One of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war.

From The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux.  Page 254.

Kemp Tolley, who grew cynical about so much of what he witnessed in North Russia, nonetheless came home believing in the value of the Murmansk Run: “The bottom line on convoys to the north is that though it was costly, sometimes exasperating, always dangerous, and to a certain degree bumbling, it worked. Conceivably it saved the war. . . . The bad things were outnumbered by the good things: sincere, desperate efforts by the Russians to get the job done; kind, generous, cooperative people in most of the ships who were grateful for the help received from those ashore, whether Russian, British or American, recognizing the difficulties under which they operated.”

Between 1941 and 1945, the Arctic convoys delivered to the Soviet Union more than 4 million tons of war supplies worth more than $12.4 billion, which corresponds to more than $180 billion in today’s dollars. Those supplies represented roughly one third of the total Lend-Lease shipments to Stalin’s regime; the remaining two thirds reached the Soviet Union via the southern convoy route through Iraq in the last two and a half years of the war. But the Murmansk Run was the Soviets’ main lifeline from the West early in the “war, when the Red Army and Soviet industries were on the brink, and Russia’s survival—and possibly Europe’s fate—hung in the balance.

Together, the northern and southern convoys delivered more than 10,000 Allied tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces, 14,500 planes, and 450,000 trucks, along with fuel to operate them. They delivered enough state-of-the-art radio and radar equipment to modernize the Soviet military. They delivered 100,000 tons of rubber, as well as huge quantities of steel, aluminum, and chemicals to jump-start Soviet factories after the shock of the Nazi invasion. (Some entire American factories were dismantled and shipped to Russia, including the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge tire factory in Dearborn, Michigan.) The convoys delivered 2.3 million tons of food, ranging from canned meat to salted fish, powdered eggs to beans, dried vegetables to sugar, tea, and coffee. They brought the Soviets medical supplies, clothing, and a wide array of miscellaneous cargo including toys, fishing tackle, and false teeth.

Of the roughly 1,400 Allied merchant ships that set out for North Russia, 104 were sunk while en route to North Russia, while moored at the docks of Murmansk or Archangel, or while sailing home, with the loss of 829 Allied merchant seamen. That total does not include the loss of 29 Soviet ships and their uncounted casualties. In addition, 18 British warships were sunk while protecting the Arctic convoys—including the cruisers Trinidad and Edinburgh—at a cost of 1,944 lives. (The Germans’ attacks on the Arctic convoys cost them 5 warships, 31 U-boats, dozens of planes, and several thousand lives.) While the Allied losses on the much busier North Atlantic convoy routes were higher in sheer numbers, the Murmansk Run was proportionally the deadliest convoy route of World War II. And the costliest Arctic convoy by far, in terms of ships, tonnage, and cargo, was convoy PQ-17. The distinguished American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of the scattering of convoy PQ-17: “There has never been anything like it in our maritime history.” The Seafarers International Union (SIU), an American union representing unlicensed mariners, called the convoy “the most tragic episode of the war “ at sea.  Churchill called it “one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war.”