Excellent ... Mr. Sebag-Montefiore, who previously wrote about the British retreat at Dunkirk and the efforts to break the Germans’ Enigma code, uses wartime diaries, interviews and newly available archives from Russia, including the Northern Maritime Museum in Arkhangelsk, to focus on 'the officers, armed guards and the ordinary civilian seamen.'
Reading this book is like being battered with hailstones in a fierce storm. The carnage is relentless. Sebag-Montefiore, formerly a barrister, now an accomplished military historian, clearly loves his topic. He has read all the ship’s logs, all the memoirs, all the official reports. He’s interviewed surviving crew members. He gathers all that material together in a mammoth book of more than 800 pages. It’s an impressive accomplishment, but I wish he’d spent more time on editing. Some sentences are clumsy and convoluted; the book itself is unnecessarily long. It will nevertheless appeal to naval history aficionados who don’t mind being pummelled by relentless horror.
A giant and comprehensive history ... Jimmy Campbell, a 15-year-old steward’s boy – and yes, children that age could serve in the Merchant Navy – recalled how, in his lifeboat, one sailor lost his mind and thought he was going 'to the pub to meet his mates'. He 'stepped off' into the sea before anyone could stop him ... Testimonies such as these are the strongest part of Sebag-Montefiore’s book. Meticulously drawn from a range of archival sources, they must have taken years to assemble. The book was originally due for publication some time ago, which makes the author’s sustained commitment and scholarship all the more impressive.
A lively writer, Sebag-Montefiore delivers 600 pages that will hold most readers’ attention without attempting to cover all the battles, courage, suffering, and tortuous strategic and political background. The author takes advantage of interviews and fresh documentation to emphasize the experiences of individual sailors ... A gripping chronicle of warfare in extreme conditions.
Hell does indeed freeze over in this rousing history of Allied supply convoys to the Soviet Union. Historian Sebag-Montefiore (Dunkirk) recaps the exploits of British, American, and Russian freighters ferrying wartime supplies from Scotland and Iceland to Russia’s arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel ... It’s a rich and detailed chronicle of a crucial but seldom-sung naval struggle.
