The German vessel Komet lay dead in the water, immobilized by Arctic ice. Captain Robert Eyssen watched from the wheelhouse as a large Soviet icebreaker crunched through the icepack toward him. The steel-reinforced bow of the 11,000-ton icebreaker Stalin could crush the Komet’s hull like an eggshell.
It was August 1940. The Nazi blitzkrieg was storming through western Europe, where the German Wehrmacht seemed unstoppable. But the war at sea was a different matter. Although German U-boats ravaged the Atlantic, the British Navy kept Germany’s few major surface warships mostly bottled up in their ports. Komet aimed to thwart the Royal Navy’s blockade and strike at vital sea lanes that sustained Britain’s war effort.
The ship was no defenseless merchantman. In 1939, the German Navy commandeered the 7,500-ton passenger-cargo ship Ems and transformed it into an auxiliary cruiser, renamed KMS (Kriegsmarine Schiff ) Komet. It was to be a commerce raider, designed to attack enemy vessels while disguised as a merchant ship sailing under a neutral false flag. Hinged steel deck plates concealed the ship’s main armament, six 5.9-inch guns. Captain Eyssen, however, did not lower the concealing deck plates and train Komet’s guns on the approaching icebreaker…because it was secretly an accomplice. Stalin was coming to free his vessel and clear a path through the ice so the German warship could transit the Russian Northern Passage, skirting the Arctic Circle and avoiding the Royal Navy, to emerge in the Pacific to plunder British and Allied shipping, KOMET’S MISSION was an unlikely offshoot of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—a cynical deal between Hitler and Stalin that triggered the outbreak of World War II. The pact, which stunned the diplomatic world on August 23, 1939, was much more than a pledge of mutual nonaggression. Secret clauses and side agreements amounted to a temporary limited partnership between the Nazi and Soviet dictators. At the outset, each got most of what he wanted.
For Hitler, the pact was a green light to invade Poland, now that he could
