Book News

Readers might like to hear about the paperback edition of historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War Two. It is to be published by William Collins price £12.99 on 5th November. The hardback was published near the end of last year.

As the book’s title implies, Battle of the Arctic, about the Arctic convoys’ carrying arms to Russia during WW2, tells a unique story. Progress through the Barents Sea, north of Norway, was complicated by terrific storms, snow, ice, and fog, not to mention whales and Arctic mirages.

The action unfolded as Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers and intelligence officers delivered on their countries’ promises to take the aid to Russia notwithstanding the German attempts to hunt them in their aircraft, U-boats and surface fleet spearheaded by the warships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. When ships were attacked, and went down in seas so cold that a man could die after five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic. Men perished one by one in lifeboats, and as castaways on deserted Arctic islands where they were stalked by polar bears. Frostbitten and wounded survivors ended up in primitive Russian hospitals where amputations were carried out without anesthetics. Others, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD, and the gulag, as well as famine and prostitution.

Most readers will have heard about the heroism exhibited by our seamen during the Battle of the Atlantic. This book shows comparable but undeservedly unappreciated bravery in a different theatre.