It was the worst of times. It got worse. So the men onboard the HMS Ulysses rose up and fought on, past the cold, past the exhaustion, past the numbing, past the end of endurance, past the extremes of “fear, suspense, hunger…the things that break a man, that destroy him as surely as fire or steel or pestilence,” past the edge of the world, into the abyss. HMS Ulysses was Alistair MacLean’s first novel. Maclean is one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time, writing such famous thrillers as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare.* He was also a seaman and torpedo operator in the British Navy during World War II, serving part of his time on Arctic convoys. These miserable patrols, where 101 allied vessels were lost between 1941 and 1945, are the background of this tale of human endurance and pain, and the redemption of men of war in the coldest of circumstances.

The Ulysses is a light cruiser (think 6 inch guns, 7000-ish tons displaced, 500-ish feet long). The book opens with the Assistant Director of Naval Operations visiting the ship. There has been a mutiny. The Ulysses has gone out again and again and again and the men have broken, and then mutinied when ordered to set sail on another convoy again. Nearby marines put down the mutiny. In the opening chapter, when discussing the mutiny, the worldly-wise ship’s doctor explains what happens when people are pushed to the very edge of the suffering they can take and still survive, stating that:

“Such is the fantastic resilience and toughness of man that he can tolerate – for extremely short period. But the limit, the saturation capacity for adaption is soon reached. Push men beyond that limit and anything can happen. I say ‘anything’ advisedly because we don’t know the precise form the crackup will take – but crack-up there always is. It may be physical, mental, spiritual – I don’t know. But I do know this…the crew of the Ulysses has been pushed to the limit – and clear beyond.”

This is the essence of HMS Ulysses. The entire book is a character study. How far can you push a human being before they can be pushed no further? How many hours of sleep is too few? How cold is too cold? How many lost lives are too many? And if the crew of the Ulysses have been pushed already to the point of mutiny as the book opens, how much further is there that they can go? And most importantly, when someone has been pushed this far, what drives them to keep moving, to keep trying, to keep fighting?

Of course the Ulysses is ordered back to sea. Disaster quickly ensues. There are massive waves and horrific storms. There is freezing weather north of the Arctic Circle; weather so cold that watches are measured in minutes rather than hours because people will freeze to death. There are constant attacks from the Germans; so many attacks that the convoy runs out of depth charges and guns to shoot. There are men who “crack-up,” such as the Rear Admiral who loses his mind after making a slew of poor decisions. There are heroes, like the sickly, yet “courteous, kind, and considerate” Captain suffering from tuberculosis who can do no wrong, who is slowly working himself to death. There are villains, like the incompetent Junior Officer with a grudge or the Master-At-Arms who does not understand that every man is needed in the fight. There are clichés and fantastic coincidences, like the Seaman who keeps saving the day but must be the one who launches the torpedo to sink his own father’s cargo vessel, lest the German’s use its blazing deck fires to locate the convoy. There are survivors, like the assistant doctor – who survives the convoy and makes it back to England – and is interrogated by the Admiralty and “a small, stocky man with iron-grey hair, eyes still and wise and old,” a clear allusion to Winston Churchill.

Spoiler alert – this is not a book with a happy ending, and that’s ok. Rather it is a story of the horror of war. 32 ships set out in the convoy; only five make it all the way to Murmansk. The Ulysses is not among the survivors. It is also not a book about the horrors of Nazi Germany. The Germans are considered competent, clever, and dangerous adversaries; there is no moralizing tone about how they are evil and the fate of the world is in the balance. It is also not a story where we get to decide how to feel about the characters. MacLean bludgeons us with how we should think about this crew. Individuals are described as “the Royal Navy at its best,” or having intelligence “that barely cleared the moron level,” or for the incompetent Junior Officer (my personal favorite), having “the face of an over-bred racehorse…his grammar was frequently execrable…[he] was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system. Vain, superior, uncouth, and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.”

Rather this is a story about motivation among a crew. The narrator intones that “a ship – any ship – can never be better than its crew.” This crew does not stop and must prove to the world who they are. They are “worn-out, sleepless men, numbed with cold and sodden duffels, grey and drawn and stumbling on their feet with weakness and hunger and lack of rest.” Eventually, we find why they keep going – what can drive them thru these extremes. It is not

“the synthetic national hatreds and the carefully cherished myth of King and country; these are nothing and less than nothing when mankind stands at the last frontier of hope and endurance: for only the basic, simple human emotions, the positive ones of love and grief and pity and distress, can carry a man across that last frontier.”

And by the end, even though only a few make it out alive, we learn that the men of the Ulysses “were the best crew God ever gave a Captain.”

HMS Ulysses is also a fascinating case study of life on a naval vessel. The vernacular, the equipment, the watches, the motions of the sea – these are all familiar yet dated for today’s sailors. For me, they felt a little like an old home. Some equipment was not as familiar and is no longer operated by today’s military, and some of the language is overly British, but I thoroughly enjoyed the realistic dip into the British Navy of World War II.

According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge according to my father), along with The Cruel Sea (by Nicholas Monsarrat) and The Caine Mutiny (by Herman Wouk), HMS Ulysses is one of the “classic tales of World War II at sea.” These three books are all inspiring and fascinating in their own way. Having read all three, each adds a different lens through which to see the sailors of the past. Each is worth your time;  Ulysses absolutely holds its own next to these other two works.

I heartily recommend this book to sailors, both past and present. It started the career of a brilliant thriller writer – one whose books I have read since middle school. And while this is a different sort of story, it still retains MacLean’s prototypical tired, bitter, weary anti-heros who can stay alive and avert disaster.

 

Score: 8.0 – perhaps a little to blunt in its superlatives, but salty to the core.

 

Final note: I do not read much poetry, but the book opens with an epigraph quoting Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses. I added the quote here because it made me smile.

Come, my friends,
‘Tis is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

*Where Eagles Dare was made into an amazing 1968 spy movie starring Richard Burton and a young Clint Eastwood. The number of double crosses is mind boggling.