The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux

The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux

Author:William Geroux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER TEN

ARKHANGELSK

In the days of the czars, Archangel—Arkhangelsk in Russian—had been a great cosmopolitan city, a jewel of Northern Europe. It was a historic seaport, founded in 1584 by Ivan the Terrible on the delta where the North Dvina River flows into the White Sea, near the site of a twelfth-century monastery dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Peter the Great had built Russia’s first state shipyard at Archangel a century later, and for more than three hundred years the city had thrived as an international port, serving as Russia’s chief link to Western trade, industry, and culture, despite the considerable disadvantage of being iced in every winter when the White Sea froze over. Merchants and visitors from around the world had strolled Archangel’s streets and marveled at the intricate designs of its traditional wooden buildings. The Russian government had even allowed foreign merchants to build Catholic and Lutheran churches in the city. But by the time the survivors of convoy PQ-17 straggled into Archangel in late July 1942, the city was no longer beautiful, prosperous, or welcoming.

Under Soviet rule, Archangel and its surroundings had been transformed into a land of exile and hard labor. Most of the handsome wooden architecture was gone. The bulk of the city’s shipping business had shifted to the Baltic Sea port of Leningrad, which could stay open year-round. Archangel, whose population hovered around two hundred thousand, served the Stalin regime mainly as an industrial port, an export hub for the timber industry. World War II transformed it into a vital port for Lend-Lease supplies. Rail lines led straight from its docks to both Moscow and Leningrad. Archangel shared the burden with Murmansk of receiving the Arctic convoys.

While Murmansk was only 35 miles from the German air bases, and thus under constant attack, Archangel was more than 350 miles from the front lines, and barely within range of the German bombers in Norway. The Germans had not yet bombed Archangel by the time convoy PQ-17 arrived, though German reconnaissance planes swooped low over the city on many occasions, pinpointing future targets for the bombers. In addition, German seaplanes dropped mines into the North Dvina River near Archangel to threaten shipping. During the spring thaw in 1942, Soviet icebreakers had found unexploded mines frozen into the ice.

Even without being bombed, Archangel had been traumatized by the war. One out of every three men in the city had been called up to the front lines with the Red Army, and by the summer of 1942 thousands of them had already been killed. By war’s end, more than twenty-three thousand men from Archangel would die in combat—one out of every three who went to the front. Working-age women in the city either served in the military or were bused every day to long shifts in factories producing war supplies. Like other Soviet cities, Archangel had been reduced by the Great Patriotic War into a community of the very old and very young.

And Archangel was starving. The Soviet agencies tasked



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.