Captain John Egerton Broome DSC, also known as Jackie Broome, was a Royal Navy officer who served in both World Wars. He commanded the escort group of the ill-fated Arctic Convoy PQ 17 in 1942. After the Second World War, he became a writer and illustrator.
Broome on the bridge of HMS Begum in 1944
PQ 17 was the code name for an Allied Arctic convoy during the Second World War. On 27 June 1942, the ships sailed from Hvalfjörður, Iceland, for the port of Arkhangelsk in the Soviet Union. The convoy was located by German forces on 1 July, after which it was shadowed continuously and attacked. The First Sea Lord Admiral Dudley Pound, acting on information that German ships, including the German battleship Tirpitz, were moving to intercept, ordered the covering force based on the Allied battleships HMS Duke of York and USS Washington away from the convoy and told the convoy to scatter. Because of vacillation by Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Tirpitz raid never materialised. The convoy was the first large joint Anglo-American naval operation under British command; in Churchill's view this encouraged a more careful approach to fleet movements.
Escorts and merchant ships at Hvalfjord May 1942 before the sailing of Convoy PQ 17.
U-255 after the attacks on PQ 17, flying four victory pennants and the captured flag of the merchant ship SS Paulus Potter
