It was known as the voyage to hell and for many years it was the forgotten battle of the Second World War. For four gruelling years between 1941 and 1945 British and allied merchant seamen and Royal Navy sailors of the Arctic Convoys battled their way through U-boat-strewn northern seas to take much needed supplies to the Soviet Union battling Hitler on the eastern front. Tomorrow a dwindling band of survivors from that epic campaign will gather in Liverpool to commemorate the 75th anniversary of what wartime prime minister Winston Churchill called “the worst journey on earth”.

It is a fitting location as Liverpool was the headquarters of naval operations during the war but the beating heart of the operation was much further north in the deep waters of Loch Ewe in Wester Ross which was the main assembly point for convoys from September 1942 until the end of the war. Many of the merchant sailors on those desperate undertakings came from the Western Isles which has a long and glorious tradition of service in Britain’s navies, so much so that when the Mercantile Marine War Memorial was built at Tower Hill in London one of the sculptor’s models was Bosun Kenneth Stewart BEM from Tong on the island of Lewis.

Untold numbers of Scots served on the Arctic Convoys and were amongst the roll call of those who gave their lives to answer Joseph Stalin’s plea to provide the Soviet Union with sufficient supplies to sustain their war effort. Around 3,000 allied sailors were killed during the operations. In the totality of losses of the war the figures might seem modest but according to naval historian Richard Woodman this has to be put in perspective: “The Arctic passage was the most lethal of all convoy routes and casualties among Allied merchant seaman were proportionately higher than among any of the armed services.”

Amongst those who served on the convoys was a young Scot from Leith called Jim Annand who had been born in 1908 and at the outbreak of war was working as a school teacher. A committed socialist he described himself at the time as “a potential Conshie [conscientious objector]” but the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s had convinced him that fascism to had to be confronted and when he was conscripted in July 1941 he volunteered for the Royal Navy.

His first posting was to HMS Tartar, a modern Tribal class destroyer which was based at Scapa Flow and was involved in escorting five convoys at the beginning of 1942 including convoy PQ12 which arrived in Murmansk on March 12 having evaded the attentions of the huge German battleship Tirpitz on one of its few sorties from the Norwegian port of Trondheim. Annand also served on Convoy PQ 13 which lost five merchant ships and one escort HMS Sulla which was sunk with the loss of all hands.

Later in life the young sailor returned to teaching and under the name J. K. Annand became a distinguished poet writing in Scots. Quite against the rules he started writing a journal while in the navy and from it a vivid picture emerged of the tribulations faced by every crew on the hazardous voyages to the northern Soviet ports of Archangel and Murmansk. With typical modesty Annand claimed that the convoy experience was “very dull and unexciting” where “our worst enemy was the weather” but he also admitted that in rough conditions “the mess deck was a hell of a shambles” with “no hot food at all”. Later the scenes came back to inform his poetry and his poems “Arctic Convoy” and “On the Fo’c’sleheid” tell the modern reader all there is to know about conditions aboard on the Arctic run.

In April 1942 Annand left HMS Tartar to be commissioned and went on to serve on HMS Bute, a mine-sweeping trawler which also took part in convoy duties from Loch Ewe. The final Arctic Convoy JW66 left the Clyde on April 16 1945 and the final inbound wartime convoy RA66 arrived off the Tail of the Bank on May 8 in time to celebrate the end of the war in Europe with all ships blazing their navigation lights, as were the street lights in Gourock and Greenock.

Altogether 78 convoys sailed to the Soviet Union through some of the worst sea and weather conditions in the world around the north cape of Norway and through the Barents Sea to Archangel and Murmansk. Throughout the voyage they had to face the threat of attack by German submarines, surface ships and bombers and paid a heavy price for the 4.43 million tons of supplies which reached their destinations - 104 merchant ships, 20 Royal Navy warships, a submarine and two armed whalers were lost in the convoys, with Germany losing 31 submarines.

Extract from JK Annand's “Arctic Convoy” from Selected Poems 1925-1990

Northwart, aye northwart, in the pitmirk nicht.

The nirlin wind has gane, a lownness comes;

The lang slaw swall still minds us o the gale.

Restin aff-watch, a-sweein in our hammocks,

We watch our sleepin messmates’ fozy braith

Transmogrify to ice upon the skin

That growes aye thicker on the ship-side plates.