During the Summer of 1942 Britain and America jointly agreed to supply desperately needed arms to Soviet Russia. The Germans were as determined to halt this potentially war-winning operation as the Allies were that it should succeed. The battleground could not have been more inhospitable than the appalling conditions of the Arctic sea. The British and American merchantmen and their gallant naval escorts suffered grievous losses. The cold was so intense that there were pitifully few survivors from the many vessels sunk in the running battles that raged. The book deals in detail with the fate of the convoys PQ13 and PQ 17, bound from Iceland to North Russia, and the Westbound convoy QP13. Attacked by aircraft and U-boats, PQ13 and PQ17 lost between them a total of thirty ships while QP13, untouched by the enemy, ran into a British minefield off Iceland with the loss of seven ships.