the good ship

 

H.M.S. Penelope, in Gibraltar for repairs in 1942.

[Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/gn4yuw/1300_x_990_hms_penelope_nicknamed_hms_pepperpot/ .]

I was at the dump last week, shoving crumpled papers into the slit on the side of the paper-recycling skip, when my finger-tips touched the spines of books. Books, real books! I began to fish them out, and in the end I walked away with five: Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, two poetry collections by Christy Brown, and two books by C.S. Forester, the Hornblower fellow. (Do you remember that book about D.H. Lawrence, Hornblower of the Unconscious? -- maybe I dreamt it.)

Presteign knew himself to be on the verge of a great outburst of poetry; a sequence of sonnets; the falling bomber, the Italian Navy ranged along the horizon, the Italian destroyer bursting into flames to split the night, the German submarine rising tortured to the surface; these were what he was going to write about. Presteign did not know whether ever before naval warfare had been made the subject of a sonnet-cycle, neither did he care. He was sure of himself with the perfect certainty of the artist as the words aligned themselves in his mind. The happiness of creation was upon him as he stood there beside the pompom with the wind flapping his clothes, and the stern wave curling gracefully behind the ship; grey water and white wake and blue sky; and the black smoke screen behind him. The chatter of his friends was faint in his ears as the first of the sonnet-cycle grew ever more and more definite in his mind.

"'Ere we go again," said Nibs.

Artemis was heeling over on the turn as she plunged back into the smoke screen to seek out her enemies once more.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 

FROM THE CAPTAIN'S REPORT

. . . further hits were observed until . . .

                              *

The smoke screen was only a little less dense this time; it was holding together marvellously well as that beautiful wind rolled it down upon the Italian line. The ventilating shafts took hold of the smoke and pumped it down into the interior of the ship, driving it along with the air into every compartment where men breathed. Acrid and oily at the same time, it dimmed the lights and it set men coughing and cursing. In 'B' turret, forward of the bridge and only just lower than it, the guns' crews stood by with the smoke eddying round them; their situation was better than that of most, because the ventilation here was speedier and more effective than in any other enclosed part of the ship. The guns were already loaded and they could feel the turret training round. Every man of the guns' crews had a skilled job to do, at some precise moment of the operation of loading and firing, and to keep a six-inch gun firing every ten seconds meant that each man must so concentrate on doing his work that he had no time to think of anything else; after a few minutes of action they would find it hard to say offhand on which side the turret was trained, and unless the loudspeaker or Sub-Lieutenant Home told them they would know nothing about the damage their shots were doing. Their business was to get the guns loaded every ten seconds; the transmitting station would do their calculation for them, the director would point the guns and fire them. But they knew what the return into the smoke screen implied. It was hardly necessary for Sub-Lieutenant Home to tell them quietly:

"We shall be opening fire again in two minutes' time."

(from C.S. Forester's The Ship, Chapters 15-16)

I've found it disturbing to witness the shaping of public opinion over these past two years, the use of propaganda on a scale I'd never seen before (or perhaps had never noticed before). So it was with considerable transferred resentment that I now read The Ship (1943), which is essentially a propaganda novel. 

In the 1930s Forester was making his money in Hollywood, like so many other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name but one), but when the war started he returned to London to work for the new Ministry of Information. (He was soon sent back across the Atlantic, to assist in persuading the USA to join the Allies.) 

He researched The Ship by spending time aboard H.M.S. Penelope (presumably this was when "H.M.S. Pepperpot" was in New York for repairs), and his novel is informative about life aboard a light cruiser, the workings of the ship and its armaments. It describes a sea battle in the Mediterranean while escorting a vital convoy to Malta. 

Not that Forester was anything but sincere in his passionate devotion to the Royal Navy, to naval warfare and armaments and personal sacrifice. In a sense he never stopped fighting the First World War. In such books as Brown on Resolution (1929) (the other book I hauled out of the skip) and The African Queen (1935) he portrayed men and women who were fanatically dedicated to landing a blow on the enemy. 

The Ship treats the navy and its personnel as heroes, with the intention of maintaining public support and a steady flow of new heroes. Propaganda means defining the model of heroism you want and making sure people perform the acts of heroism you've defined.  

This risks making the story a little dull, because no British sailor hero is allowed to be seen falling short of their duty or making a mistake, and none of the equipment is allowed to be anything other than perfectly made by the factory heroes at home. Death and destruction arrive in the form of Italian shells, but in a deeper sense nothing aboard ever goes wrong. Among the ship's lightly-sketched crew Forester shows us cowards who find their courage when it really matters, and rogues who step up to their duty when it really matters.  Or at least to be honourably blown to bits, like the poet Presteign. 

(A year later, H.M.S. Penelope was sunk by torpedoes, with the loss of two thirds of her 600 men. The recent defence secretary Penny Mordaunt was, as she told us, named after this celebrated ship.)

When, towards the end, the novel switches over briefly to the enemy flagship, things are very different. The German and Italian commanders are portrayed as vacillating, riven by internal jealousy, desperate to duck responsibility for failure, operating in regimes ruled by fear. The contrast with the British side is stark: in fact too stark to be quite credible. Here more than anywhere the propaganda shows through, the implausibilities that are being smuggled in under the cover of narrative realism.  

*

A fighting machine: that's a favourite metaphor, describing both the ship and the individual sailor. Forester is lyrical about it.  

The Captain sat on the stool which bucked beneath him like a playful horse; the motion was unnoticed by him even though the reflexes developed during years at sea were continually at work keeping him steady in his seat. He was thinking deeply, but on subjects so logical, and with such a comforting ingredient of mathematics, that his expression gave no sign of it. The Mephistophelian eyebrows were their normal distance apart; and although the plan he was to carry out called for the highest degree of resolution, the firm mouth was no more firmly compressed than usual, for the plan was a part of the Captain's life, something he was going to do, not something he wished to do or did not wish to do . . .

(The Ship, Chapter 11)

During the brief while he was taking aim there was time for a myriad thoughts. If he did not press the trigger he would be left unpursued; Ziethen would effect her repairs and clear from Resolution, and he would remain, a free man, to take his chance of being picked up by a passing ship to serve his country again. Once let him fire and kill one of Ziethen's crew, and all the hundreds of German sailors on board would become his sworn enemies, and might hound him down to his death. Death lay on the one hand, and liberty on the other; it was a momentous choice and one over which Brown might have hesitated. He did not hesitate at all; he did not even think about the choice. He had made up his mind last night, and when a man like Brown makes up his mind there is no room left for hesitation. 

(Brown on Resolution, Chapter 13)

Different as are the situations of Captain the Honourable Miles Ernest Troughton-Harrington-Yorke and Leading Seaman Albert Brown, both are distinguished by the ability to make a decision and stick to it. Brown, like the best of fighting machines, becomes an automaton: his decision once made, he no longer thinks about it. The Captain's decision once made becomes what today we'd call non-negotiable ("something he was going to do"), even existential ("a part of the Captain's life").

In these rare instances the men are acting on their own initiative, but they still act in the same way as if under orders. 

More commonly, the sailor's existence is about obeying the orders of others. So though the propagandist makes great play with "heroism", it isn't really heroism that's wanted in a fighting machine -- heroism is too unpredictable. As in any dull office job what's most needed is absolute and instant reliability. 

What attitude of mind is needed? The passage I quoted at the beginning continues to think about the men in 'B' turret:

A devotee of discipline of the old school would have been shocked to see the easy way in which they attended to their duties; a man did not spring to stiff attention when he had completed the operation for which he was responsible. He took himself out of the way of the others and stood poised to spring forward again. There was no need for the outward show of discipline, of the Prussian Guard type, with these men. They understood their business; they had worked those guns in half a dozen victories; they knew what they were fighting for; they were men of independent habit of thought working together with a common aim. They did not have to be broken into unthinking obedience to ensure  that they would do what they were told; thanks to their victories and to the age-long victorious tradition of their service they could be sure that their efforts would be directly aimed towards victory.

It was true as well that every man knew that the better he did his work the better would be his chance of life, that for every Italian he helped to kill in this battle there was one less Italian who might kill him, but that was only a minor, a very minor reason for doing his best. Love of life did not have nearly as much strength as did the love for the service which actuated these men, the love for the ship, and especially the artistic desire to do perfectly the task before them . . .

(The Ship, Chapter 16)

I think there is dishonesty in this passage. For instance, the propagandist is always keen to suggest that an independent habit of thought is a very good quality, and one that's notably evinced by the people he's propagandizing. 

But there's also a true insight here. Hitler and the Nazis were indeed an obscenity to be fought at all costs, and Forester is happy enough to bring forth anti-German and anti-Italian stereotypes when the opportunity arises; but the effectiveness of a fighting service cannot depend on how strongly individual sailors dislike their enemy. The effectiveness must depend on something else, on a prior dedication, on "love for the service" and "love for the ship" and pride in the Navy's record of victory. Victory entails combat: the sailor must long to fight and thrill at every chance of action, no matter the odds. 

In Brown on Resolution Forester had been less guarded about this. He admits of his dying young hero, "Never even had he known liberty; he had been all his life the slave either of a mother's ambition or of a Navy which demands her servitors' all to bestow upon unthinking ingrates" (Chapter 19). To be dedicated to the Navy was not about a patriotism based on any modern Britain that existed ("the babbling mob of civilians" (Chapter 11)), but on the Navy's own traditions, on aspiring to follow in the much-mythologized steps of Drake and Nelson. And at the core of this aspiration was an essential vacuity, something no more to be inspected than the decision already taken or the order from the bridge. The fighting machine must not be a mere human being.