Word: convoying
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...signs of Phase II were everywhere apparent. In one day came news that a fourth U.S. expeditionary force—"the greatest American convoy that ever crossed the Atlantic"—had landed in northern Ireland; that a fleet of four-motored U.S. bombers, flown by U.S. crews, had gone a-bombing over the Black Sea. The U.S. had reached out to the enemy. The problem now: to strike effectively, to carry the war to the enemy...
...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...
...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...
...improved since World War I. U-boat packs have a host of devices to permit their skulking and striking with greater safety. Destroyers are no longer the complete answer. U-boat skippers outfox destroyers by outmaneuvering them with fast turns underwater. And the Navy had not enough destroyers to convoy both in coastal waters and cross-ocean supply routes...