Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War II

Hell does indeed freeze over in this rousing history of Allied supply convoys to the Soviet Union. Historian Sebag-Montefiore (Dunkirk) recaps the exploits of British, American, and Russian freighters ferrying wartime supplies from Scotland and Iceland to Russia’s arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel. Along the route, the convoys ran a gauntlet of German U-boats and Luftwaffe planes. Sebag-Montefiore covers the theater’s major engagements at every level, from arguments between Churchill and Stalin over how many convoys to send, to intelligence analysts’ attempts to predict enemy movements, to shipboard lookouts anxiously scanning the waves for U-boats. There’s plenty of heroism (one sailor kept “the torpedo away from the ship by the simple method of firing burst after burst of machine gun fire just ahead of it”), along with carnage (“My mate was lying beside the gun platform, his head missing”) and the gruesome, frostbitten plight of survivors from sunken ships who made it onto life rafts. Sebag-Montefiore also weighs in on the conflict’s controversies, particularly the decision of British admiral Dudley Pound to scatter a convoy on the suspicion of an overwhelming German attack; though the order proved disastrous—it resulted in the sinking of 22 ships—the author contends that Pound was somewhat justified given his incomplete knowledge of the situation. It’s a rich and detailed chronicle of a crucial but seldom-sung naval struggle. (Dec.)