Dangers Fore or Aft

After Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the dynamic of the Second World War changed. Britain no longer stood alone and without allies against the Nazis; the enemy of her enemies became her friend, at least until 1945.

But Stalin’s Russia, despite its size and population, was ineffectual and vulnerable due to more than twenty years of depredations by the Communists. Stalin had the manpower, but was unable was unable to supply his war effort with adequate arms and equipment. He was desperate for help from the capitalists.

The problem for Britain — and for the United States after Pearl Harbor — was how to get supplies to the Soviet Union. The Nazis’ rapid advance through Eastern Europe closed off all possible routes except for two. One was a rail line running from the head of the Persian Gulf through the Caucasus into Russia, but materiel could not be moved quickly enough by that route for it to be viable.

The other route was known as the Murmansk Run. It was possible, even in the dead of winter, for Allied merchant ships to set sail from Iceland or northern Scotland, cross the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea, and round the North Cape of Norway to reach the Russian ports of Archangel (during the ice-free months) and Murmansk (all year round).

Starting in the late summer of 1941, British, Canadian, and eventually American merchant ships, along with their naval escorts, transported massive quantities of arms, equipment, and supplies to the Soviet Union via the long and dangerous route through the Arctic to Murmansk and Archangel. Without this enormous logistical operation the Soviet war effort might well have collapsed. The disappearance of the Eastern Front was strategically unthinkable, so the death trap of the Murmansk convoys had to continue.

Ships on the Murmansk Run veered as far north as they could, pressing close against the limits of the polar pack ice to try to minimize the danger of enemy attacks. The Germans committed a substantial portion of their naval forces to defend against a possible Allied invasion of Norway, and also used them against the merchant convoys on their way to Russia. U-boats and destroyers based in the fjords of northern Norway attacked and sank as many of the supply ships as possible. During the Arctic summer, when there was daylight for twenty-four hours a day, any ship that entered the range of the Germans could expect no surcease from attack for the rest of the journey around North Cape.


The Second World War offered no shortage of horrific ways to die in battle, but the Murmansk Run was one of the worst. Depending on which sources are consulted, between one in fifteen and one in eight of the merchant ships and their escorts failed to return to port. The environment was as harsh as human beings can be forced to endure, with intense cold, fierce storms, and an icy sea in which a floating sailor could survive for no more than a few minutes.

Not only that, ships were under absolutely strict orders to maintain full speed, no matter what. There could be no turning around to pick up any men who fell overboard. If a ship hit a mine or took a torpedo, it could not expect help from any other ships in the convoy. There were no stops allowed before Murmansk.

The men who never came back from the Barents Sea were not just the sailors of the Royal Navy or the U.S. Navy. The ships carrying essential materiel to the Russians were British, Canadian, and American merchant vessels in service of the war effort, and the brave men who went to the bottom with them were civilian heroes who served their country as fully as anyone in the military.
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The toll on Allied shipping was enormous, but it was especially damaging to the British. Merchant ships were the blood and bones and sinews of the British Empire, and the damage done by the Germans, both in the Arctic and elsewhere, could never be repaired. The British effectively consigned a large part of their capital stock to a watery grave — from a practical point of view, it was the fiscal equivalent of towing barges of gold bars up to the frozen north and sinking them in the Barents Sea.

Britain’s leaders knew what they were doing. They realized that their actions would likely spell the end of the British Empire. They knew that the capital losses they were sustaining could never be repaired, but they went through with it all anyway. Defeating the Nazis was simply more important.

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I told the story above in order to introduce a song by Al Stewart. I haven’t featured it before now because the album which contains it had been impossible to obtain until recently.

“Murmansk Run” is from the 1980 album 24 Carrots, which was out of print for many years, but has now been re-released:

Murmansk Run
by Al Stewart

Your father sailed on the Murmansk run
To guide the flocks of the ships home one by one
Grey beneath the Arctic sun
Or the glow of Northern Lights

I see you have his photograph
His eyes are watching for dangers fore or aft
Trading days beneath the sun
For the cold and wintry nights of the Murmansk run

He never did come home to you
It’s long forgotten, a childhood dream or two
But something of the cold got through
And it lingers in your eyes

On days like these you hear the wind
And feel the chill of the ice floes closing in
Trading days beneath the sun
For the cold and wintry nights of the Murmansk run

Save our souls, river of darkness over me
Save our souls, lost on the dark uncharted sea

Now you hide yourself from view
You seem to find it an easy thing to do
Trading days beneath the sun
For the cold and wintry nights of the Murmansk run

Save our souls, river of darkness over me
Save our souls, lost on the dark uncharted sea

The lyrics above actually comprise only the first half of a two-part song called “Murmansk Run/Ellis Island”. “Ellis Island” is a change of topic, a look at another group of people who made a perilous sea crossing.

Follow the link to the lyrics if you want to read what Al Stewart has to say about the wretched refuse who opened the golden door at Ellis Island.