The sea was the color of gunmetal, and it wanted to kill them all.

The Last Convoy to Murmansk: When the Arctic Became a Graveyard

Convoy RA-66's Desperate Dash Through Nazi U-Boats and Frozen Seas

British sailors died fighting U-boats in the Arctic on the very day Germany surrendered in World War II.

The sea was the color of gunmetal, and it wanted to kill them all. On May 9, 1945—the very day Germany surrendered—the men aboard Convoy RA-66 were still fighting for their lives in the Arctic waters between Murmansk and Scotland.

For nearly four years, the Arctic convoys had been threading a needle between Nazi-occupied Norway and the polar ice cap, delivering tanks, aircraft, and ammunition to a Soviet Union hemorrhaging soldiers on the Eastern Front. Churchill called it 'the worst journey in the world,' and he wasn't exaggerating. Temperatures plunged to minus forty. Ships accumulated ice so fast that crews had to hack it away with axes or capsize. And lurking beneath the grey swells, German U-boats waited like patient wolves.

RA-66, consisting of 24 merchant ships and their escorts, had departed Murmansk on April 29. The Germans knew the war was lost, but their submarine commanders hadn't received the memo—or perhaps they simply refused to accept it. U-boats still prowled the Barents Sea, their torpedoes armed, their crews determined to exact a final toll.

On May 2, the frigate HMS Goodall was patrolling the convoy's perimeter when U-968 found her. The torpedo struck with ca…

💡 Arctic convoy veterans were denied a campaign medal for nearly 70 years because the British government didn't want to offend the Soviet Union during the Cold War.