| moscowexile |
03-26-08 04:28 AM |
What few people seem to realise now is that every merchant seaman in WWII was a civilian: he was under no military obligation to go to sea; he was just doing his job. Yes, that "job" not only contibuted to, but was, indeed, essential to the allied war effort against the axis powers in Europe, hence merchant ships and their crews were considered to be legitimate targets of military action. And here we come to the thorny question of unerestricted submarine warfare: sinking without warning and refusal to rescue survivors.
The very nature of the U-boot weapon necessitated such tactics as did the very nature of Nazi Germany's enemy, Great Britain. That is why Churchill said after the end of the hostilities that the U-boat threat was the only thing that had seriously worried him during the whole of the hostilities. (Quoted on the frontispiece of the SH3 user's handbook.) As former First Lord of the Admiralty in WWI, Churchill knew what he was talking about: in 1917 British shipping losses in the Atlantic had become so perilously high that Admiral Jellicoe, he who had got a bloody nose in containing the German surface threat in the shape of the Imperial German High Seas Fleet in 1916, informed Lloyd George (the British Prime Minister at that time) that he was ready to throw the towel in, that the war would shortly become unwinnable.
Another often unkown or forgotten point concerning British merchant seamen in WWII is the fact that statistically a merchant seaman (and I repeat: all such seamen were civilians) had the lowest survival rate of all when compared to the survival rates of any other section of allied combatants during World War II.
Another point: as a boy I often used to visit the waterfront at Liverpool. Then, as now, I was fascinated with all matters maritime. Then, but not now, the River Mersey was choc-a-block with ships nearly all bound for or returned from the New World. (One of the liners at that time that I remember well was the Canadian Pacific Lines Empress of Canada.) And also at that time the Mersey estuary was littered with the rusting hulks of ships that had run the Atlantic gauntlet only to be sunk by air attacks whilst waiting to be unloaded in the Liverpool docks.
On the Pier Head at Liverpool is a memorial to those that did not survive the Atlantic run and voyages in other convoys; their names and the names of their ships are all meticulously registered on tablets of bronze; a great many of those names are not English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh: they are Hindu, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, African....
When the war began, Britain's merchant service included 45,000 men from the Indian sub-continent and over 6,000 Chinese, as well as many Arabs. According to the Official History 37,651 merchant seamen died as a result of direct enemy action: the true total that includes deaths indirectly due to the war would be 50,525. (Source: Blood, Toil, Tears, Folly: Deighton, L, HarperCollins 1997.)
And they were all only doing their job when they died: very quickly if they were lucky and agonisingly slowly if not; dying, often mutilated, crippled or burnt, in their open boats upon the storm wracked North Atlantic, where it was seldom anything but cold; going mad whilst slowly and agonisingly suffering from thirst and exposure.
The sea lanes were kept open because, in the final analysis, enough ships were built and there were enough brave men and boys to man them. During the war Britain's Shipping Federation (the recruitment organisation for the British merchant marine, renamed the Merchant Navy after WWI in honour of the valour of merchant marine sailors) was receiving over 100 letters a day from boys (16 was the minimum recruiting age) asking for a job afloat.
They were too young for the fighting forces but old enough to drown in the Atlantic.
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