The John Witherspoon was laid down on December 10, 1941 -- three days after Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into global conflict. She was one of thousands of Liberty ships, the mass-produced workhorses that would carry the material of war across every ocean. Built under a Maritime Commission contract as MCE hull 31, she slid down the ways at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore on March 4, 1942, sponsored by Miss Grace Rose Culleton. Her namesake, John Witherspoon, had been a Scottish-American Presbyterian minister who signed the Declaration of Independence -- a Founding Father whose legacy now rode on a steel hull through U-boat-infested waters. By April she was allocated to Seas Shipping Co. Inc., and by June she was loaded with her deadly cargo and heading north.

Convoy PQ-17 assembled at Hvalfjordur, Iceland, and sailed on the afternoon of June 27, 1942. The convoy's destination was Arkhangelsk, and the route ran through some of the most dangerous waters on Earth -- within range of German aircraft in Norway, German surface ships lurking in the fjords, and U-boat wolfpacks patrolling the Arctic ice edge. The John Witherspoon carried ammunition and tanks, cargo that made her both essential and extraordinarily vulnerable. For the crews aboard these merchant ships, the Arctic convoys offered a particular kind of dread: water temperatures that killed in minutes, pack ice that could crush a hull, and summer daylight that lasted twenty-four hours, leaving no darkness to hide in.

What happened to Convoy PQ-17 remains one of the war's most controversial decisions. On July 4, the British Admiralty, fearing an attack by the German battleship Tirpitz, ordered the convoy to scatter. The escort vessels withdrew. Suddenly, thirty-five merchant ships were left alone in the Arctic, each making its own way toward Russia with no protection. It was a death sentence for many. German aircraft and U-boats picked off the undefended ships one by one. Of the thirty-five merchant ships that had sailed from Iceland, twenty-four were sunk. The John Witherspoon was among them.

At 4:38 on the afternoon of July 6, the first torpedo from U-255 struck the John Witherspoon on her starboard side between holds number four and five. A minute later, a second torpedo hit beneath the bridge. Captain John Stewart Clark ordered abandon ship, and all eight officers, thirty-one crewmen, and eleven armed guards went over the side. One crewman drowned in the process. At 4:55, two more torpedoes struck the port side amidships, and the ship broke in two and sank within minutes. The entire attack lasted seventeen minutes. In a gesture that seems almost surreal in the context of total war, U-255 approached the lifeboats, questioned Captain Clark about his cargo, then offered the survivors food, water, and directions to the nearest land.

The survivors drifted in Arctic waters for two days before the merchant ship El Capitan picked up nineteen of them on July 8. The remaining survivors were rescued the following day. But their ordeal was not over. On July 9, El Capitan herself was attacked, and the men who had already abandoned one sinking ship found themselves abandoning another. They were rescued a second time and eventually reached safety, but the experience left its mark. Today the wreck of the John Witherspoon lies on the floor of the Barents Sea at roughly 72 degrees north, a steel monument to the merchant sailors who carried the war's supplies through the most dangerous waters on the planet.