On June 27, 1942, 35 merchant ships left Iceland bound for Arctic Russia loaded with tanks, aircraft, and supplies for the Soviet war effort. Days later, fear of attack by the German battleship Tirpitz caused the Admiralty to order the convoy to scatter, leaving individual ships nearly defenseless against U-boats and Luftwaffe bombers that sank 24 of them.
Convoy PQ 17 represented the lifeline of the Arctic convoy route, one of the most dangerous supply lines of the Second World War, running from Britain and Iceland to Murmansk and Archangel through waters patrolled by German submarines, aircraft, and surface raiders operating from occupied Norway.
The disaster that followed the scatter order became a byword for naval catastrophe. Without the protection of a coordinated convoy, individual freighters were picked off one by one over the following week by Junkers bombers and U-boats. Of the 35 ships that left Iceland, only 11 reached their destination.
The losses — 430 tanks, 210 aircraft, and 3,350 vehicles sent to the bottom of the Barents Sea — were so severe that Arctic convoys were suspended for months afterward, straining Anglo-Soviet relations at a critical point in the war. Novelist Nicholas Monsarrat and historians alike would later cite PQ 17 as the costliest convoy disaster in naval history.
Key people: Jack Broome, Erich Bey