The Cruel Sea (Penguin World War II Collection)

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Primarily concerned with life at sea, this doesn't completely ignore the home front, but sees it primarily in terms of the impact home lives have on the men at war. As a female reader I never felt excluded from this narrative, made up as it is of overwhelmingly masculine characters, and wasn't hit with technical sea-faring terms or the names of different types of ship body parts... Instead it focuses on the characters, and the intense pressures they're under. The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat is fiction, but it is based on the author’s own WW2 experiences. For four years, he was stationed in the Atlantic, serving on corvettes and on a frigate. This shows. It is clearly evident that the author writes about what he knows and has experienced firsthand. My Father for years, with an almost mantra repetitiveness has been telling me to watch the film or read the Cruel Sea, I always replied, “will do” with no real intention of getting round to it. I am so glad I now have. THE Captain carried them all. For him, there was no fixed watch, no time set aside when he was free to relax and, if he could, to sleep. He had to control everything, to drive the whole ship himself: he had to act on signals, to fix their position, to keep his section of the convoy together, to use his seamanship to ease Compass Rose’s ordeal as much as possible. He was a tower of strength, holding everything together by sheer unrelenting guts. The sight of the tall tough figure hunched in one corner of the bridge now seemed essential to them all: they needed the tremendous reassurance of his presence, and so he gave it unstintingly, even though the hours without sleep mounted to a fantastic total. The Cruel Sea is a 1951 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat. It follows the lives of a group of Royal Navy sailors fighting the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War. It contains seven chapters, each describing a year during the war.

He consulted a batch of reports from his staff, “Gunnery,” he wrote, as a subheading, and underlined it. “The single four-inch gun which is the sole major armament of this class of ship will only be adequate if constant attention is given to gun drill and to ammunition supply. H.M.S. Compass Rose did well in her various gun-trials, and the nightshoot was successful, both as regards the handling of the ship and the actual firing. Anti-aircraft shooting, conducted with a towed streamer-target, was less successful: it is recommended that more provision be made for anti-aircraft gun-control, possibly by loud-speaker operated from the bridge. Here were the ships, assembling for their long uncertain voyage: here was Compass Rose, appointed to guard them: here was Ferraby himself, a watchkeeping officer — or practically so — charged specifically with a share of that guardianship. His pale face flushed, his expression set in a new mold of determination, Ferraby surveyed the convoy with pride and a feeling of absolute proprietorship. Our ships, he thought: our cargoes, our men. . . . None would be surrendered, of this convoy or of any other, if it depended on any effort of his.Born on Rodney Street in Liverpool, Monsarrat was educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge. He intended to practise law. The law failed to inspire him, however, and he turned instead to writing, moving to London and supporting himself as a freelance writer for newspapers while writing four novels and a play in the space of five years (1934–1939). He later commented in his autobiography that the 1931 Invergordon Naval Mutiny influenced his interest in politics and social and economic issues after college. You can really appreciate this was written by a person who had actually experienced these things, so the term historical “fiction” should be used loosely if describing this book. He loved the sea, though not blindly: it was the cynical, self-contemptuous love of a man for a mistress whom he distrusts profoundly but cannot do without. THE war to which they went had hardly settled down, even in broad outline, to any recognizable pattern. From London". The Mail. Adelaide: National Library of Australia. 9 January 1954. p.50. Archived from the original on 29 March 2021 . Retrieved 10 July 2012.

I suppose you were slipping ashore the whole time.” He took an enormous gulp of whisky, coughed, and only just held on to it. His eyes moved unsteadily round to Morell and Ferraby. “And as for you married men—married — ” He lost the thread of what he was going to say, but unfortunately started again. “You had a wonderful time. Don’t tell me.” But this isn't just a war story. In a surprisingly subtle way, The Cruel Sea also chronicles the often abrasive process by which classes, previously unknown to each other, were thrown together onboard ship and had to learn to rub along - and how the earned respect, in the long term, led to the future Welfare State and the social equity and cooperation of the 50's and 60's. In 1956, according to the documentary Fifties British War Films: Days of Glory, when Elstree Studios was being sold to the BBC, Sir Michael Balcon was asked what had been his greatest achievement during his tenure. He replied "I think perhaps The Cruel Sea because when we saw that for the first time, we realised that we really had brought it off. It seemed to just gel and be absolutely right. Sometimes you don't get that feeling, but with that one we all did." Monsarrat notes before the action begins that this is a "long" book. Given that it is fewer than 500p it hardly seems so, but it is three times the length of a more typical novel of its day...and there is no bloating or padding here. It's a compelling tale from the outset and all the way through to the end, which covers the entire period of the war as the Royal Navy attempts to keep the vital supply lines of Merchant Navy traffic protected from the depredations of the German U-boats. It had gone on too long, it had failed too horribly, it had cost too much. They had been at action stations for virtually eight days on end, missing hours of sleep, making do with scratch meals of cocoa and corned-beef sandwiches, living all the time under recurrent anxieties that often reached a desperate tension. There had hardly been a moment of the voyage when they could forget the danger that lay in wait for them and the days of strain that stretched ahead, and relax and find peace. They had been hungry and dirty and tired, from one sunrise to the next: they had lived in a ship crammed and disorganized by nearly three times her normal complement. Through it all, they had had to preserve an alertness and a keyed-up efficiency, hard enough to maintain even in normal circumstances.

He said — ah — ‘Don’t come the acid with me,’” Morell screwed up his eyes. “‘Come the acid’ . . . I must confess I have not heard that before.” Saltash Castle was portrayed by Castle-class corvette HMS Portchester Castle, pennant F362, as in the film. Although she had been paid off in 1947, she was held in reserve until broken up in 1958, and so could be made available for use in the film. I listened to this in Swedish read by Tore Bengtsson. It was clearly read and not hard to follow, but the tone put me off. It felt like it was a man reading for other men. This is kind of hard to explain, but it is the definite feeling I get. Men in the company of other men speak this way. Add the presence of women and the tone changes. The narration I have given three stars. He should have done something about getting the mess cleared up in the fo’c’s’le, but he couldn’t be bothered. He should somehow have organized at least one hot meal a day, even if it were only warmed-up tinned beans; the galley fire was unusable, but with a little ingenuity it could have been done in the engine room. This, again, was more trouble than he was prepared to take. Instead, he sulked, and shirked, and secretly longed to be out of it.

Therefore it was an unusual and happy occasion earlier today when Martin walked with me to the Park Ridge Library booksale and I espied a copy of Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, a novel Dad had had and which I had read sometime in childhood. The title might not have been enough. The author's name meant nothing. But the cover was the very cover of Dad's edition.Ferraby was only twenty; his eyes were new, and took a good deal on trust. Other eyes — Ericson’s among them — were not new, and to them, it must: be admitted, the convoy was somewhat more impressive than the escort, which reflected perfectly the pinched circumstances of the Royal Navy at this stage. To shepherd these forty-six ships through waters that were potentially the most treacherous in the world, there had been provided one fifteen-yearold destroyer, of a class that, though valiantly manned and valiantly driven, was really far too slight and slender for the Atlantic weather: two corvettes—one a pre-war edition of crude design, the other Compass Rose; a trawler; and a rescue tug that already, in the sheltered waters of Liverpool Bay, was bouncing about like a pea on a drum. Five warships — four and a half would be nearer the truth to guard forty-six slow merchantmen was not a reassuring prospect. But there it was: the best that could be done. 3 Over half a century later, the historian Paul Kennedy still considered Monsarrat's fictionalisation of his experiences as the best and most authentic guide to the mentality of the wartime escort commander. [2] Film and radio adaptations [ edit ]