Thirty-five merchant freighters sailed into the midnight sun. Only eleven made it home.
In the summer of 1942, the fate of the Second World War hung on an ice-choked strip of open water north of occupied Norway. The German Wehrmacht was driving toward the oilfields of the Caucasus, and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of total collapse. In response, Britain and the United States assembled Convoy PQ 17: thirty-five cargo ships packed with 594 tanks, 297 crated fighter planes, and 150,000 tons of high explosives, enough war materiel to rearm thirty Red Army divisions.
Shielding the merchantmen was the most powerful naval escort ever deployed in the polar seas, backed by battleships, cruisers, and a fleet aircraft carrier. But lurking in the northern fjords was the most terrifying dreadnought in the world: the German battleship Tirpitz.
On the night of July 4, five hundred miles away inside the bomb-proof Admiralty Citadel in London, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound made an unthinkable deduction. Believing Tirpitz had sortied to slaughter the convoy, Pound overruled his intelligence tracking officers and flashed three fateful telegrams across the Arctic ether. The cruisers withdrew at high speed. The destroyers turned west to join the battle fleet. And the thirty-four defenseless cargo ships were ordered to do what no convoy should ever do in broad daylight: Scatter.
What followed was not a naval engagement, but an Arctic turkey shoot of unprecedented savagery. Cast adrift across ten thousand square miles of leaden sea under a sun that never set, civilian merchant mariners and teenage naval gunners faced howling Junkers Ju 88 dive-bombers and predatory U-boat wolfpacks alone. Yet amidst the slaughter emerged legendary acts of defiance: an Oxford barrister who led four camouflaged freighters into the frozen pack ice; gun crews who fought until the icy water swept their boots; and men who rowed open lifeboats through frost and delirium toward the jagged cliffs of Novaya Zemlya.
Reconstructed from declassified Admiralty war diaries, Bletchley Park Ultra decrypts, and eyewitness accounts, Scatter and Survive is a gripping, cinematic narrative of bureaucratic error, frozen terror, and the unbreakable resolve of ordinary men abandoned on the edge of the world.
Grab your copy today and experience the greatest maritime survival epic of World War II.
