Eric Carter’s heroism in helping to defend the port of Murmansk during the Second World War might never have been acknowledged by the Russians but for the Queen. In 1994 President Yeltsin invited the Queen for what would be the first state visit to Russia by a British monarch since the revolution in 1917 — especially poignant given the fact that the executed Tsar Nicholas II had been a first cousin of her grandfather George V.
The Queen accepted the invitation on the condition that the Russians publicly acknowledged the role of the RAF pilots in protecting the port that was a vital supply line of Allied support to the Russians as they held off and then counterattacked the Nazis. In the first 24 hours of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 21, 1941, 1,811 Soviet aircraft were destroyed. For decades after the war the Kremlin refused to admit that Stalin had then pleaded with Winston Churchill to send RAF fighter pilots and aircraft to keep the port open. Carter, who engaged in dogfights with the Luftwaffe in above the port, was invited to accompany the Queen.
Murmansk, on Kola Bay in the extreme northwest of Russia, was Stalin’s gateway to the Atlantic, the only northwestern Soviet port free of ice all year round because of warmer waters flowing in from the Gulf Stream. Churchill was acutely aware that the fall of Murmansk could lead to Russian surrender, allowing Hitler to focus on the western front. The Germans knew it too and threw the might of the Luftwaffe at destroying the port.
Carter was 21 when he embarked on the top-secret mission known as Force Benedict in July 1941. The plan was to send 550 pilots and engineers to Murmansk along with an initial consignment of 40 Hawker Hurricanes. Stalin had requested for Churchill to send Spitfires, but what the Hurricanes lacked in agility they made up for in firepower, recalled Carter. “They had eight machineguns. A two-second burst was a heck of a thing.”
During the first two months of the mission, the RAF pilots recorded 15 kills of Messerschmitts and Junkers. “I was flying along and just below me, a few hundred yards ahead, was a Messerschmitt 109,” Carter recalled. “I flipped the cover off the firing button and as I looked at the 109 I gave him a burst and he went off into the clouds. I don’t know what happened to him. I think I hit him. I had potshots at several but couldn’t claim any kills. To be truthful, I don’t want to claim any. It was a job that had to be done but I didn’t see any point in rejoicing about it.”
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Based at Vaenga aerodrome near the port, Carter also helped to train Russian pilots to fly the Hurricanes, which had been transported in bits and reassembled. “Murmansk was all rubble and the Russian soldiers didn’t bother to ask who you were. They killed you on sight if they didn’t like the look of you. We were issued with special passes and had to hold them in front of us as we walked anywhere or we would have been shot.”
Yet he was astounded at the bravery of the Soviet pilots he trained. “They were good pilots. A bit less careful than us. Let’s put it that way.” One Russian pilot, Zakhar Sorokin, brought down an Me 110 by ramming it before crash landing himself. In the week it took him to walk back to base both his feet became so frostbitten that they had to be amputated. The pilot was fitted with prosthetic feet and went on to destroy nine more German aircraft.
During the four-month mission, the RAF pilots flew 365 sorties (averaging three a day) against the Luftwaffe sweeping in relentlessly from Nazi-occupied Norway. They left in November 1941, handing over defence of the port to the Russians. During the mission Carter had his appendix removed. The anaesthetic was vodka.
Murmansk remained open for Allied convoys until the Germans were defeated. RAF 151 Wing were banned from talking about the mission under threat of court martial. Nothing was publicly known about Force Benedict until the late 1960s.
Eric John Carter was born in near Bromsgrove at the end of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1920, one of two children to John Carter, a builder, and his wife Elsie, née Stafford. As a child he would cycle to Birmingham airport to watch aircraft and vowed to become a pilot one day.
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After leaving school he began an apprenticeship as an electrician. He immediately enlisted on the outbreak of war, but by luck he was given a fast-track into the RAF when a young woman he was taking out told him that her father was a recruiting officer. “She told me to tell her father that I was her boyfriend. I can’t even remember her name now. I was given my papers and told to take them to the RAF recruiting officer.”
On completing his training, he was posted to 615 Squadron flying Hawker Hurricanes on convoy patrols over the Irish Sea. He then flew Defiants defending the skies over Liverpool. After transferring to 81 Squadron, 151 Wing, in 1941 he was on leave in Birmingham when he was ordered to report to base and pick up a tropical uniform and mosquito net from the RAF stores. When he arrived at Scapa Flow in Orkney and met Russian interpreters he realised he would not be needing his mosquito net, a diversionary tactic to throw potential spies off the scent.
“I had never seen so many ships in a single place. It was as if most of the Royal Navy was at anchor here. I saw at least three aircraft carriers.” He was to embark on the troopship Llanstephan Castle as part of the first Arctic convoy, codenamed Dervish. The voyage, which Churchill called “the worst journey in the world”, sailed through the U-boat-infested waters of the Norwegian and Barents Seas braving icebergs and 10m waves.
They disembarked at the port of Archangelsk on Russia’s White Sea. “I was very happy to be facing the Luftwaffe hundreds of miles from home in a frozen foreign country rather than have to get back on that ship,” Carter recalled. The Hurricanes were assembled in nine days and then flown 300 miles to Murmansk.
Carter and his comrades had not been expected to survive the mission. Indeed, no plans had been made to repatriate them. Eventually, he hitched a ride on a British warship, which hugged the Norwegian coast while bombarding Nazi positions. Back in Britain he converted to flying Spitfires. In 1943 the warrant officer was posted to Burma to fight the Japanese.
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After demobilisation he settled down to married life with Phyllis, née Price, a volunteer in the auxiliary fire service whom he had met while training at RAF Valley in north Wales in 1940 and courted at dances on Llandudno pier. She died in 2005 and he is survived by their son Andrew, an aerospace engineer.
He resumed his career as an electrical engineer and consultant in the British mining industry, retiring in the 1990s. An unassuming and gracious man with a Brummie accent who always served visitors with tea on a trolley, he lived modestly in the village of Chaddesley Corbett, Worcestershire.
After his historic visit to Russia in 1994, Carter was invited back several times. As one of the few westerners given the honour of visiting the closed town of Severomorsk, near Murmansk, he was invited on board a Russian submarine. “Even James Bond couldn’t pull that off,” he observed wryly.
In 2012 he visited the Potteries Museum near Stoke-on-Trent to help launch a fundraising drive to restore its Spitfire. Keen to step into the cockpit, the 91-year-old was told that he was not allowed because of health and safety rules. “I had to laugh to think that I couldn’t sit in a stationary Spitfire in case I got hurt,” he said. “I used to fly those things every day fighting the Germans. Now that really was a health and safety concern.”
Several months later a flying enthusiast arranged for Carter to fly in a Spitfire over the Goodwood Aerodrome in West Sussex. “All the controls were exactly as they were when I last flew the Spitfire. I can only describe it as being like jumping back into your first car.”
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In 2013 Carter was presented with the Arctic Star medal. He wrote a book about his wartime experiences and continued to share his memories as the last-surviving member of the mission. “I don’t think the operation gets the credit it deserves,” he said. “If Murmansk had fallen, the whole course of history might have been very different.”
Eric Carter, RAF fighter pilot, was born on February 12, 1920. He died of old age on July 26, 2021, aged 101