Archangel Again

A file of rust-pocked freighters dropped anchor last week in Archangel's harbor. These ships of the United Nations had come to Russia's great Arctic seaport on a mission far different from the one in which ships of the same nations had been engaged 24 years ago. In 1918 Allied ships had put ashore at Archangel expeditionary forces to fight Red revolutionaries; this time the nations of the West brought supplies to an embattled Red Army. The safe arrival of the convoy meant more, however, than a complete turn in the wheel of history. It meant a new supply route to the Red Army over a rail line 200 miles farther east, hence safer, than the Murmansk route, which has to carry all Russia's northern traffic until thaws free Archangel in late spring.

Only three days before Britain disclosed that Archangel was in use again, the Admiralty had told how a convoy, perhaps the same one or a section of it, had fought its way to safety through a five-day battle with U-boat and Luftwaffe packs. German boasts of sinking 18 ships the Admiralty called "an exaggeration of 175%" (i.e., six or seven ships were lost).

The intensity of the German assault, with more than 100 planes, suggested that Germany was trying to snip the northern convoy route while round-the-clock daylight and the necessity of squeezing between polar ice drifts and the Norwegian coast make the slow convoys easy targets. To meet this threat, Russia's air force opened an offensive against airfields, repair shops and fuel depots tucked in the folds of conquered Norway, flanking the Arctic route. The Russians said that 40 Nazi planes were destroyed by the first sweep, while Soviet flyers kept on probing deep into fjords and valleys.

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