The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, adapted for The BBC

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This is a very good work about war.
And…The Cruel Sea.

By a strange coincidence, I have finished listening to this adaptation after having the chance to hear another:

- Homage to Catalonia

There are similarities and differences.

- They are both about war
- In Homage to Catalonia and The Cruel Sea we have protagonists with left wind views, sometimes convictions
- Both narratives propose formulas for conflict
- In Homage to Catalonia war was 99% tedium and 1% sheer terror
- The Cruel Sea presents a formula that goes something like this: 94% paper work and the rest bloody bodies

It is a compelling, meaningful, moving, and terrifying at times, especially knowing it was all so real tale of men, ships and The Cruel Sea:

- “Capt. Ericson: [opening lines as narrator] This is a story of the Battle of the Atlantic, the story of the ocean, two ships, and a handful of men. The men are the heroes; the heroines the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea that man has made more cruel.”

Horrifying as it mostly is the story includes some comical and at times happy moments, when some romance escapes the gruesome war.

At the end, which is well known by all those who have been through some elementary classes, so no need for spoiler alerts, and the Nazis surrender.
But a couple of U boats arrive with one captain so full of himself and arrogant that looked like he is on parade.

This upsets Captain Ericson who orders:

- Shoot through the hair of this repugnant individual to show him who won…words to that effect that is

Otherwise, most of the narrative is about scores of people dying, civilians on board convoy ships and soldiers.
Some die horrendously, in what is called “friendly fire”.

In one instance, our heroes think they have identified signals from an enemy submarine, a U boat that is near.
The decision to attack it is terrorizing the captain, who wants to destroy a vessel that would kill so many if allowed to escape.

Only just where the explosives need to be discharged in order to get the German submarine, survivors from a ship are stranded.
When the explosion is over, bodies and body parts flow through the air and float on The Cruel Sea without any good reason:

- It was a mistake and the signal must have had another cause

That has reminded me of two other events, one more recent and the other from The Imitation Game, the moment when they break the Enigma Machine Code.
There is an impulse to announce a convoy of ships about the imminent attack that is now known from the decoded messages.

But if they would do that, the Germans would know that there code is now useless and immediately change it.

So it is better to allow innocent people to die at that moment and avoid the death of many, many more later.
The other terrible event involved the US Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes that has shot down an Iranian passenger plane.

The awful mistake is mentioned in the classic Blink- the Power of Thinking without Thinking by the fabulous Malcolm Gladwell.
It refers to the theory of “thin slicing” and the pressure in that particular case to decide in seconds what to do about an incoming flight that did not respond to any warning and repeated attempts to make it change course.

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