Winston Churchill was determined to help Joseph Stalin following Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, no matter the cost and despite their deep ideological differences. This meant that the warships of Admiral John Tovey’s Home Fleet were required to escort supply convoys through the Norwegian and Barents Seas to Murmansk and Archangel. Both were within the Arctic Circle and in the case of Archangel it iced up from winter to spring.
Churchill and US President Franklin D Roosevelt, whose country had not yet entered the war, feared if they did not immediately back the battered Red Army then Stalin might rapidly sue for peace. Not everyone agreed with this. General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial Staff, felt that all military equipment should go to the British armed forces, but he was overruled. Churchill and Roosevelt, just three months after Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union, began
