Henshaw, John A Bloody Business

Convoy PQ 17

At the beginning of June 1941, few optimists would have predicted that beleaguered Britain would achieve victory or even gain new military allies. But on 22 June, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its surprise attack on the Soviet Union, which advanced to the gates of Moscow within six months. On 7 December, Japan launched an even more surprising attack on the US Pacific Fleet, which was not on alert in its home port of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Without these two surprise attacks and possibly without either of them the final outcome of the Second World War would have been very different. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill quickly recognised an uncomfortable truththe enemy of my enemy is my friendand that keeping the Soviet Union in the war, even if it meant supplying vital war materials to a totalitarian regime, which was an abomination, took pressure off Britain and its allies. Accordingly, the first of 78 convoys to the Russian Kola Peninsula left port in August 1941, almost exactly two months after the start of Operation Barbarossa. The following year saw significant events that gave new impetus to the fundamental direction in which the Second World War was now developing: in favour of the Allies. However, these successes were marred by many setbacks on land, in the air and at sea. One of the Allies' setbacks in 1942 was the almost complete destruction of a convoy carrying vital war materials from Britain and the United States to Soviet Russia: PQ 17. What made this sad event even worse was that it need not have happened. Without the decision of one man, the Chief of the Naval Staff and First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Dudley Pound, the massacre could have been avoided. Pound overruled the advice of his staff and gave the fateful order Convoy to disperse in the mistaken belief that the German battleship Tirpitz and its accompanying warships had set sail to intercept PQ 17.