Читать книгу The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice - John Bourne - Страница 19

Tony Lane

The development of submarine commerce warfare in the First World War and its extensive and systematic application in the Second World War ensured that in both wars merchant seamen were the only civilians to be killed in large numbers by military action: 14,679 in the First War, 28,000 in the Second. Where in each war the casualty rates suffered by merchant seamen were higher than those for Royal Navy seamen, in 1939–45 merchant seamen actually had a higher death rate than any of the armed forces. The wars produced a few epic encounters between lightly armed merchant ships and warships, and frequent examples of extraordinarily resourceful feats of survival in lifeboats and the nursing homeward of seriously damaged ships. Of the latter, there was the extraordinary case of the San Demetrio. Abandoned by her crew, then reboarded by those in a lifeboat unnoticed by a rescue ship, fires were extinguished and makeshift steering organised. With engines restarted, the San Demetrio limped home with her cargo of petrol – to be celebrated in a full-length feature film and a Government publication, The Saga of San Demetrio, by F. Tennyson Jesse (HMSO, 1942).

Seafarers could hardly have been unaware of their critical role in bringing in food and raw materials, or insensitive to the risks they ran; neither their exploits nor their crucial role in the supply chain seems in any way to have affected their everyday behaviour. They did not set aside their habitual independent-minded attitudes to shipboard discipline and become ‘respectable’ and orderly patriotic citizens. In both wars, merchant seamen unquestioningly adjusted to testing circumstances, but in their everyday actions they insisted on being themselves. They were intensely proud of their occupational culture, and at the heart of this fine mesh of norms and values was a profound belief in the legitimacy of resistance to breaches of customary rules of justice and fair play, and entitlement, when opportunity offered, to a ‘good run ashore’. These beliefs were not set aside in the exceptional conditions of war, and merchant seafarers could therefore seem to be both heroic and a disorderly rabble. They were neither. They were themselves.