Winston Churchill called it ‘the worst journey in the world’. But was even this telling quote, describing the transportation of military aid to northern Russia during World War II, an understatement?

As this book’s title – Battle of the Arctic – implies, it tells a unique story. For much of the conflict was complicated by terrific storms, snow, ice, fog, whales, and Arctic mirages, creating an atmosphere similar to Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, David Crane’s Scott of the Antarctic, and an Arctic version of Robinson Crusoe.

The action unfolded as Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, and intelligence officers delivered on their countries’ promise to take arms to Russia as the Germans hunted them in aircraft, U-boats, and surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. When ships were attacked, and went down in seas so cold that a man could die after five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic.

Men perished one by one in lifeboats and, as castaways, they died on deserted Arctic islands where they were stalked by polar bears. Frostbitten and wounded survivors ended up in Russian hospitals so primitive that amputations were carried out without anesthetics. Other survivors, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD and the Gulag, as well as famine and prostitution.

Using new material unearthed in American, British, Russian, and German archives, as well as Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, and French sources and a remarkable collection of vivid witness accounts brought together at the passing of the last survivors, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore can at last tell this extraordinary story that oscillates between the sailors’ point of view on the front lines and the controversies that infuriated world leaders.