Herman, Fred Dynamite Cargo: Convoy to Russia

A gripping, contemporary — and somewhat fictionalized — account of the horrific Murmansk Run. Herman’s focus is an American Liberty ship — the JASON (“it was not her name but it will identify her”) — as she sails from America to Russia with a cargo of high explosives and other munitions. The author opens his book with a series of well-drawn crew profiles. Though the JASON’s eastbound trans-Atlantic voyage is described in detail, Herman’s real interest lies with the Murmansk Run convoy that the JASON joins in Scotland. The convoy, described by the author as the largest assembled up to that point in the War, is soon enveloped in a running battle with German bombers, fighter planes and U-boats. One Allied ship after another is consigned to a watery grave by the Nazi foe. Included in the carnage is the JASON herself, though most of her crew survive and are picked up by a British minesweeper (here again Herman is at best with his physical and psychological descriptions of the 200+ survivors of various ships all crammed aboard the minesweeper). Interestingly enough it is the minesweeper which is forced to sink the stricken JASON after she had been torpedoed in order to keep the vessel’s cargo out of Nazi hands. Herman closes the book with statistics documenting the high mortality rates suffered by merchant seamen up to that point (1943) in World War 2. “We don’t claim to be heroes,” he convincingly writes. “We are the bums. But we deliver cargoes.” Further note: the American edition of Dynamite Cargo is illustrated with a series of dramatic black-and-white convoy photographs issued by British official and newsreel sources.