To Russia With Love

[bayonetbrant]

https://medium.com/angry-planet/to-russia-with-love-76a2e4ca6c46

On Oct. 11, 1941, 11 merchants ships from Arctic convoy PQ-1 entered the harbor of Arkhangelsk in northern Russia. It was the second of dozens of Allied convoys that would brave the U-boat-infested waters of the North Sea to deliver vital military aid to the Soviet Union.

The USSR was still reeling from the Nazi invasion that launched that summer.

The ships carried 193 disassembled Hawker Hurricane fighters, nine Matilda II heavy tanks and 11 Valentine Mark II tanks.

The Valentines had emerged from the Vickers Elswick factory in Newcastle-upon-Thyne a few months earlier for £10,000 apiece.
With 8,275 built, the Valentine tank was the most numerous British tank of World War II. Canadian and British factories shipped nearly half (3,782) to the the Eastern Front for service with the Red Army.

450 of those Valentines sank into watery graves, victims of German U-boats, mines and bombers. But the surviving 3,332 Valentine served the Red Army throughout World War II.

We know what the Red Army thought about its British Valentines thanks to Soviet archives that Yuri Pasholok translated and which Peter Samsonov expanded on at the website Tank Archives.

more at the link