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PQ17 An Arctic Convoy Disaster

Man has fought wars in many terrible places over the centuries, but never has he fought in a place as terrible as this, this is the place where the men who ran the second world war arctic convoys went to work, among not only the German, submarines and planes but nature at her most brutal. One hundred mile an hour winds, mountainous waves, Icebergs and temperatures down to minus 60 degrees celsius. It was a terrible place to live and a terrible place to die. Throughout the second world war their where many arctic convoys but in the documentary presented by Jeremy Clarkson the focus is on just one. Codenamed PQ17, it was the largest that had ever sailed, it was also the first significant Anglo-American operation of the war and on the night of July the 4th, 1942, it became the biggest naval disaster of the 20th century.

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  1. I apologise in advance, but…

    The ‘shaky camera work is a) original work from the wat b) video taken in the present day in the same conditions, which is intended to show the conditions, or finally c) quite unimportant in the context of the story.
    Anyway, I didn’t particularly notice anything unusual.

    Brilliant documentary. Shows the best (local ‘get it done’ and local leadership) and the worst (remote command) of British character, and the US ship doing a handbrake turn (and its recreation) is a GO USA moment.

    Great documentary,cshowing the good and the bad.

  2. Looks like a good documentary,but I had to stop watching after a few minutes due to the “shakey” camera work. You would think that such an organization as the BBC could afford tripods/gyro-mounts to steady their filming. All of this “attention deficit” editing looks amateurish!