During the last four years of the Second World War, the Western Allies secured Russian defenses against Germany by supplying vital food and arms. The plight of those in Murmansk and Archangel who benefited is now well known, but few are aware of the courage, determination and sacrifice of Allied merchant ships, which withstood unremitting U-boat attacks and aerial bombardment to maintain the lifeline to Russia. In the storms, fog and numbing cold...

For the British, the Battle of the Atlantic was a fight for survival. They depended on the safe transit of hundreds of convoys of merchant ships laden with food, raw materials and munitions from America to feed the country and to keep the war effort going, and they had to export manufactured goods to pay for it all. So Britain's merchant navy, a disparate collection of private vessels, became the country's lifeline, while its seamen, officially non-combatants,...

Among the coral outcrops of the island of Rota, lies the wreck of a Spanish galleon, the Santa Margarita - Spring 1601. This is a reconstruction of the Santa Margaritas disastrous last voyage, beset by an extraordinary sequence of typhoons and storms. Based on what little is known of the ships journey overloaded cargo, bad-blood amongst the crew and a curse we are told a story of greed, horror, deprivation and unimaginable hardship by the handful...

A wartime attack on a defenceless merchant convoy brings the intent of the Admiralty into question. Was it merely a bad tactical decision or something more sinister? Why did Admiral Dudley Pound scatter Convoy PQ17 in the Barents Sea on the evening of 4th July 1942? Most of the merchant ships were destroyed while not a single one of the warships assigned to protect them was lost, casting a long shadow over subsequent events. Why did Pound act as...