Unsung Heroes

My first copy of Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea was a twelfth birthday present, given to me in 1956. It was Cassell’s expurgated ‘Cadet Edition’, intended for a generation who knew little about the war during which they had been born. While Monsarrat’s publishers thought we should be acquainted with the Battle of the Atlantic, they clearly considered that we would come in our own time to adultery and what was then breathlessly referred to as ‘premarital sexual intercourse’. What mattered was access to Monsarrat’s brilliant evocation of a grim campaign at sea. I read it as I bumped into school on the Northern Line and have been haunted by it ever since.

Some books inspire, some comfort, others divert, but The Cruel Sea seems to have dogged me, assuming a personal significance ever since my mother hinted that she had once been on nodding terms with Monsarrat. ‘A small, dark, active man,’ she said, recalling her days as an officer in the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. She also remembered that before he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Monsarrat, a journalist by profession, had been active in the Blitz, digging survivors out of the rubble of their homes. The experience inspired one of his short stories: ‘Heavy Rescue’. I do not come from a seafaring family but was, from an early age, obsessed with ships and the sea. Monsarrat’s account of the great drama played out from the first to the very last day of the Second World War in the vast wastes of the Atlantic was a revelation. I can vividly recall the onset of an outrage that has grown large of late, and which first manifested itself in a precocious assertion at the Sunday dinner-table, where history was the main topic of family conversation. Britain, I said, made too much fuss of ‘The Few’. It was not so much that I objected to the Royal Air Force’s claim on the nation’s gratitude for its triumph over south-east England in the summer of 1940, but rather that, with youthful intensity (and youthful conviction), I believed that another brand of heroism had been ignored. The arduous, long and vital services of the Royal Navy and the mercantile marine, to whose appalling struggle with German submarines and long-range aircraft Monsarrat’s vivid novel had drawn my attention, lacked advocates just as it lacked glamour. Out of sight, its significance became dimmed, and in the drab post-war years it was in danger of being lost altogether. At 16 I gave up the Northern Line and went to sea myself. To a callow boy the smattering of medal ribbons among my seniors in the saloon and their occasional vague references to torpedoings recalled Monsarrat’s book. Moreover, several of the fast cargo-liners in which I then served had taken part in the war in what I now knowingly called ‘The Western Ocean’. Once, in Chi-lung, we passed an ancient Flower-class corvette flying the ensign of Nationalist China: before being sold to the Chinese she had been HMS Heliotrope, a reminder of Monsarrat’s fictional Compass Rose which sent me back to read the unbowdlerized text of his masterpiece. My sense of outrage was rekindled. Then, by chance, I endured a winter in the North Atlantic as Third Officer in an ocean weather ship, a superannuated and converted corvette that still bore, under shrouds of ‘mothballing’, some of her original armament. Fitted out to post-war, mercantile standards, she was luxurious compared with either Compass Rose or Saltash, the second of the two ships in Monsarrat’s saga. But while we had neither a convoy to defend nor U-boats to fight off, conditions were brutal enough to compel me to read The Cruel Sea yet again. Monsarrat had first heard his title spoken when, as First Lieutenant of HM Corvette Campanula, he attended the Anti-U-Boat School, an extemporized tactical establishment in Liverpool run by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of Wrens. Roberts concluded each course with a summing-up: the convoy escort officers were told that they were fighting a vital battle that was ‘long, patient and unpublicized against our two great enemies: the U-Boat and the cruel sea’. In an affectionate gesture to his old corvette, the Campanula is the only vessel in The Cruel Sea to appear undisguised, for Monsarrat otherwise studiously avoided conforming too closely to history. HMS Compass Rose commissions impossibly early in 1939, while Vice Admiral Sir Vincent Murray-Forbes, KCB, DSO, under whose eye the corvettes and frigates are ‘worked-up’ to operational standard at ‘Ardnacraish’, bears a shadowy likeness to Sir Gilbert Stephenson and his establishment at Tobermory. Monsarrat’s skill lies in his ability to summon up the spirit of this ‘private war’, understood only by those who participated but upon which the survival of these islands depended. There are no heroics in his novel, just as there are no heroes: The Cruel Sea is, as he says in his introduction, simply ‘the long and true story of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men’. It is a war fought at gutter level by men whose chief enemies in reality were exhaustion, cold, damp, a ceaseless and wearying motion, monotonous food, irksome and unavoidable contact with their fellow men and an underlying fear of what might happen tomorrow, or the next day, or even the next second. And when death does explode in their midst, the sudden alteration of circumstances, the account of men who behaved well and men who did not, leaves a powerful sense of participation imprinted on the mind of the reader. This is skill of a high order, for one has the distinct feeling that this was a shared experience rather than a vicarious one. I can personally attest to the accuracy with which Monsarrat describes living conditions aboard ship and the eternal presence of the cruel sea itself. My Western Ocean winter was dominated by gales with winds in excess of 90 knots. The weather ship had the skimpy scantlings of war-built tonnage and the smell, as all ships have, of cooped-up humanity. Once, woken in my bunk by water pouring over me, I climbed to the bridge to find the Second Officer, who had relieved me two hours earlier, paddling in a foot of water sloshing from one side of the bridge to the other. On another occasion we came down off the crest of a huge sea and, before rising to the next, slammed into a secondary wave which sprung the shell-plating in the flare of the starboard bow. The impact shattered the shaving mirrors bolted in the crew’s washroom, scattering shards of glass. It was as well that it was two in the morning and that no one had been peering into them, wrestling with a razor while the bow did its wild dido. This was small beer – while we were weary enough, we never knew the excoriation of many long months of war – but the experience increased my admiration for Monsarrat’s achievement. Many authors have made reputations writing about the sea. Few have achieved the power of Monsarrat’s prose, for few truly know the sea’s effect upon seafarers, apart from other seafarers. Fewer still have written a heroic epic without a hero, or told of a hard-fought victory without a hint of jingoism. Monsarrat’s war, like that of his characters, was largely fought by an improvised navy and unpractised warriors. Compass Rose’s, and later Saltash’s, commanding officer, George Eastwood Ericson, is a member not of the Royal Navy but of the Royal Naval Reserve, a professionally trained merchant officer who put on the King’s uniform in time of war by virtue of peace-time commitment. Monsarrat’s own preparation for battle was, like that of Ericson’s First Lieutenant Lockhart, five weeks’ training based on some yachting experience: such men do not worship at the shrine of naval perfection. Like Lockhart, too, Monsarrat was his ship’s medical officer until surgeon sub-lieutenants were unearthed from the country’s medical schools. In this capacity he was brought face to face with the pitiful survivors of torpedoed merchant ships, men who were picked up by the corvettes. Under-armed and lacking radar and long-range air cover, for the first three years of the war the corvettes were not capable of much else in the way of defending the laden merchantmen that formed the convoys. As a result, proportionately far more merchant seamen died than did men in any of the armed services; moreover, for those difficult three years their pay stopped the day their ships sank. Ericson is the nearest we get to a hero, yet he is marred by war, driven to drop depth charges among waving survivors as he hunts the U-boat he knows is lurking immediately below them, and thereby turning himself into a war criminal in his own eyes. His solitary drinking binge after the ship has reached Gibraltar ends in a touching exchange between Ericson and Lockhart that marks their relationship as both intimate and yet separated by rank and responsibility. For his part Lockhart never gets the command he deserves but is compensated by a bitter-sweet affair with a ‘commissioned lovely’, a beautiful Wren officer who does not survive the war. There are other officers too: the odious Australian Bennett who is written out of the story because, Monsarrat later admitted, he was in danger of taking it over; the ex-bank-clerk Ferraby who desperately misses his young wife and is invalided out after losing his nerve; and the suave and apparently worldly lawyer Morrell whose actress wife is too busy to spend an evening with him when he is on his pitifully brief leave. And there are the petty officers and ratings. The former are all regular, long-service men, utterly dependable and who turn Compass Rose into a man-of-war. One real-life corvette officer wrote: ‘One always hopes the petty officers will be as good as they could be and always they are.’ The men, the seamen, stokers and telegraphists, almost all of whom are ‘Hostilities Only’ ratings, endure their personal miseries amid the greater collective ordeal of the unfamiliar mess-decks. The unfaithful wife whose conduct provokes a man to desert, the loss of lovers in the Blitz and disruption in family life are all searingly depicted, testimony to Monsarrat’s keen observational skills which carry no hint of sentiment. There is, however, that strong sense of passionate conviction that what these men and all those involved in that long struggle achieved had in the post-war years been overshadowed by the exploits of others. It is hard not to be haunted by Monsarrat’s masterpiece, very hard if one has been a mariner. My own copy of the book, first published in 1951, bears its previous owner’s name. Somehow the fact that it was once owned by a naval officer only adds to its lustre. But that is not quite all. For me The Cruel Sea was not merely a book, it was also a point of departure.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Richard Woodman 2004