If you were born in Australia in 1945, as I was, you were likely to have put in front of you, when you could read, books about the war.  When mum’s parents joined the Herald-Sun Book Club, it was full of titles like The Dambusters, Boldness Be My Friend, and Two Eggs on My Plate.  Perhaps the best known was The Cruel Sea – especially after the launch of the film with a cast led by Jack Hawkins. 

The author was a natural and most graceful writer.  During the war, he had served in and commanded the kind of ships dealt with in the book – the smaller naval vessels that accompanied convoys on the Western Approaches by attacking German U-boats with depth-charges.  The Germans could by attacking Britain’s supply lines have forced it to sur for peace.  Gradually, the British navy got on top, but, like Waterloo, it was a damned close-run thing.  Monsarrat’s knowledge of all this comes through on every page, but he is just as much at home in discussing the private lives of the sailors.  The result is a wonderful and moving classic of the genre.

The novel covers the whole duration of the war.  It centres on two ships, a corvette, HMS Compass Rose, and a frigate, HMS Saltash, and two officers, Ericson and Lockhart.  We go through the commissioning of both ships and the training of their crews before they go into action.  Ericson is the senior officer and a professional seaman.  Lockhart is a journalist and Ferraby, the other sub-lieutenant, is a bank clerk. 

Their characters are very different – and so is their performance.  At the start, they have to put up with a dreadful first lieutenant, who is Australian, and it is a mercy when they lose him.  (To return to Oz and, as we later hear, bullshit about his experiences.)  Lockhart becomes Number One on each ship, and is in many ways the central character.  He and Ericson are very close, while still observing the discipline of rank.  They are joined by Morell, who is a barrister, married to a very attractive actress.  Ericson is the very model of the captain of a warship in wartime.  He is fully supported by his wife – but not by her mother.  He has a son at risk in the merchant navy.  When Saltash comes in, we meet new officers.

All the time, we are learning of the traditions and customs of the Royal Navy.  That is an institution that has been vital to the nation and its people since well before Trafalgar.  (We learn that Lockhart idolises Nelson and can quote him at will – something he must have picked up before he signed up.)  So we learn all this as they go – and we go.  It is utterly engrossing, because the writer is so obviously at home with his theme and his craft.  The whole book is imbued with a sense of dedication to all those who served, especially those who did not make it back.

There are scenes that stay in our minds – in my case for about sixty years.  After a very hard convoy, Compass Rose returns to Liverpool which is still smoking after nights of heavy bombing.  Two ratings in uniform turn the corner to see if the house of the sister of one of them is still standing.  On a later run, Ericson has to decide whether he should run over his own countrymen in order to pursue a U-boat.  No man or woman should ever be put in that position – but you could say that about almost anything that happens in this dreadful war which calls to mind life and death in the trenches at the Somme.

 Some men crack, and some wives play up – the two may be related.  Lockhart falls madly in love with the belle of the Wrens, and she reciprocates it – presumably to the sadness of many sailors  There is a Don Quixote sequence of the grotesque horrors of the war, and the sequence dealing with life and death after Compass Rose is torpedoed contains writing that is as strong as that left to us by the great Russian novelists.

The cast of characters is delicious.  When the officers are introduced in the ward-room of Saltash, one causes a pause when he (Holt) announces that he went to Eton.  The Australian – ‘Guns’ – who is, thank heaven, nothing like the first one, decides to take the Etonian on and asks him if he was taught about Australia.  ‘Well, yes.  Convicts and rabbits.’  Holt has the hots for the Wren whom Lockhart will fall for.  Things may be a little different below decks.  Stoker Evans has been putting it about to excess.  It all catches up with him when his ship is torpedoed.

But he could guess what could happen now.  The wives would combine against the other women, and rout them; they would then combine again, this time against him, in the dock for seduction, in prison for debt, in jail for bigamy: he could imagine no future that was not black and complicated, and no way out of it, of any sort….It seemed to him, in a moment of insight, that he had had a good run – too good a run to continue indefinitely – and that the moment had come for him to pay for it.  If he did not pay for it now – in the darkness, in the cold oily water in private – then he would have to meet a much harsher reckoning when he got home.

That is how this writer links what happens at sea in the war to what goes on at home.  It is wonderful writing – as much like a play or opera as a novel.

Here is how the author sums up near the end.

….no quiet end could obscure the triumph and pride inherent in this victory, with its huge cost – 30,000 seamen killed, 3000 ships sent to the bottom in this one ocean – and its huge toll of 780 U-boats sunk, to even the balance.

It would live in history, because of its length and unremitting ferocity: it would live in men’s minds for what it did to themselves and to their friends, and to the ships they often loved.  Above all, it would live in naval tradition and become a legend, because of its crucial service to an island at war, its price in sailors’ lives, and its golden prize – the uncut life-line to the sustaining outer world.

In truth, this book shows how England (Great Britain, I should say)  won the war – through the grim determination of its fighters and the true grit of its people at home.  This memorial is for me as good a read as any book in this two hundred book collection.