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First published in 1951, Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest pieces of war fiction ever written.
Its author joined the Royal Navy as a sub-lieutenant in July 1940, and throughout the war served with distinction on board three different corvettes and two frigates. As such, the scenes he describes in this and his other books are, for the most part, ones he had personally witnessed. So reliable are his accounts that they have been cited by several generations of historians.
But The Cruel Sea, Monsarrat’s 14th book, is not a documentary history of the war, nor of the battle in which it is set, the Battle of the Atlantic. The action described is minute in scale, limited to just two ships and their crews, as well as some close relatives. References to events in the wider war – such as the development of U-boat wolf-packs, and the increasing assistance from the Americans – are included only occasionally. This keeps the narrative focused and unflinchingly realistic.
The novel explores the burdens and loneliness of duty from the point of view of Captain George Ericson, the battle-scarred and ageing commander of the fictional corvette Compass Rose, and later of a whole escort group. Ericson is a father-figure to his officers and men, particularly the young and sensitive sub-lieutenants Keith Lockhart and Gordon Ferraby.
Monsarrat holds nothing back in his descriptions of the war at sea, and throughout his narrative there comes horror after horror: the mummified corpse still clutching the tiller of a small boat drifting across the convoy; the skeletal bodies bobbing about in life jackets, still roped together; and the ‘ghost ship’ with human remains plastered over the metalwork of the wrecked bridge like some ghastly abattoir.
But the most graphic illustration of the burden of duty is possibly the best-known scene from the book and the subsequent 1953 film, in which Ericson decides to go ahead with depth-charging a suspected U-boat even though the target area is full of swimming seamen who have just abandoned a torpedoed ship. Predictably they are killed, quickly but only after they have been hideously mutilated, and Ericson faces the revulsion of his crew for his decision – as well as the torture of his own conscience.
In this scene particularly, Monsarrat is clearly drawing on his own experiences. In some sense, the writing of The Cruel Sea must have been cathartic for him.
‘The only real villain’
The novel is remembered for its realistic focus on the ‘little ships’ of the Royal Navy. Popular perceptions are inevitably bound up with the great cruisers and capital ships, and the stirring set-piece battles with Kriegsmarine flagships such as Graf Spee, Bismarck, and Scharnhorst. But, in truth, the real work of the Royal Navy involved small ships like Compass Rose and the thousands of merchant ships they escorted. The numbers put things into perspective: during the war years five battleships and 57 cruisers were added to Britain’s naval fleet; in the same period, multiple new classes of destroyers and hundreds of specialised convoy escorts were built.
Of course, the small size of these ships made their crews as vulnerable as mariners of any era to the vagaries of what Monsarrat in his preface calls ‘the only real villain… the cruel sea itself’. The fleet of Flower Class corvettes, of which the Compass Rose is a fictional member, gained an enviable reputation for handling rough seas, largely because of their tiny size. But the price paid for this by the crew was that they bobbed about like corks, as Monsarrat describes:
They were always being hurt, in spite of a continual watchfulness: doorways hit them as they were leaving their cabins, they were thrown out of their bunks as soon as sleep relaxed their tense care, and all around them on the floor would be books and papers and boots and clothes, which some especially violent roll had released from control.
Despite these experiences, crews still preferred the stormiest of weather to the menace of the U-boat packs, which threatened torpedo attacks with increasing aggression and efficiency.
Stirring and gritty
Something that distinguishes the novel from purely factual accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic is the way Monsarrat effortlessly includes the lives of those left behind by the sailors. ‘At least a hundred and fifty women,’ he writes in the preface, ‘loving them, or tied to them, or glad to see the last of them as they go to war.’
The relationships he depicts were often complicated – and tinged with tragedy. For instance, there is the minor character of chief petty officer Bob Tallow, who stays regularly with his widowed sister Gladys in Liverpool, visiting her along with his friend Jim Watts, an engine room artificer. Over the course of the book, Tallow discovers Watts has an ‘understanding’ with his sister and wants to set up with her after the war. But the intense bombing of Liverpool puts paid to this ambition.
Some women, it has to be said, are oversimplified in the book, often reduced to a binary dynamic: the idealised figures like Tallow’s sister perish, while supposedly more ‘wayward’ women party in London as men freeze and drown at sea.
Another slightly dated aspect of the novel is the narrator’s attitude towards Britain’s allies. With the exception of the exiled men of the Dutch navy, all of these come in for criticism: the Americans are energetic but boastful and ignorant, the French defeatist, Russians are suspicious and hostile. These characterisations undoubtedly reflected the widely held stereotypes of the time. Veterans of the arduous Arctic convoys do recall the frosty reception they were met with at Murmansk, while other soldiers – having served from the opening shot of the war – saw America’s late arrival to the party with a mildly jaundiced eye.
With The Cruel Sea, Monsarrat doesn’t quite achieve the literary depth of fellow-mariner Joseph Conrad. Nor is his book a comprehensive history of the Battle of the Atlantic. But, as an account of the experience of ordinary men facing unimaginable hardship and danger, it remains a stirring and gritty account that can be read with fascination.
Nicholas Monsarrat
Born: 22 March 1910 – Died: 8 August 1979
Nationality: British
Monsarrat was born in Liverpool and went up to study law at Trinity College, Cambridge, but after a couple of years working in a solicitor’s office turned to journalism instead. His first novel, Think of Tomorrow, was published in 1934, but it was not until after the Second World War that he became a bestselling author. Aside from The Cruel Sea, his other books include 1963’s Smith and Jones, a Cold War thriller based on the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to the Soviet Union, and 1978’s The Master Mariner, the first of an uncompleted two- part story about the British Navy from 1588 to 1788.
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