Russia at war 1941-1945

I returned to England in November 1941, and did not go back to Russia again until May 1942—this time for the duration—sailing for twenty-eight days from Middlesbrough to

Murmansk on the Liberty ship, the Empire Baffin, which formed part of the famous PQ-16 convoy. Soon after leaving Iceland, the convoy was subjected to six days' dive-

bombing by the Germans, from their bases in Northern Norway. As we know from

Churchill's letters to Stalin, the Admiralty expected half this convoy to be wiped out; but owing, apparently, to some faulty organisation on the Germans' part, only eight ships were sunk, out of a total of thirty-five. The Germans were to make up for it a month later with the next convoy, the PQ-17, threequarters of whose ships were destroyed.

In The Year of Stalingrad I described this extraordinary voyage of the PQ-16, the marvellous spirit shown by both the British and the Russian seamen who took part in it; the miserably poor protection given it by a couple of submarines and a few destroyers and corvettes—the two escorting cruisers having left it after the first German air-raid.

About 160 men lost their lives in that convoy, and many others were wounded, and were, in the end, taken to the terribly crowded and under-equipped hospital at Murmansk.

At the end of May 1942 there were about 3,000 British "survivors" at Murmansk—many of them from the cruiser Edinburgh, which had been sunk shortly before. Despite frequent German airraids, especially when a convoy landed there from the west,

Murmansk was still more or less intact at the time; and it was not until a month later that most of it was destroyed in a great fire-blitz.

In the same book I described not only Murmansk in May 1942, but also my remarkable

six-days' journey in a "hard"—i.e. third-class—carriage from Murmansk to Moscow during the first week of June. With the sun shining for nearly twenty-four hours in that part of Russia far beyond the Arctic Circle, summer had come in a rush within a few

days, and the far north, with its millions of flowers, was extraordinarily beautiful. Of wonderful beauty too, in the midnight twilight, were Lake Imandra, in the mountainous country of Soviet Lapland through which we travelled a day after leaving Murmansk, and then the immense forests south of the White Sea and all along the Archangel-Vologda

railway line, which we reached on the third day. Often the train would stop, and people would jump out to pick flowers and cranberries—which had been preserved by the snow

through the winter.

The carriage was crowded with soldiers and civilians, and they presented a remarkable cross-section of Russian humanity. In The Year of Stalingrad I recorded dozens of conversations with soldiers, officers, railwaymen and all kinds of civilians, among them an eleven-year-old girl called Tamara, an evacuee from Leningrad, who had spent the

winter in a small town on the White Sea and was now being taken by her mother to a

kolkhoz, where her grandmother lived, in the more clement province of Riazan, south-east of Moscow.

All these people had something significant to say. Tamara had gone to school during her winter on the White Sea; she had with her several school books with pictures of Stalin and Voroshilov, as well as a game of snakes-and-ladders. She said she had had enough to eat at the school canteen, thought that "Hitler would have to be killed before things got better", but kept the carriage amused, all the same, by often singing in a shrill voice an optimistic ditty she had learned at school:

Hitler sam sebé ne rad,

Vziát' ne mózhet Leningrád,

Vídit Névsky i sadý,

I ni tudý i ni sudy

Na Moskvú pustílsya vor,

Dáli tam yemú otpór,

Propádayut vse trudý,

I ni tudý, i ni sudý

(Hitler is cursing his luck, he can't take Leningrad; he can see the Nevsky and the

gardens, but he's got stuck. Then the thief tried Moscow, but here, too, he got thrown back; all his efforts are in vain; he's stuck, he is stuck again).

Although enormous areas of Russia were still under German occupation, the fact that

neither Moscow nor Leningrad had been lost gave people a certain amount of self-

confidence; nevertheless, morale among them varied a great deal—partly depending on

the amount of food they had had to eat. Civilians were badly underfed, and many suffered from scurvy; old women especially were tearful and pessimistic, and thought the

Germans were terribly strong, and God only knew what might yet be in store for Russia during the coming summer. Railwaymen, though much better fed than most other

civilians, were in a grim mood—all the more so as they had had an extremely hard winter on this Murmansk railway which had been continuously bombed by the Germans.