Battle of the Atlantic

THE CRUEL SEA (510 pp.]--Nicholas Monsarraf--Knopf ($4).

During the '30s, Nicholas Monsarrat was a budding British novelist. During World War II, he rose through the Royal Navy to command, in succession, three escort vessels, a corvette and two frigates, all on convoy duty in the North Atlantic. In The Cruel Sea, his first full-length novel since the war, Monsarrat writes a moving odyssey of the convoy men.

Monsarrat's story is "of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men." It begins late in 1939, when the corvette Compass Rose, "a fiddling bloody little gash-boat," is commissioned. A few halcyon runs, and then the U-boats come. On one ghastly trip to Gibraltar, a convoy of 21 merchantmen is reduced to seven--a slaughter with all too many counterparts in wartime reality.

Through '41 and '42, as the U-boats up their toll of Allied vessels, the Compass Rose rides dogged herd on its sheeplike formations, manages to bag one enemy sub. Then a night torpedo sends the corvette herself to the bottom. Only eleven of her officers and crew of 88, among them Captain Ericson and First Officer Lockhart, survive. These two, in the frigate Saltash, see the war against the U-boats shift from woefully inadequate defense to ruthlessly efficient pursuit.

Even in a story with scores of human actors, Ericson and Lockhart stand out as sharp, deeply drawn characters. Ericson, an easygoing veteran of the merchant service, hardens slowly into a killer as cold as a shark. He does not lose his humanity, but it shrinks up inside him like a dried pea. Lockhart is a richer and more appealing nature. He hardens in authority but he does not shrink. He broadens and deepens in his knowledge of men, and at the end, he not only can bear the weight of war, but can shoulder a home-base love affair with some weights of its own.

For Author Monsarrat as a writer, The Cruel Sea was as much a test as the cruel sea was for his characters. The son of a Liverpool surgeon, he had written four novels with the grace, talent and final inconsequence that seem the natural equipment of many a young English writer. Then came the war and four nonfiction books on naval operations, all of them good, one of them, H.M. Corvette, just about the best of its kind.

Plenty of writers have moaned about the creative years stolen from them by war service. For Novelist Monsarrat, as for his character Lockhart, "they were not lost years . . . He had grown up fast in the meantime, he was a different person from the . . . not very good journalist who had joined up in 1939 . . . He had missed five years of writing and travel, but he had gained in every other way . . . 'I should be all right after the war,' he told himself."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.