Convoy PQ 17 and consequential and irreversible decisions

I am reading The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux.  It is a history of the infamous Convoy PQ-17, a convoy of 35 merchant ships from Iceland to Russian Archangel in June 1942 during World War II.  

Russia was desperate for supplies and there was a shaky alliance between the US, Britain and the Soviet Union.  Russia was losing tens of thousands of men a month.  The Americans were not on the battlefield yet and the British were stretched across North Africa and Asia.  Stalin demanded that Britain and America open another front and deliver material to the Soviet war effort.  

It would be another year before there would be another front manned by the Americans and British so the only means of demonstrating Alliance support was via convoys of food and arms across the North Atlantic and Barents Sea.  

But this presented a special challenge.  The British Navy and Merchant Marine were already overstretched, having suffered catastrophic losses to U-boats in the Battle of the North Atlantic.  Britain was losing 500,000 tons of shipping a month.

The northeast passage to Archangel was even worse.  In the summer, there was 24 hour sunshine, exposing the convoy to continuous submarine and bomber attack.  Additionally, the arctic ice approached close enough to the passage that convoys were essentially funneled into a German kill zone.  Churchill in particular was extremely concerned about the perils of the northeast passage.  Roosevelt was insistent that the convoys run in order to both provide some relief to the Soviet Union and to shore up the alliance.  

It was an impossible dilemma.  Send the convoy at the risk of its extermination or hold them back at the risk of destroying the alliance and possibly subverting the USSR's war effort against the Germans.  

Further, Churchill faced the possibility of a vote of no confidence in Parliament when Britain had suffered a string of military setbacks and did not yet have any visible prospect of victory.  If he sent QP-17 and it was sunk, it might bring down his government and British opposition to Hitler.  

Any answer was likely to be bad and with possibly irreversible consequences.  

While Roosevelt and Churchill discussed how to deal with Stalin, the Soviet dictator learned from his agents about the backlog of ships in Hvalfjord. He wrote Churchill on May 6:

I have a request for you. Some ninety steamers loaded with various important war materials for the U.S.S.R. are bottled up at present in Iceland or in the approaches from America to Iceland. I understand there is a danger that the sailing of these ships may be delayed for a long time because of the difficulty to organize convoy[s] escorted by the “British naval forces. I am fully aware of the difficulties involved and of the sacrifices made by Great Britain in this matter. I feel however [that it is] incumbent upon me to approach you with the request to take all possible measures in order to ensure the arrival of all the above-mentioned materials in the U.S.S.R. in the course of May, as this is extremely important for our front.

Stalin was not exaggerating the seriousness of the situation on the eastern front, although his poor leadership had exacerbated it. In February and March, he had foolishly ordered counterattacks at Leningrad and in Ukraine that left more than 440,000 Red Army troops dead—almost nine times the German casualties. While the immediate threat to Moscow had abated, Leningrad remained under siege and the Soviet Union’s position farther south looked precarious. In May, the Germans retook Kharkov in northeastern Ukraine and then attacked Rostov, which was the gateway to the Volga River citadel of Stalingrad and the oil fields of the Caucasus.

Churchill might have to tolerate being bossed around by Roosevelt—America was Britain’s lifeline—but not by the Communist dictator. Churchill wrote back to Stalin on May 9 “challenging the Soviets to provide more protection for the convoys at their end. “I know you will not mind my being frank and emphasizing the need of increasing the assistance given by the U.S.S.R. naval and air forces in helping to get these convoys through safely.”

Stalin replied: “We quite understand the difficulties which Great Britain is overcoming, and those heavy sea losses which you are suffering while you accomplish this big task.” But “our naval forces are very limited, and . . . our air forces in their vast majority are engaged at the battlefront.” Stalin was not exaggerating about that, either. The Soviet Northern Fleet consisted of only eight destroyers, seven frigates, fifteen subs, fifteen patrol boats, and a small collection of torpedo boats and minesweepers. The Soviets had so few fighter planes that Russian pilots defended Murmansk with mostly British aircraft.

Churchill felt caught between Roosevelt and Stalin. In the Royal Navy’s official history of the sea war, Captain S. W. Roskill wrote that the Soviets

seemed not to have cared whether recent convoys had suffered terrible losses or had survived the most menacing dangers. . . . [S]uch considerations as the perpetual daylight of the summer months seemed to trouble “ them not a whit. Their stubborn pressure for convoys to be run, cost what they might, continued relentlessly and monotonously. Most of this pressure fell, as was natural, on Mr. Churchill; for the American President was able to take a more detached view of the problems involved and the risks entailed.

On May 17, Churchill wrote to his chief of staff, Major Gen. Hastings Ismay:

Not only Premier Stalin but President Roosevelt will object very much to our desisting from running the convoys now. The Russians are in heavy action, and will expect us to run the risk and pay the price entailed by our contribution. The United States ships are queueing up. My own feeling, mingled with much anxiety, is that the [next] convoy ought to sail on the 18th. The operation is justified if a half gets through.

Churchill added: “Failure on our part to make the attempt would weaken our influence with both our major Allies. There are always the uncertainties of weather and luck, which may aid us. I share your misgivings, but I feel it is a matter of duty.”

That duty would fall mainly to the men on the ships at Hvalfjord.

As I was reading these passages last night, it reminded me of the current conflict in Ukraine.  Indeed, one of the tankers in the convoy was the Soviet Donbass named for an area of Ukraine now at the center of the present-day conflict.  

But the parallel is not about names.  Churchill had to make a decision under uncertainty and any decision, absent the most amazing good fortune, was almost certainly to be tragic, bloody, consequential and possibly existential.  

The Western Alliance today faces nearly exactly the same thing.  They are being threatened with the possible use of tactical nukes by Russia in Ukraine if the Ukrainians are too successful in defeating the Russians and throwing them out of Ukraine.  

There are Western voices alarmed by the nuclear threat and speaking up for appeasement.  There are others who are equally confident that it is a mere bluff and calling for greater support of the Ukrainians.  I fall in the latter camp but acknowledge that the first argument has merit.  But in the balance of goals and the balance of probabilities, I think greater support for the Ukrainians is the right answer.

But we won't know if that is the right answer for a year or more.  Until we see the consequences.

Similarly, Churchill faced a decision that was possibly the death warrant of hundreds or thousands of sailors, the downfall of his own government, the defeat of the Russian military effectiveness or the smashing of the Alliance against Hitler.  And possibly all four outcomes together.

Churchill ended up making a decision.  He dispatched QP-17 to Archangel.  It was a running unremitting battle under the most dire and harsh of conditions.  

Hundreds died.  The majority of the convoy was sunk.  However, the alliance held.  Churchill's government handily survived a vote of No Confidence proposed in Parliament on July 1, 1942.  The Soviets continued in the war.  But none of that ultimate success would be fully known until the defeat of Germany on May 7th, 1945, nearly three years along.  

We make consequential and difficult decisions and can only then bare the consequences, whether they turn out to be successful or not.