‘After ordering the chief officer away in a boat with 30 men the vessel was torpedoed again… throwing a high column of blazing benzine high into the air, setting the ship on fire from the foremast, right aft. The water on both sides was immediately covered with burning benzine. In spite of the port boat being 250 feet away from the ship it was filled with burning benzine and being a metal boat it soon melted. The occupants must have perished immediately… During three hours in the water before finding a raft I bumped into several of my men. I turned two of them over but they were beyond recognition, the flames had done their work only too well.’41
Both wars generated, among some of the more excitable jingoistic commentators, stories of brutal German warship crews. There were inevitably people who behaved cruelly, but the war at sea provided far more opportunities for acts of generosity and common humanity than were available to armies. When in the First World War the cruiser Dresden encountered the sailing ship Penrhyn Castle, the German captain allowed the ship to set a course for home unmolested on discovering that the sailing ship’s captain had his wife and child aboard.42 There were also numerous examples of submarine crews towing lifeboats to safety, providing first aid to wounded crew members, giving navigational advice, sending radio messages to neutral ships, supplying food, water and tobacco. In both wars some of these stories got into the press. The Daily Mirror, for example, reported in 1940 that an Italian submarine, after sinking the British Fame, towed the survivors in their boats to St Michaels in the Azores43. In 1941 an 18-year-old survivor recounted how, after survivors had got into rafts and a lifeboat, the submarine rose to the surface and the U-boat commander handed over a couple of bottles of rum and some tins of bully beef. He said goodbye and submerged.44
During the years of each conflict the war at sea killed thousands of seafarers. War is about damaging others defined as enemies, and this is well understood by the participants. But this engagement does not preclude the possibility of expressions of common humanity, whether it were between the formal enemies or among those on the ‘same side’, but commonly at odds with each other. Wars invariably demonstrate the absurdity of the condition itself. They also, and even more absurdly, offer some of the participants the opportunity of rediscovering the essential condition of life itself, that without solidarity there can be no life. Many survivors went to the edge and experienced that elementary lesson of interdependence – then forgot it again afterwards. It was bizarre and often remarked upon that survivors were quickly sorted out into officers and ratings. This was naturally regarded as essential because officers needed to be lodged in hotels of a certain class, and ratings in hotels of another class. Once back aboard ship – and it was the same in both World Wars – the rituals of encounters between persons of different classes carried on as usual.
In conclusion
The view of war as an imposition from a world of affairs that was ‘nothing to do with us’ was not unique to merchant seafarers, and was probably universal. In his novel August, 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes what he plainly takes to be the common response to the onset of war: ‘People in the village did not discuss the war or even think about it as an event over which anyone had any control or which ought or ought not to be allowed to happen. They accepted the war… as the will of God, something like a blizzard or a dust-storm…’45 Pre-revolution rural Russia, at least in terms of outlook on the world and thinking about the possibilities of human control over events, was perhaps not so far distant from Britain, which was in 1914 probably the most industrialised nation on the planet. Very little of the apparatus of the modern democratic state then existed in the UK. Property and residential requirements left roughly half the adult male population without the right to vote, and of course virtually all women were unenfranchised. A sequence of electoral reforms ensured that by 1939 almost all of the adult population had the vote, but the knowledge and experience of the democratic process beyond electoral politics was inevitably rudimentary. A young infantry lieutenant, Neil McCallum, noted in his diary during the Second World War that he found it ironic that if he and his comrades were fighting for democracy, why was it so ‘hard to find an infantryman who could define democracy?’46
The merchant seafarer – or at least the ratings – came from the same stratum as McCallum’s infantrymen and were no less hard-pressed to explain what the war was about.47 Fifty years afterwards and thinking about how he and his shipmates had thought about the Second World War, Alan Peter, who had been a bosun, was surely right in his characterisation of attitudes:
‘We had no control over the politics of war, had we? In the fo’c’sles of all the ships that I can remember or amongst the crew when we’d sit out on the poop at night chewing the fat just before the sun went down, there’d be fooling about among the younger ones wrestling or sparring up to each other, doing their hobbies or playing the mouth organ. That was the usual thing and occurred no less than in peacetime. There was no great discussion about the pros and cons of war.’48
It is impossible to escape the conclusion that most merchant seamen, despite feeling the full brunt of war, especially in the Second World War, felt that it had little to do with them. They kept it out of their lives even though it pervaded them.
Notes on contributors
Professor Tony Lane, Cardiff University, UK
Tony Lane is Director of the Seafarers International Research Centre at Cardiff University. He has written extensively on merchant seafarers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including The Merchant Seaman’s War (1990).
Recommended reading
Beckman, Morris, Atlantic Roulette (Brighton: Tom Donovan Publishing, 1996). Easily the best everyday account of a wartime voyage. Excellent.
Bennett, G. H. and R., Survivors (London: Hambledon Press, 1999). A very full account of Second World War merchant seafarer survivors.
Lane, Tony, The Merchant Seaman’s War (Manchester: University Press, 1990, and Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 1993)
‘The people’s war at sea: work-discipline and merchant seamen, 1939–1945’ in Scottish Journal of Labour History, 1995, pp61–86. Provides the only case study refutation of the ‘people’s war thesis’.
Thomas, R. Gabe, Milag: Merchant Navy Prisoners of War (Porthcawl: Milag Prisoner of War Association, 1995). A very detailed ‘warts and all’ account of the merchant seafarers POW camp, Milag Nord, in North Germany.
Woodman, Richard, Arctic Convoys 1941–1945 (London: John Murray, 1994)
There have been no thorough studies of merchant seafarers in the First World War. Books published during the war or soon thereafter are neither in print nor readily available.
War in the air: the fighter pilot
David Jordan
The first flight of an aircraft in 1903 created a new arena for warfare. In simple terms, the aircraft was another piece of machinery produced by advancing technology. Although from the perspective of the 21st century it is difficult to perceive the Wright Flyer or Blériot’s monoplane as articles of cutting-edge technology, at the time of their construction they represented the height of innovation. They were also dangerous. Their newness made them unreliable, and herein lay the difficulties. If a piece of