"Anglo-Russian Naval Operations, Arctic Ocean." Topic

Having just inherited my grandfathers' WW2 medals, I was amazed to find he had an Atlantic Star – given he was in the Royal signals.

I knew he was wounded 'in Norway' – the sum total of how much he told me about WW2.

Turns out he wans't there in 1940, but helping lay communications cables in co-operation with the Red Navy sometime around the mid-war period.

I know his ship was torpedoed (which is where he picked up his shrapnel from) and that the ship must have had both Soviet and Royal Navy personnel since when the rescuing RN ship hosed them down (to remove the oil) they discovered one of the Russian sailors was a wwoman…

Anyone got any more info on these operations? Or indeed (long shot!) know what ship this was?

Bangorstu, normally Russian North Fleet ships were meeting Arctic convoys on their way to Murmansk, and there were plenty of joint operations and several accidents where Russians were saving sailors from convoy and patrol ships and vice versa. I will have a look at Russian sites, I remember there was some info on the subject.

BTW one of my grandfathers was stationed in Murmansk, he was flying Hurricane in first half of the war…

Thanks Barin – no idea if he was on a British or Russian ship.

I'm guessing the period would be from 1941-1943 since he was wounded, but recovered enough to be involved in D-Day(D+3 I think).

I would think there would be records of this still.

I'd try contacting the Imperial War Museum first, as a start, if you can't narrow down the period more.

If you can get it down to the month/year, or season/year, you should be able to narrow the vessel selections considerably, and then just go on battle accounts.

A search of German records would be useful as well, since they are quite good in many cases. The Seekrieg site lists a lot of battles, with victories/losses, in detail.

Out of 78 convoys 26 were in 1941-1943 period. Total ship losses from 1941 to 1945 were 101. What is often forgotten, is that for each PQ there was a QP (return) convoy. Of course, Germans paid more attention to inbound caravans, but you could be bombed on the way back, too.

here (ok, it is wiki, but it is in English) is the list of convoys, ships that were in them and losses, if there were any.

link

In Russia we have a government site where you can check paperwork behind some of the awards, so if you have the name of recipient and award type you can find how he got the medal…

This link should be useful to you as a starting point:

link

I'm considering writing to the Royal Signals Museum, which would appear to be the best palce to start.

Interesting stuff about the convoys, but I don't think he'd have been in one. Cable laying is I think a very slow business…

I can just imagine how popular the request to slow down a bit would be with the emrchantmen :)

I was trying to find smth on the joint operations in regards to cable laying in the period, but failed to get any useful info. I found some stuff that describes cable laying as a part of anti-submarine defense for the convoys, I doubt that they were laying communication cables near occupied Norway but who knows…

That's more or less what I found – but given my grandfather was a signalman traine din telecommunciations I assume it was a comunications cable.

How close to Norway he was I don't know – probably not that close but there's an awful lot of empty sea up there.

Norway could just be the nearest bit of land at the time.

Thanks for looking – I'll write to the Royal Signals museum and see what I can dig up.