Rating: 
Summary: Invaluable: beautiful prose, compelling historical fiction
Review: The Battle of the Atlantic is often referred to as a crucial campaign in the history of World War II; in keeping the sea lanes open throughout the war, the Allies kept the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in the fight and began the build up for operations in the Mediterranean and in Europe. Popular and historical focus in the Battle of the Atlantic often falls on the German U-Boats as their captains' daring and their crews' boldness make for more dashing stories. In contrast, technologies such as radar, sonar and the cracking of ULTRA are often credited with winning the battle for the Allies, and little attention is paid, generally, to the ships and men who fought the Germans and prevailed in the Atlantic. The Cruel Sea is their story. It is the story of a British destroyer tasked to escort Allied convoys across the Atlantic. It relates the entire course of the war, and illustrates the challenges that the British Navy and the Allies faced at various points in the Atlantic: manning ships with draftees in volunteers in a time of war, the the fear and uncertainty of pre-radar/sonar escort operations in the early years of World War II, and the slow and gradual triumph over the U-Boats after 1943. The Cruel Sea also is a gripping story of human nature, providing insights into loyalty, leadership and courage through the actions of its characters. The Cruel Sea is not a book about war; it is a book about people, men mostly, in a time of war and how they react to adversity. As literature, it is beautifully written, a masterpiece. The author crafts his words so that the reader is gripped by prose as well as by the action and flow of the story. It was a joy to read. The Cruel Sea is a valuable bit of history as well, shedding light on a service and a battle that few know about beyond devoted students of World War II.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, it is
Review: the best drama-at-sea novel of WWII, really, and stylishly written, by a professional writer who served as a naval officer. You not only believe he was there, you believe you are there. After reading it, one feels the weariness of war.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, it is
Review: the best drama-at-sea novel of WWII, really, and stylishly written, by a professional writer who served as a naval officer. You not only believe he was there, you believe you are there. After reading it, one feels the weariness of war.
Rating:
Summary: Probably the best WWII naval novel written
Review: The cold gripping fear, frustration,and agony of the convoy escorts in the North Atlantic during WWII. The physical and emotional sacrafices of the men assigned to escort duty to protect the life blood of Great Britan. Monsarrat is a fantastic story teller, filling the reader with emotions in a way that very few writers will ever master. The realization that Command is really lonely,and the second guessing of descisions is a tough pill for Captain Ericson to swallow. These sailors are not Regular Navy from a Family lineage of Naval service, rather the average Joe brought together by the war. Yet they form a strong fighting unit. As as in every war, death is not picky about whom it takes. A great book that will be hard to put down till it is finished. Give it some time and you will read it again.
Rating:
Summary: Man versus the sea - the real war
Review: The Cruel Sea is perhaps the finest novel written out of World War II. It is drawn on the actual service in the Royal Navy of the author. It is the story of two ships, maybe 200 men, German submarines and the constant relentless ocean. Even when there is no combat action, the sea is always there in all its forms - just waiting for a small defect to occurr and then it will claim another victim - be it man or ship. The sailors of the Compass Rose are a dramatic cross section. The captain is a reservist from the merchant navy while his officers are all volunteers from the civilian sector. One officer's only sea going experience is crossing the channel in a small yacht with a one woman crew. Not the best of material. The crew is even more diverse. The senior ratings, coxswain, signalman, engineer and several others, are all professional Royal Navy and it is one these men the captain will lean the most. The remainder of the crew is drawn from all walks of life from clerks to vet assistants. Together they are all molded into a working crew. The contacts with the German submarines are numerous but the end result is disappointing to some in that only two submarines are sunk between the two ships. Lots of survivors are pulled from the sea though as the submarines whittle away at the convoys chugging across the sea. One gets a sense of the unending grind that the men endure as the ships make thier rounds from Liverpool to New York with a side trip to Russia for variety. Even shore time is not enjoyed as the local Liverpool area is pounded by German bombers and wives and girlfriends are not willing to endure the constant seperation. Compass Rose is sunk and the crew, once more, is held together by the captain. Some men are heros and die a heros death and others are simply freightened men trying to stay alive which few do. It is a sobering time for the survivors as they look back at their life in Compass Rose. The captain and one officer move on to another ship and finish the war in her. Again, it is a return to the grind of fighting the sea and occassionally fighting the Germans. One submarine is sunk by the new ship and the war ends. There is little glory to be earned in this story, rather it is a tale of survival, hanging on to make it through the day or night. Everyone is a hero in this story from the junior sailor to the captain. It is a story that is being remembered less and less as the survivors of World War II diminish in numbers. It is a story to be read and remembered - when there was no array of electronic weapons and nuclear energy to draw upon to destroy an enemy; rather it was skill, patience, persistance and a willingness to endure that saw a successful outcome from a combat between corvette and submarine. Sometimes the corvette won and sometimes the submarine won. Many times it was a draw. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the war at sea during World War II. It should be in every naval officer's personal library regardless of nationality. Once read, it should never be forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Totally involving reading from first page to last.
Review: The late Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (originally published in 1951) is a powerful and riveting novel of maritime endurance and daring set in the North Atlantic during World War II. Carefully scripted and written, the reader is drawn into this story of the British ships Compass Rose and Saltash, and their desperate cat-and-mouse game on the high seas with Nazi U-boats. This fine trade paperback edition from Burford Books will introduce a whole new generation of action/adventure enthusiasts to a truly skilled and engaging writer whose ability to involve the reader from first page to last is rarely equaled and never surpassed.
Rating:
Summary: Nicholas Monsarrat,s best.
Review: The more I read this book,(having read it on six previous occasions),the more I want to read it. The best book ever written about war at sea. Nothing else come close.
Rating:
Summary: A cut-above WWII Sub-chaser film !
Review: There are probably two really good films that depicit life aboard a surface ship - target from a submariner's point-of-view - from the perspective of seeking-out and destroying U-boats. One is Dick Powell's "Enemy Below" (Mitchum-Jurgens); this is the other ...well worth viewing.
Rating:
Summary: I Am What I Am.
Review: This book literally changed my life. In the eleventh grade in Greenville, South Carolina, i had an English teacher who designated Thursday as "Free Reading Day" and encouraged the entire class to read anything they wanted to (well, within limits -- "Playboy" would have been Right Out, i'm sure.) -- and, in case you had nothing of your own, she laid out an assortment of magazines and books on a table at the front of the room. On that table, one Thursday, was a copy of "The Cruel Sea". Since i've always been at least a bit interested in sea stories, and it looked interesting, i picked it up. From the first i was hooked solidly. In the next three or so years, i reread it twice at least, possibly more than that. And then i joined the Navy -- and i am sure that it was because of what i read in this book, and what i sensed behind it, in what Monsarrat -- who, like his viewpoint character, Lockhart, was there from the beginning, working his way up to command his own ship before the end of the war -- didn't so much say as assume about the sea and the Navy -- *any* Navy. Monsarrat presents us here with a brotherhood of the sea, corny as that idea may sound. Sailors, more than the other Armed Forces, tend to regard other sailors -- even enemy sailors -- as brothers in arms, and, as Monsarrat says, the only true enemy is the cruel sea itself. As he shows us here, the sailor who was your enemy five minutes ago, who was trying to kill you as you tried to kill him, is merely another survivor to be rescued from the cruel sea once you've sunk his ship. And, even more so, as Monsarrat portrays it, there is a kind of brotherhood that binds sailors in the same Navy together in very mcuh a family manner -- you may not like your cousin, but you want to know what's happening to him and, when all is said and done, he IS your relative. The best summation of this sort of attitude (which i felt to some extent myself during my time in the US Navy) comes when Ericson, the Captain, is touring his new ship as she stands under construction in a Glasgow shipyard; he meets one of his future officers, and mentions the name of his previous ship, which was lost with over three-quarters of her crew, and realises that "He's heard about 'Compass Rose', he probably remembers the exact details--that she went down in seven minutes, that we lost eighty men out of ninety-one. He knows all about it, like everyone else in the Navy, whether they're in destroyers in the Mediterranean or attached to the base at Scapa Flow: it's part of the linked feeling, part of the fact of family bereavement. Thousands of sailors felt personally sad when they read about her loss; Johnson was one of them, though he'd never been within a thousand miles of 'Compass Rose' and had never heard her name before." To be part of a band of brothers like that is a proud thing, and Monsarrat captures it perfectly. He also captures the terrified boredom of being in enemy territory with nothing happening as you wait for the enemy to make the first move, and the shock, confusion and horror of combat (particularly sea combat, in which the battlefield itself is the deadly, patient enemy of both sides). And he captures the glories and rewards of life at sea, the beauty of a glorious clear dawn at sea, the stars and the moon and the wake at night and so much more. This is the book that made a sailor out of me. It will tell you what it is to be a sailor.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Fantastic!
Review: This gripping and long novel is an absolute classis, it is impossible to put it down! The escapades of HMS Compass Rose and Saltash are escellently depicted here, and it is a really great way to find out about life of convoy escorts in WW2, a definite must have gubbinz!
| 
