HMS Ulysses

"This was published in 1955. It mattered to little me because I was in the period of falling in love with reading. One of the first books I laid my hands on, having taken the step up from the junior library to the senior library, was this book, HMS Ulysses . One look at the cover, one read of the first page, and you knew exactly what it was about. The HMS Ulysses was a light cruiser, one of the warships on the Arctic run that went from Scapa Flow in the Orkneys (way off the top of Scotland) via Norway and around the North Cape to Murmansk. These were incredibly risky and horrible journeys, with the odds that you would come to grief. We lost over 100 ships on those Arctic convoys. In the winter, when the weather was at its worst, you’re talking temperatures of minus 20 degrees. There is constant snow, everything is icy, your mug of coffee would stay hot for about six seconds. The boat is being flung everywhere. It weighs 7000 tonnes, but it makes no difference because the waves are enormous. On top of that, the enemy (U-boats, and bombing raids from Luftwaffe airfields in Norway) is trying to kill you. There are endless reasons why you’re not very happy. I realised, as anyone reading this book will realise, that it’s an essay in exhaustion. The book starts off with a mutiny. The men are knackered, and they have had enough. The Vice Admiral, known as Farmer Giles, has made a series of terrible decisions and suffered a mental breakdown. The captain, whose name is Richard Vallery, has tuberculosis. He’s a sick man, but he’s ultra-loyal to his ship and his crew and is determined to get them through it. This is a key convoy, and he’s there to protect it. “We lost over 100 ships on those Arctic convoys” Alistair MacLean had served on these convoys. He’d been a wireless and torpedo operator as a seventeen-year-old, so he had hands-on experience of what it was like. That’s key. Len Deighton did his best to become a bomber pilot, and people say that if you read Bomber, you’ll discover how to fly a Lancaster. But he was far too young to have fought in the war. MacLean wasn’t. He had been through it. As a result, for me as a young reader, every page, every paragraph, every exchange of dialogue had an authenticity you can’t miss. I read it time and time again and thought, ‘Can things have been that bleak, that desperate, that testing, and how did those guys ever come through?’ I don’t want to give you any spoilers, but the fact is that most of them don’t. The novel has an enormous cast of characters, and the characters by and large are the ship’s company. They are young, old, experienced, inexperienced, novice. Together, they have to man up and fight the enemy, not just on this trip, not just on the trip before, but on the trip to come, assuming they make it to Murmansk. Do they get there? You’ll have to read the book. I read this book as an eleven-year-old. I’ve got an eleven-year-old grandson and I gave him HMS Ulysses last year for his birthday. To my delight, he devoured it in ten days. You asked about writers who don’t do their homework and whether the reader notices. Even when you’re eleven you can smell the real thing, and by God, this was the real thing. The Germans were partners with the Russians after the non-aggression pact of 1939. Hitler honoured that pact for less than two years: in June 1941, he invaded the Soviet Union. That was a blessing for us because it was someone else doing the fighting and the dying. That sounds cynical, but it was important. It is one of history’s ironies that the Communists became the capitalists’ best chance of surviving the war and beating the Nazis. The Soviets could only do that with a lot of material help. Much of that help came from the United States via Britain. It was Britain’s job to get the tanks, the Spitfires, the Hurricanes, the fuel, the ammunition, and the food, to Murmansk. Then, it all went south into Russia by rail. That is why those convoys—and they cost an arm and a leg, in terms of men and shipping—were so important. We had to put money on the table to keep the Soviets fighting our mutual enemy."