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The from the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to the July 22 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Intelligence in the Arctic.

80 years ago, in July 1942, the Allies suffered one of their most notorious losses of World War II.

The merchant ship convoy, PQ17, carrying supplies to Russia, Allied suffered one of their most notorious losses of World War II.

The merchant ship convoy, PQ17, carrying supplies to Russia, was attacked in the Arctic seas by German aircraft and submarines. Out of 34 merchant ships in the convoy, only 11 made

it safely to Russia. The incident has become symbolic of the suffering and endurance of those involved in the Arctic convoys.

In this It Happened Here episode, we revisit the events of July 1942, as well as the wider

naval war in the Arctic, in order to put PQ17 in context. How typical were the losses to PQ17?

Just how effective was the German campaign against the convoys to Russia?

And what part did intelligence from Bletchley Park play in these events?

As usual, we're joined by Bletchley Park's research historian, Dr David Kenyon, to tell us more.

Special thanks to Owen Mugan for voicing our archival documents.

This is Bletchley Park. It happened here.

David, why are we covering the topic of PQ17 and the Arctic convoys today particularly?

Well, we're covering it today because the 80th anniversary of the famous scattering of PQ17, which led to the

disaster that followed, was on the 4th of July, 1942. So we have just passed the 80th anniversary

of the event. And so it seemed a natural thing to talk about. Also, we actually covered this

story on the 75th anniversary of the event back in 2017,

and some of our more loyal listeners will already have listened to episode 60, which covers

PQ17, but there's a lot more to talk about since then. This is in particular because we've talked

in the last couple of episodes about our new Block A exhibition.

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