Naval Occasions
DISCHARGED DEAD. By Sydney Hart. (Odhams Press, 13s. 6d.)
Graf Spec by Miehael Powell is the book of his film, ?'ire Battle of the River Plate, which is not to be confused with, or indeed compared to, Mr. Dudley Pope's excellent book of the same name. Mr. Powell has transferred from the film large chunks of dialogue verbatim. Much of this is highly artificial, owing to Mr. Powell's fondness for over-dramatising. Yet his statement on the dust-jacket, 'This is not a historical document, it is an adventure story,' disarms most criticism, and at least the book does not suffer from the film's
visual unreality. In a final chapter Mr. Powell's explanation of Captain Langsdorff's seemingly baffling behaviour is the most illuminating and satisfactory I have yet read.
From the hysterical blurb of Ordeal Below Zero you might think you were on to another jazzed-up adventure story. 'Each journey, says the blurb-writer, referring to the Arctic convoys, `was a perilous struggle for survival.' This is rubbish. On two of the convoys which I sailed in we weren't attacked once, and this was also true of others. Why embroider when the material you already have is what it is ? As it happens, M. Blond has written a first-rate objective account of all the main Arctic naval operations—convoys P.Q. 16 and 17, the sortie of the Hipper and Lutzow, the X-craft attack on the Tirpitz, the sinking of the Scharnhorst.
Sydney Hart served in submarines as a stoker. He writes in a charming, leisurely, mid- Victorian style in which numerous depth-charge attacks and the deaths of almost all his shipmates are mentioned as a sort of afterthought (e.g., `Leading Stoker Thompson—since lost, alas was filling in a form.'). He adores his officers, he quotes from Kipling, Mark Twain, Belloc and the Bible, and he is apt to start a sentence : 'It may perhaps interest my readers . . All that is missing are the chapter headings : 'I go to sea—I am shanghaied—I am demobbed, etc.' A most unusual collector's piece.
LUDOVIC KENNEDY
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