust into the crisis of convoy PQ-17. In addition, he wrote, “The length of time some of these ships spent in Iceland, without shore leave, was not conducive to keeping up a very high standard of morale.”

The abandonment of the Paulus Potter and of the Germans’ subsequent boarding and search of the ship was described in Dowding’s report in the U.K. National Archives and in Paterson’s Steel and Ice, page 110.

My brief account of the doggedness of the Daniel Morgan’s Armed Guard crew is based on documents in NARA Records Group 38. David A. Schwind’s Blue Seas, Red Stars: Soviet Military Medals to U.S. Sea Service Recipients in World War II (2015) contains a detailed account of the ship’s Armed Guard gunners’ heroics before and after the sinking of their vessel.

The description of the Olopana’s unsuccessful efforts to pick up lifeboat survivors was pieced together from several sources, including NARA Records Group 38; S. J. Flaherty’s Abandoned Convoy (1970), page 27; Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There, pages 96–97; and Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, pages 231–32. The detail about the captains of two sunken ships agreeing to take their lifeboats in different directions came from Irving, page 231.

The harrowing story of the sinking of the River Afton and Commodore Dowding’s subsequent efforts to rescue shipmates came from Dowding’s final report on convoy PQ-17 in the U.K. National Archives.

The Admiralty’s unusual message to the escorts that their main duty was “to avoid destruction” came from the Admiralty files in the U.K. National Archives. Captain Lawford’s struggle over whether or not to release the corvettes to go back and hunt for survivors was described by several sources, including Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, page 206; Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell, page 100; Paul Kemp’s Convoy! Drama in Arctic Waters (2004), page 84; and Godfrey Winn’s PQ-17 (1948), pages 113–15.

Lund and Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell describes the decision by the commander of the Lotus to go back in search of survivors, page 100. Dowding described the results of that decision—including how it saved his own life—in his final report on the convoy, which is in the Admiralty files at the U.K. National Archives.

Dowding noted the importance of an Arctic mirage in the rescue of the survivors of the River Afton in his final report on the convoy in the U.K. National Archives.

The Soviet submarine’s unsuccessful attack on the Tirpitz and the subsequent sightings of the battleship by British forces are described in David Brown’s Tirpitz: The Floating Fortesss (1977), page 26; various documents in NARA Records Group 38; and Zetterling and Tamelander’s Tirpitz, pages 137–38. My account of the various German reactions to the Tirpitz’s turning back from the attack came from several sources, including Martienssen’s Hitler and His Admirals, pages 152–53. The story of the German sailor who deserted the Tirpitz and his fate came from page 111 of Peillard’s Sink the Tirpitz! The German Navy’s final report on convoy PQ-17, contained in the U.K. National Archives, explains the reasoning behind the Germans’ decision to turn the Tirpitz around.

The anonymous Ayrshire diarist’s comment about the increasing difficulty of breaking the ice came from his diary at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Lieutenant William Carter described reaching a dead end in the ice field and his men’s adventure with the makeshift canoe on pages 177–79 of Why Me, Lord? (2007).

CHAPTER EIGHT: NOVAYA ZEMLYA

My description of Novaya Zemlya is based on a number of sources, including the Arctic Pilot, pages 23, 37, and 313–14; McCann’s A History of the Arctic, pages 244–45; and David McGonigal and Dr. Lynn Woodward’s The Complete Encyclopedia of Antarctica and the Arctic (2001), page 181. I also visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2017.

Ensign Howard Carraway described in his diary how the change in the wind prompted the decision to leave the ice field. Dr. Victoria Hill, the Arctic researcher at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, described to me in an interview how a wind shift can suddenly trap ships in the ice.

Walter John Baker described his strange feeling of disappointment at the pleasant Arctic weather on page 56 of The Convoy Is to Scatter (2011).

Ensign Howard Carraway described in his diary the shock of hearing the Pan Kraft explode and seeing the black smoke rise in the distance. North also described the experience to me in my interviews with him, and Baker mentioned it on pages 56–57 of The Convoy Is to Scatter. I found details about the Pan Kraft’s cargo in NARA Records Group 38.

Lieutenant William Carter described the offshore fog bank on page 179 of Why Me, Lord? (2007).

Several mariners on the Ghost Ships described the German plane passing overhead in the fog. My account is based mainly on interviews with James Baker North III, on Carraway’s diary, and on page 180 of Carter’s Why Me, Lord? Baker quoted the Bible verse on page 59 of The Convoy Is to Scatter.

Carter provided the most detailed account of the ships nearly slamming into the ice salient, on pages 180–81 of Why Me, Lord? Francis Brummer also described it in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott, page 50.

My description of the Troubadour’s struggles to keep up with the other ships came mainly from Carraway’s diary. North, in my interviews with him, vigorously defended the crew and laid the blame on the Troubadour’s boilers.

Baker described the seals on page 59 of The Convoy Is to Scatter. Brummer’s quote came from his diary in Donald Vining’s American Diaries of World War II (1982), page 135. Carter’s comment came from page 181 of Why Me, Lord?

Carraway described arriving at the bay at Novaya Zemlya in his diary. Baker’s reference to the woolly mammoth came from page 61 of The Convoy Is to Scatter. Carter’s evocative description of the bay and the polar bear fishing came from pages 181–82 of Why Me, Lord?

I based my account of the captains’ conference in the bay on Carraway’s diary. Carraway suggests Captain Colbeth of the Silver Sword felt strongly about going no further, which seems out of character for Colbeth, who according to records in Ancestry.com sailed cargo ships throughout the war after his experience in convoy PQ-17. Carraway writes that Captain Moore of the Ironclad initially “didn’t object” to going no further. Exactly what he meant by that is unclear. Carter, who admired Moore, does not mention any reluctance by Moore to continue with the voyage in Why Me, Lord? Lieutenant Gradwell refers only vaguely to the American captains’ growing nervousness in his report to his superiors on the voyage. A copy of that report was provided to me by Gradwell’s daughter, Mary Corrigan.

The description of the ersatz commando raid on the weather station is based mainly on Carraway’s diary, which provides by far the most detailed account of that adventure. Carter wrote a briefer account on pages 183–86 of Why Me, Lord? The accounts vary only in that Carter seems to suggest he came up with the idea of the raid, while Carraway credits Gradwell with the plan. Gradwell takes credit for the idea in his report to his superiors, although he leaves out the details. His first officer, Richard Elsden, in his oral history on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London, reflects that “it’s damn silly what one decides to do.”

Gradwell’s report does not mention his recovery of bodies in the shallows of Novaya Zemlya, but his daughter told me he spoke to her about it and that the experience disturbed her father’s sleep for years after the war.

My account of the Fairfield City survivors’ ordeal came from documents in NARA Records Group 38, and from Robert Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell, pages 185–88. Carse, whose book was published in 1969, reviewed detailed accounts of the Fairfield City survivors before NARA, infuriatingly, destroyed many of those accounts to create space for other records.

The Soviets most likely would not have appreciated their Pioneers youth organization being compared to the Boy Scouts, although the organizations were similar. According to U.S. Merchant Marine captain John Le Cato’s entry in Scott’s Eyewitness Accounts, pages 190–91, Soviet propaganda held that the Boy Scouts were “a bourgeois group . . . trained to oppress the people of the working class.”

Carraway’s diary described his shock at seeing the Liberty ship Benjamin Harrison in the Matochkin Shar, and his subsequent reunion with his fellow Armed Guard trainees. Gradwell’s description of his shore visit with the trappers and their dogs came from his handwritten, unpublished account of the latter stages of his convoy PQ-17 voyage.

The information that the crew of the Benjamin Harrison painted their ship white for camouflage came from several sources, including Mark Llewellyn Evans’s Great World War II Battles in the Arctic (1999), page 80. I hesitated to include it because the ship’s Navy Armed Guard commander did not mention it in his report of the voyage, which I found at NARA, but I decided the weight of the evidence supported it.

My information about the crowd of British escorts in the Matochkin Shar with four merchant ships, and Commodore Dowding’s attempt to lead them to Archangel, came mainly from Dowding’s final report on convoy PQ-17 at the U.K. National Archives.

The German radio and press accounts of the dismantling of convoy PQ-17 came from the U.K. National Archives. Those archives, as well as NARA Records Group 38, contain a number of documents showing the initial confusion by Allied authorities over which ships had been sunk, which had survived, and which were missing.

Admiral G. J. A. Miles’s account of his conversation with Soviet admiral Nikolay Kuznetzov came from the U.K. National Archives. Admiral Arseny Golovko’s story that British rear admiral Douglas Blake Fisher refused to look him in the eye after convoy PQ-17 came from Golovko’s memoir, Together with the Fleet (1988). I suspect Admiral Fisher would have disputed Golovko’s account.

The description of the fate of homebound convoy QP-13 is based primarily on documents in NARA Records Group 38 and the U.K. National Archives.

CHAPTER NINE: “WE THREE GHOSTS”

Lieutenant Leo Gradwell described his nagging doubts and his exploration of the eastern end of the Matochkin Shar in his handwritten account.

My description of Ensign Howard Carraway marking time in the strait came from his diary. My account of the seaplane visit by Captain Ilya P. Mazuruk came from Gradwell’s written account; David Irving’s The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17 (1968), pages 345–47; and other sources. Gradwell did not appear to know that Mazuruk was a famous Russian polar aviator when the two met.

Gradwell’s daughter, Mary Corrigan, described to me her father’s observations of how the Royal Navy treated officers who disobeyed orders. His description of his thought process in deciding to disobey the order came from the handwritten report he gave Mazuruk to take to British authorities in Archangel.

The updates on the status of the ships in convoy PQ-17 came from files at the U.K. National Archives and from NARA Records Group 38.

The exchanges of messages after convoy PQ-17 between Churchill and Roosevelt and between Churchill and Stalin came from files at the U.K. National Archives. Those messages also are contained in Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence, edited by Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas (1975); and in My Dear Mr. Stalin, edited by Susan Butler (2005).

Yury Alexandrov told me the story of his being sent to the roof as a fourteen-year-old boy to shovel incendiary bombs off his apartment building when I interviewed him in St. Petersburg, Russia, in August 2017. Alexandrov is a retired Russian Navy captain of 1st Rank and the leader of the Polar Convoy Social Group, which organizes reunions of Arctic convoy survivors and historians interested in the subject of the convoys.

My information about Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and its symbolic significance is based mainly on Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (2013), which tells the parallel stories of the composition of the symphony and the siege of Leningrad.

Carraway’s account of the ships’ deeper exploration of the Matochkin Shar and his missed opportunity to celebrate his half anniversary came from his diary.

The new Russian arrivals in the Matochkin Shar were described in Gradwell’s handwritten account and in Ensign Howard Carraway’s diary. Carraway described the dinner visit from the Ayrshire crewmen; Gradwell described his and Richard Elsden’s visit to the Russian icebreaker, his enjoyable visit with the Russian captain, the propaganda film that elicited only nostalgia from Gradwell, and the viewing of the “glossy magazines.”

The account of the Troubadour and Ironclad running aground in the Matochkin Shar and the Soviet trawler’s white-knuckle effort to pull the Troubadour free came from Carraway’s diary and from my interviews with James Baker North III. North was not aware at the time that the depth charge bouncing across the ship’s deck had not been armed and thus could not explode.

Lieutenant William Carter’s praise of Commodore Dowding came from page 185 of Why Me, Lord?

Dowding described leading a second small convoy out of the Matochkin Shar in his official report on convoy PQ-17 at the U.K. National Archives.

Frankel matter-of-factly described his assignment to retrieve the grounded freighter Winston-Salem on page 87 of Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott: “The Russians got word to the British that this ship had particularly valuable cargo, that the cowardly Americans had deserted the ship . . . and that the ship was there at the mercy of any planes or submarines pursuing the ships in the convoy. I was asked if I would go up there.”

My account of Gradwell joining Commodore Dowding for a drink and chat came from Gradwell’s handwritten account of the voyage. Gradwell’s expression of relief tinged with worry came from the same account.

Carraway’s diary described the Troubadour falling behind yet another convoy. My information about the Pozarica’s salute to Captain Izotov on the Azerbaijan came from Winn’s PQ-17, page 185.

My description of the small convoy entering the White Sea is based primarily on Carraway’s diary. Walter John Baker described the mirages on page 103 of The Convoy Is to Scatter (2011). On my own voyage to Archangel, I saw the most dramatic Arctic mirages in the same place Baker did.

Baker described the ships’ arrival in the Archangel area on page 105. Carraway’s diary described the arrival in more detail and also recounted how he and other mariners gave the Troubadour, Ironclad, and Silver Sword the nickname “the Ghost Ships.” The Navy’s message announcing the Ghost Ships’ arrival came from NARA Records Group 38. Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s comment about the Ghost Ships came from I Was There: On Convoy PQ-17, the Convoy to Hell, page 184.

Carter described the appearance of the Archangel area and the commissar’s inspection of the Ironclad’s cargo on pages 187–90 of Why Me, Lord? Carraway described his observations of Molotovsk and the inspection of the Troubadour’s cargo in his diary. North described the scene to me in interviews.

Russian admiral Golovko described the U-boat’s attack on the Soviet settlement on Novaya Zemlya and the subsequent raid by the German cruiser Admiral Scheer in the Kara Sea in his memoir, Together with the Fleet (1988). Robert Carse also quotes Frankel describing the U-boat attack and its aftermath in A Cold Corner of Hell (1969), page 209.

My account of the ordeal of the Honomu survivors came mainly from NARA Records Group 38.

CHAPTER TEN: ARKHANGELSK

My description of wartime Archangel is based on conversations by phone and email with Dr. Mikhail Suprun and on a detailed paper by one of his former students, Elizaveta Khatanzeiskaya, “Everyday Life in Wartime Archangelsk: The Problem of Starvation and Death During the Second World War” (2015). Khatanzeiskaya conducted interviews and scoured official documents, memoirs, and news accounts.

Kemp Tolley’s description of starving Russians stealing food from the docks at great risk to their lives came from page 115 of his book Caviar and Commissars (1983), a lively and often darkly humorous account of Tolley’s years as an assistant U.S. naval attaché in North Russia. Tolley, remarkably, had been the U.S. Naval Academy instructor who advised Carter to join the Navy Armed Guard. Tolley summed up why the theft of food in North Russia was a problem without a solution: “Wartime Russia was simply too desperately hungry and ragged for one to expect some of the less highly motivated individuals to pass up an unguarded case of Spam or a bundle of Red Cross sweaters from the Ladies Aid of Kansas. It was not a matter of mere cupidity; it was often a question of human survival.” Ambassador Averell Harriman described the Soviet practice of forcing thieves to sit naked in the snow in his entry in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott, page 97.

Carraway’s description of the food centers in Archangel came from his diary. My descriptions of the city in general came from numerous sources, including Ensign Howard Carraway’s diary; interviews with James Baker North III; Brigadier General Boswell’s account in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945, edited by Mark Scott, pages 115–18; and Tolley’s Caviar and Commissars, pages 57 and 127. Godfrey Winn described the “pagoda-like” opera house in PQ-17 (1948), page 164.

My information about the labor camps near Archangel and the types of prisoners who were held in them came mostly from Dr. Suprun. North’s observations about the prisoners and particularly the POWs came from my interviews with him. S. J. Flaherty’s description of the frostbite victims in the Archangel hospital came from his book Abandoned Convoy (1970), pages 68–69.

The description of Lieutenant Leo Gradwell’s unease about the silence from the Royal Navy came from my interview and subsequent emails with his daughter, Mary Corrigan. Mary also sent me copies of the letters by various people praising Gradwell. The description of Gradwell as “a brave and eccentric barrister yachtsman” came from the account by John Beardmore on the Flower-class corvette website, www.cbrnp.com/RNP/Flower/ARTICLES/Poppy/Beardmore-1.htm. Mary Corrigan provided me with a copy of Gradwell’s post–convoy PQ-17 letter to his mother.

Gradwell’s son Christopher Gradwell and his daughter, Mary Corrigan, told me about their father’s experiences in Archangel.

The description of the Intourist Hotel in Archangel is based on accounts from a variety of sources. Almost every Allied mariner in the convoy spent at least some time in the place. Winn described the band’s eclectic offerings on page 165 of PQ-17; Captain John Le Cato described being lectured about Marx while dancing, in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945, edited by Mark Scott, page 125. Lieutenant William Carter described his visits to the hotel and the nearby club on pages 197–200 of Why Me, Lord? Carraway also described the hotel and club in his diary.

North described the club with the propaganda movie in my interviews with him.

Carraway’s reflections on the Soviet Union’s ability to focus everything on the war effort came from his diary.

My description of how the Soviet Union was able to recover from the Nazi onslaught and turn the tide are based on my interview with Dr. Suprun, who also provided me with an academic paper he wrote in 2015 entitled “Strength and Weakness of the Totalitarianism in Wartime Soviet Union.” I also learned a great deal about the Soviet Union’s recovery from Richard Overy’s Russia’s War (1998) and Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War (2006). Surkov’s angry poem came from page 124 of Ivan’s War, which also offers a good description of Stalin’s Order No. 227 on page 156. Tolley described General Zhukov’s demotion of the Soviet officers in the jeep on page 123 of Caviar and Commissars.

My description of the unloading of the Troubadour came from Carraway’s diary and my interviews with North. The account of the unloading of the Ironclad is based on Carter’s Why Me, Lord?, pages 189–90.

The details of the Ironclad’s cargo came from NARA Records Group 38. My description of where the cargo was sent by train is based on my interviews with Dr. Suprun and with Sergey Aprelev, a retired Russian Navy captain of 1st Rank who is now a historian and filmmaker, whom I interviewed in St. Petersburg, Russia, in August 2017.

Carter expressed his misgivings about the American level of commitment to the Arctic convoys on pages 193–96 of Why Me, Lord?

North described his adventure with the Gum-Gum Boys and in the women’s dormitory in my interviews with him. Other mariners described less tense encounters with the Gum-Gum Boys. Dr. Suprun said all-women dormitories such as North described were common in wartime Archangel. North described his friend’s fights and arrests in my interviews with him.

Carraway’s diary described the return of the Uruguayan coal passer to the Troubadour. Tolley described the arrests on the Israel Putman on page 94 of Caviar and Commissars.

Dr. Suprun told me about how Stalin’s anger over the Allies’ reluctance to open the second front prompted him to refuse to let a British hospital ship anchor in Archangel, and about Admiral Golovko’s clever diversion of the hospital ship to Murmansk.

Frankel praised the merchant mariners in his recollection in Scott’s Eyewitness Accounts, pages 88–89. Many of the mariners and Navy Armed Guard men who came in contact with Frankel had a good impression of him. My account of Frankel’s speech to the hundreds of mariners stranded in Archangel came from Robert Carse’s A Cold Corner of Hell (1969), pages 213–16.

Churchill described his visit to Moscow to deliver the bad news to Stalin in detail on pages 472–502 of The Hinge of Fate (1950). His reflections on what he would say to the Soviets came from page 475. His “Stalin had become restless” quote came from page 479 and his description of Stalin’s “rough and rude” remark about convoy PQ-17 came from page 497. Churchill’s letter to Roosevelt about the meeting with Stalin came from Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence, edited by Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas (1975). Roosevelt’s letter to Stalin about American airplanes came from My Dear Mr. Stalin, edited by Susan Butler (2005). Dr. Suprun told me about Stalin’s subsequent, unsuccessful overture to Hitler.

My account of the first German bombing of Archangel came from Dr. Suprun (who says most Russian accounts wildly overestimate the number of bombers involved in that raid). The U.S. naval attaché’s messages came from NARA Records Group 38.

Carraway’s diary described his homesickness and his tense encounter with the Soviet sentry outside the air-raid shelter.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE KNIFE-EDGE

Lieutenant William Carter described the problem of mariners stealing lifeboat rations, as well as his latest encounters with the Kid, on pages 203–9 of Why Me, Lord? (2007). Ensign Howard Carraway wrote in his diary about the mood on the Troubadour and the steps leading up to its departure from Archangel.

I found manifests of the Ghost Ships’ cargoes for the return voyage to the United States in NARA Records Group 178.

My description of the German pattern of bombing Archangel is based on information from Dr. Mikhail Suprun and Carter’s account on page 201 of Why Me, Lord?

Bob Ruegg and Arnold Hague’s Convoys to Russia 1941–1945 (1992) contains particulars about the ships comprising homebound convoy QP-14. The details about the Ghost Ships’ cargoes for the return voyage came from NARA Records Group 178. The detail about the Ayrshire’s smuggling of butter out of Archangel came from Lieutenant Leo Gradwell’s daughter, Mary Corrigan.

My description of the apparent sabotage of the Ironclad came from documents in NARA Records Groups 38 and 175, and pages 215–16 of Carter’s Why Me, Lord? Carter blamed the sabotage on Nazi sympathizers in the ship’s crew, but I think it’s more likely that crew members set out to disable the Ironclad because they thought they would be safer sailing home on a different ship. Carraway’s diary contains his disparaging view of the Ironclad—a verbal stone cast from the glass house of the Troubadour.

Carraway described in his diary the Troubadour’s homebound voyage and the narrow escape from a U-boat near Svalbard. James Baker North III also described it to me in detail in our interviews. Details about the Silver Sword’s voyage came from NARA Records Group 38.

My broader account of convoy QP-14’s voyage and the sinking of the Silver Sword came from NARA Records Group 38 and the U.K. National Archives. I liked the narrative account by Richard Woodman on pages 284–95 of Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945 (2004).

Ruegg and Hague’s Convoys to Russia describes the makeup of convoy PQ-18 and its escort force. My account of Raeder’s aborted plan to attack the convoy with cruisers came from Anthony Martienssen’s Hitler and His Admirals (1948), page 154.

The assessment by the senior British naval officer in Archangel that the small escorts of convoy PQ-17 should have protected merchant ships after the scatter order rather than clustering together to run to Novaya Zemlya is contained in the U.K. National Archives as well as in NARA Records Group 38. The other officer’s comments about the lessons of convoy PQ-17 came from a message I found in the U.K. National Archives.

Churchill and Roosevelt’s exchange of letters about Operation Torch and its impact on the Arctic convoys can be found in Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (1975), edited by Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas, on pages 254–57.

I heard both Russian jokes about the second front while I was visiting North Russia in 2017. Kemp Tolley also mentions them on page 119 of Caviar and Commissars (1983).

Carraway’s diary describes the Troubadour’s rough voyage down the East Coast of North America. North described his unpleasant shift as a coal passer to me in our interviews.

Rick Atkinson provides a detailed account of Operation Torch in An Army at Dawn: Volume I of the Liberation Trilogy (2002). My description of the war news in The New York Times on November 3, 1942, came from microfilm files of the paper.

My information about Carraway’s wartime experience after convoy PQ-17 came from my interview and subsequent communications with his son Mac.

North described his careful exit strategy from the Troubadour to me in our interviews.

Captain Salvesen never took the Troubadour back to sea, but he sailed Allied merchant ships for the rest of the war with distinction. According to a feature article in the Times-Union and Journal of Jacksonville, Florida, on December 12, 1976, one of Salvesen’s vessels caught fire in 1943 while taking on a cargo of bombs at a wharf in Red Bank, New Jersey. The captain quickly mustered enough crew members to sail the ship out to sea and scuttle it before the fire could reach the bombs and cause a disastrous explosion at Red Bank.

The description of the Ironclad’s ill-fated voyage out of Archangel is based on Carter’s account on pages 220–32 of Why Me, Lord? and on documents in NARA Records Group 178. The U.S. Navy document suggesting the Ironclad be turned over to the Russians and the ship’s crew be repatriated to the United States as quickly as possible came from NARA Records Group 38.

My account of Carter’s account of his relocation to the Liberty ship Richard Bland, his witnessing of the aftermath of the Soviet guards shooting an injured prisoner, and other rigors of his life in Archangel are based on his descriptions on pages 233–39 of Why Me, Lord?

CHAPTER TWELVE: REINDEER GAMES

My description of Roosevelt and Churchill’s meeting at Casablanca is based on Churchill’s detailed account in The Hinge of Fate (1950) on pages 674–94. Churchill includes Stalin’s letter expressing his regrets on pages 665–66.

The letters between Roosevelt and Stalin can be found in My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (2005), edited by Susan Butler. Stalin’s letter to Roosevelt about the second front came from The Hinge of Fate, page 667.

My account of the Richard Bland’s horrific homebound voyage is based on Lieutenant William Carter’s Why Me, Lord? (2007), pages 3–29 and 239–56, as well as Bob Ruegg and Arnold Hague’s Convoys to Russia 1941–1945 (1992) and documents from NARA Records Group 38. Carter’s description of the “macabre ballet” is from page 18 of Why Me, Lord?

I found the poem “Kill Him,” credited to Konstantin Simonov, on page 417 of Alexander Werth’s Russia at War (1964).

Churchill described his letter to Stalin about the resumption of the Arctic convoys, Stalin’s terse response, and Churchill’s aside to Roosevelt in Closing the Ring (1951), pages 264–70.

The description of Sir Dudley Pound’s death and funeral is based on Robin Brodhurst’s Churchill’s Anchor (2000), pages 1–7. I found the Manchester Guardian’s reference to convoy PQ-17 on page 149 of Theodore Taylor’s Battle in the Arctic Seas (1976). Churchill’s reflections on Pound and the convoy came from The Hinge of Fate, pages 262–66.

My reference to Roosevelt telling Stalin at Tehran that he wanted to see the end of the British Empire came from Robert Service’s Stalin (2005), page 462. Roosevelt’s comment that he and Stalin spoke as “men and brothers” came from Dennis J. Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin (1998), page 215. It reminded me of former president George W. Bush’s comment in 2001 that he had looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the eye and gotten a sense of his soul.

On pages 373–74 of Closing the Ring (1951), Churchill describes his growing sense that the Big Three was becoming a Big Two.

William Bullitt’s comment about the need to place Allied troops in front of the Red Army came from Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin, page 177. The statistic about the large number of Soviet advisors in American factories came from Tolley’s Caviar and Commissars, page 100. Harriman’s comment about the bear came from page 223 of Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin. The footnoted detail about U.S. troops in Korea apparently seeing old U.S. military weapons in enemy hands came from Albert L. Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (2004), page 121.

I heard about the mirrors and microphones at the hotel in Archangel from Sergey Aprelev during my visit to St. Petersburg in 2017. He also told me the story about the unsuccessful “goodwill” visit to the Soviet warship. Kemp Tolley’s account of the vodka-fueled ship inspections came from Caviar and Commissars, page 100.

The story of the mariner falling under suspicion for buying a copy of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony is from Earl Carter’s entry in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott, pages 154–56.

I heard stories about the gifting of reindeer while I was in Russia, and also found references to the practice in several books. But the best description by far is on page 106 of Tolley’s Caviar and Commissars, which I have quoted in this book.

Tolley did not mince words in a report to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Soviet citizens, he wrote, “are ruled body and soul by a bureaucracy maintained by power and fear. It may appear trite to mention the huge numbers of Russians now in concentration camps or dismal outposts in the Far North or East, but this picture is before every Soviet citizen, affecting his every move.” Tolley was stunned by how little the average Russian knew about life outside the Soviet Union. “Few know electric refrigerators, portable radio, string beans, corn, mayonnaise, cigars, chewing gum, the game of golf.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s description of his cell in the Archangel work camp came from his book The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

My account of Jac Smith’s experiences in a work camp near Archangel came from Thomas E. Simmons’s book about the experiences of mariner Smith, Escape from Archangel (1990). The description of Smith’s task of unloading the boxcars appears on page 113.

Simmons’s description of how Smith eventually escaped from Nazi-occupied Norway prompted me to pick up a copy of David Howarth’s The Shetland Bus: A World War II Epic of Escape, Survival, and Adventure (1951). It’s a fascinating book about fearless Norwegian mariners who guided small fishing boats between Scotland’s Shetland Islands and the coast of Norway to deliver British saboteurs and to rescue fugitives from the Nazis. It also describes a commando mission in miniature submarines to try to destroy the Tirpitz.

The information about the Germans transferring planes from the Arctic to the Mediterranean came primarily from Adam R. A. Claasen’s Hitler’s Northern War: The Luftwaffe’s Ill-Fated Campaign, 1940–1945 (2001), pages 203 and 221. The statistics about the reduced dangers of the Murmansk Run came from the Masters, Mates & Pilots union newsletter of July 1945, and from Ruegg and Hague’s Convoys to Russia 1941–1945.

My description of the Tirpitz’s eventual demise is based mainly on accounts in David Brown’s Tirpitz: The Floating Fortesss (1977), page 43, Leonce Peillard’s Sink the Tirpitz! (1968), and Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander’s Tirpitz: The Life and Death of Germany’s Last Super Battleship (2009).

The account of the ex-POWs from the Carlton and Honomu criticizing the British over convoy PQ-17 after their return to the United States came from a story in The New York Times on February 23, 1945. Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam’s I Was There: On PQ17, the Convoy to Hell (1968) contains a thorough account of how the details of what happened to the convoy slowly came to light in Britain, on pages 221–46. The Admiralty files in the U.K. National Archives also contain numerous letters and messages reflecting the Admiralty’s efforts to spin the story of convoy PQ-17, even after the war’s end removed any real justification for secrecy. Captain Jack Broome’s letter to the Times appeared on September 23, 1981.

Charles Bohlen’s quote about Roosevelt’s health at Yalta came from Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light (2013), page 498. The point about Stalin’s demand for veto power for U.N. Security Council members is from Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin, page 233.

The description of Roosevelt’s last day and his attempts to smooth over relations with Stalin and Churchill came from several sources, including Michael Dobbs’s Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill and Truman (2012), pages 156–57; and Butler’s My Dear Mr. Stalin, pages 320–22. Truman’s comment while he was a U.S. senator about helping the Soviets and Nazis to keep slaughtering one another came from Dobbs’s Six Months in 1945, page 163.

Khrushchev’s disparaging view of Truman came from his memoir, Khrushchev Remembers (1970), page 221. Harriman’s “Barbarian invasion” comment came from Dobbs’s Six Months in 1945, page 164.

The descriptions of the final Arctic convoys came from Ruegg and Hauge’s Convoys to Russia 1941–1945, pages 77–79.

Lieutenant William Carter’s account of the Soviets’ efforts to honor him for his service and the U.S. Navy’s shifting reaction to those efforts came from pages 265–66 of Why Me, Lord?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: RECKONING

My description of what a twenty-first-century ship would encounter in the way of ice along the route of convoy PQ-17 is based on an interview and email exchanges with Dr. Victoria Hill, an Arctic researcher at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She compared a map of the convoy route with 2018 satellite images of the ice field and applied her own experience sailing in the Arctic. Among the resources she recommended to me was the website of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews.

My reference to the Russian sub planting a symbolic Russian flag in the seabed at the North Pole came from Charles Emmerson’s account on page 81 of The Future History of the Arctic (2010), a fascinating study of the Arctic’s past and likely future. The information on the voyage of the Russian LNG tanker came from The New York Times, August 27, 2017. The former Coast Guard admiral’s comment came from The Washington Post, September 4, 2017.

The description of the transformation of the Barents Sea into a Cold War battleground is based on several sources, including U.S. Navy Captain (Ret.) Peter Huchthausen’s book K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), which focuses on the harrowing voyage of a single Soviet submarine but includes a broader history of the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet, as well as an appendix listing Soviet submarine accidents. The book served as the basis for a 2002 feature film of the same name, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. One of my Russian sources for this book, Sergey Aprelev, served as technical director for the film, although he often clashed with Bigelow over what he considered the movie’s liberties with the facts. Other sources for this section of the book included Emmerson’s The Future History of the Arctic, pages 111–16, and Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew’s Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (1998).

Most of my information about the Soviets’ use of Novaya Zemlya for nuclear testing came from John McCannon’s A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration and Exploitation (2012), pages 244–45; David McGonigal and Dr. Lynn Woodward’s The Complete Encyclopedia of Antarctica and the Arctic (2001), page 181; and Emmerson’s The Future History of the Arctic, pages 119–20. The description of the ongoing problems of nuclear waste disposal in the former Soviet Union came from newspaper stories and Huchthausen’s K-19: The Widowmaker.

In the course of writing this book, I set out to retrace as much of convoy PQ-17’s route as possible. In August 2018, I visited Iceland and toured Hvalfjord, the starting point of the convoy, in the company of Richard Carter, the son of Lieutenant William Carter, the Armed Guard commander on the Ironclad and the author of Why Me, Lord? (2007).

I found helpful information about how World War II had transformed Iceland during my visit there, and in several sources, including an article in Wall Street International on December 24, 2013, entitled “Iceland During World War II: The War and Its Impact on the Country,” by Katharina Hauptmann. Emmerson’s The Future History of the Arctic and Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of Scandinavian Utopia (2014) were full of information about Iceland’s more recent history.

I explored several different ways to sail along the route of convoy PQ-17 and was surprised to find a cruise ship sailing from Copenhagen, Denmark, north and east across the Norwegian and Barents seas, stopping at the ports in Norway where the Germans had waited in ambush for the convoy, and then calling at both Murmansk and Archangel. The cruise was scheduled for almost the exact time of year that convoy PQ-17 had made the trip, and in the same twenty-four-hour daylight. I booked passage on the cruise ship—the M/S Nautica, operated by Oceania Cruises—and was delighted with the results. The master of the ship was a Russian, Captain Maksym Melnikov, who had studied the Arctic convoys in school and was gracious enough to share with me his views about them and his knowledge about sailing the northern latitudes. My fellow passengers included half a dozen people with a keen interest in the Arctic convoys. I was able to help a man from Savannah, Georgia, figure out that his father had sailed in convoy PQ-18; a computer whiz from New York with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Arctic convoys helped me find crew manifests for the Troubadour and other convoy PQ-17 ships online at www.Ancestry.com. I arranged my shore visits during the cruise so that I could make contact with archivists at museums in Murmansk and Archangel.

My description of twenty-first-century Norway is based on my visits to cities along the coast, where Norway’s investment in and profits from the oil and natural gas industry are obvious. Emmerson’s The Future History of the Arctic and Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People provided helpful background information about Norway’s fossil-fuel industries. I did not set out looking for the underlying scars of the German occupation of Norway, but found them almost everywhere I went. Some of the most striking included the ruins of a Gestapo execution post in a park in Trondheim; and the Museum of the Reconstruction in Hammerfest, which uses film clips, photos, and artifacts to show how the retreating Germans burned the city to ashes in 1944, giving residents only hours to flee with whatever they could carry. I have not been able to get some of those images out of my head.

The descriptions of modern Murmansk and Archangel are based on my visits to those cities. The size of the “Alyosha” statue overlooking Murmansk’s harbor is nothing short of amazing. When I first saw it while approaching the city from the sea, I mistook it for an enormous lighthouse. Alyosha is a nickname for Aleksey, a common Russian name, and the statue is meant to represent all Russian military personnel in the same way “G.I. Joe” represents all U.S. soldiers. During my visit to Murmansk in July, the temperature was balmy, although several locals assured me the warmth would not last long. One of them told me a Murmansk weather joke: An out-of-town visitor asks, “What was it like in Murmansk last summer?” A local replies, “I don’t know, I had to work that day.”

My visit to Archangel led me to the Northern Maritime Museum and the Merchant Yard Museum, both of which are located in the city, and ultimately to Dr. Mikhail Suprun, whose research informs many of the latter chapters of this book.

The statistics about the death tolls for various nations in World War II came from the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana.

My information about the 2017 Russian public-opinion poll showing Stalin’s resurgent standing came from The Washington Post on June 26, 2017. One Russian explained to me that for all the terror Stalin inflicted on his people, “He made Russia strong.” He added that Stalin, unlike Putin and other modern Russian leaders, never used his power to enrich himself financially. Whatever demons drove Stalin, they apparently did not include greed.

The Churchill Museum in London contains numerous exhibits with information about his life and career before, during, and after World War II. One exhibit recalls his and his wife’s conversation after his electoral defeat in 1945, and his rejoinder. The museum is connected to the fascinating Churchill War Rooms, the underground nerve center from which he oversaw the prosecution of the war.

Kemp Tolley’s analysis of the Arctic convoys came from Caviar and Commissars (1983), page 98.

My tally of the accomplishments and losses of the Arctic convoys is based primarily on the research of Bob Ruegg and Arnold Hague’s Convoys to Russia 1941–1945 (1992) and Albert L. Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (2004). I found an editorial about the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge tire plant being dismantled and shipped to Russia in The New York Times on November 3, 1942. Dr. Weeks, a historian and author, has examined the newest Russian research on the Arctic convoys. But even he concludes that obtaining an exact picture after the fog of the Cold War is “clearly an impossible task.”

Samuel Eliot Morison’s comment about convoy PQ-17 came from page 186 of his The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1943, Vol. 1 of the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (1947). I found the comment from the Seafarers International Union on page 147 of Theodore Taylor’s Battle in the Arctic Seas (1976). Churchill’s “melancholy” assessment came from page 266 of The Hinge of Fate (1950).

Milan Vego’s article, “The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17,” appeared in the Naval War College Review, Volume 69, Number 3, published in the summer of 2016.

My description of Leo Gradwell’s life after World War II is based on interviews with his three children. I also drew on documents Mary Corrigan sent me about her father. I researched the Profumo case in back issues of The Times of London, and in Christine Keeler’s lengthy obituary in The Washington Post on December 5, 2017. Gradwell’s obituary in The Times of London appeared on November 11, 1969.

My account of North’s life after convoy PQ-17 is based on interviews with him at his home in Santa Barbara, California, in 2016, and subsequent phone conversations with him.

Howard Carraway’s son Mac Carraway described his father’s postwar life to me in an interview in Bradenton, Florida, in 2017, and later communications by phone.

My description of William Carter’s life after World War II is based on interviews with his son Richard Carter, as well as a retrospective of William Carter’s life that Richard wrote.

Both Richard and I were invited to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2017 by the Russian leaders of the Polar Convoy Social Group, which organized the Dervish 2017 celebration. The event consisted of three days of activities, ranging from a ceremonial wreath laying to a tour of an icebreaker to an academic conference—where I gave a talk about the perspective of the American mariners who sailed to North Russia in the Arctic convoys. The other attendees included five feisty ninetysomething British veterans of the Arctic convoys.

The account of the political scuffle over the anniversary gathering in Red Square in 2015 came from the Daily Mail, May 23, 2015, as well as from some of the British convoy veterans I met in St. Petersburg. The Guardian’s editorial about the 2016 Arctic convoy memorial ceremony in Murmansk appeared on August 29, 2016.

My description of the evolution of Russian attitudes toward the Arctic convoys is based on my interviews with Dr. Suprun and the remarks of Russian rear admiral Alexander Konayev, who spoke at the conference I attended in St. Petersburg. I also found Weeks’s Russia’s Life-Saver helpful in understanding how Stalin and his Soviet successors downplayed the role of the convoys for political reasons.

The story of the Soviet kindergarten teacher introducing the merchant mariners to her students came from an entry by John Le Cato in Eyewitness Accounts of the World War II Murmansk Run 1941–1945 (2006), edited by Mark Scott, page 191.

Finally, my account of the docent in the Northern Maritime Museum in Murmansk telling the story of the Ghost Ships and thanking her listeners for helping to keep her family alive came from my visit to Murmansk on the cruise ship. My wife, Kema, who helps me with research and photography, took the tour of the museum while I visited a different museum. Kema videotaped the docent’s talk and suggested afterward that I might find something valuable on the tape. As usual, she was right.