Examines the disastrous Allied Convoy PQ 17 of 1942, exploring how strategic errors and one critical decision led to its near-destruction.

In early June 1941, few optimists would have forecast that beleaguered Britain would see victory or even be joined by new military allies. Yet on June 22, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its surprise attack on the Soviet Union, which in six months reached the very gates of Moscow. Then, on December 7, Japan launched an even more astonishing surprise attack on the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet, off-watch in its home base of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Without these two surprise attacks—and possibly without either one of them—the end result of World War II would have been vastly different.

Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was quick to realise an uncomfortable truth—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—and keeping the Soviet Union in the war, albeit at the expense of sending vital war materiel to a totalitarian regime was anathema, took pressure off Britain and her allies. Accordingly, the first of 78 convoys to the Russian Kola Peninsula left in August 1941, almost two months to the day after Operation Barbarossa began. The following year saw momentous events that gave impetus to the basic direction in which World War II now headed: in the Allies’ favor. However, these successes were marred by many reversals of fortune—on land, in the air and at sea. One of the Allied reversals of 1942 involved the almost complete destruction of a convoy supplying vital war matériel from Britain and the United States to Soviet Russia: PQ 17.

What made this sad event worse was that it didn’t need to have happened. But for the decision of one man, Chief of the Naval Staff and First Sea Lord of the Admiralty Sir Dudley Pound, the massacre could have been avoided. Pound contradicted his staff advice and issued the fateful order, “Convoy is to scatter” on the mistaken belief that the German battleship Tirpitz and attending warships had put to sea to intercept PQ 17.