Magnamus

Convoys, and their names

Hello. You are confused, unfortunately. Convoy PQ 8 sailed in January 1924. We're talking about Convoy QP 8, which sailed in March 1942. They are in fact essentially the same transports (minus casualties, of course), but convoys traveling from the UK to the USSR are "PQ" convoys, and those sailing in the opposite direction are "QP" convoys (you might deduce why the letters are reversed). In this case, Tirpitz attempted to attack the same group of ships twice, the first while they sailed to the USSR as PQ 8, and the second while they returned to the UK as QP 8. You can read more about this in Arctic convoys of World War II. Parsecboy (talk) 16:44, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

You are correct, thank you! It looked like a typo to me as there was no reasoning in the text as to why the letters should be reversed, and the link supplied was to a PQ convoy which did not mention QP at all.