When there was nowhere to go but down

It goes without saying that the second world war was decided as much on the western ocean as in the sky over England. Indeed the Battle of the Atlantic could be seen as the Battle of Britain in slow motion, its critical period lasting for the first three and a half years of the war. There was little dash about the battle, however, which has only occasionally been illuminated by a book or film, like The Cruel Sea, which gives this book its rather unworthily derivative title.

First glancing through the 700 pages, it seems taxingly repetitive. All those ships (merchantmen tended to have inconsequential names like racehorses), their captains (here accorded their initials in the old-fashioned way) and cargoes (manganese, bauxite, kerosene and tanks, the equivalent of Masefield’s ‘Tyne coal, pig-lead, iron-ware and cheap tin trays’) come and go. But the battle was repetitive — and that is how it must be described — only the strategy, tactics, weaponry and, of course, the sea constantly changing. But it is this drumbeat that gives this book its cumulative power.

Richard Woodman, himself a former sea-captain, the author of fine histories of the convoys to Malta and Russia and a sequence of historical novels, understands the sea and seamen and tells the story without artificial colouring. Churchill described the Atlantic war as one of ‘groping and drowning, of ambuscade and stratagem, of science and seamanship’. Had it been lost by the British, as it nearly was, Hitler would have won the war.

It began with nearly 2,000 British merchant ships at sea, about half of them liners or cargo-liners, half freighters, tank- ers and tramps. The life of the British Isles was dependent upon the cargoes the U-boats, raiders and bombers tried to send to the bottom and often did.