Convoy: Merchant Sailors at War 1939-1945

by Philip Kaplan, Jack Currie

A tribute to the ships and the men of the British and Canadian Merchant Navies and the American Merchant Marine. The authors have assembled rare photographs, paintings and memorabilia in order to convey an impression of the extreme dangers faced by seamen in some of the most lonely and terrible places on earth. The accompanying text draws upon the unpublished memoirs of the sailors and contains vivid accounts of the war at sea, providing a reminder of how much we owe to ordinary seamen who never had the chance to be heroes and often died unrecorded deaths. Illustrated in color and b&w. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Genres: Nonfiction, War

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1998

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two areas of WWII history that are not well known, underserved by historians and yet contain a wealth of heroic and inspiring stories. One is the contribution of women to the war effort and the second is the great sacrifices made by the merchant sailors. This is a sobering "coffee table" style book, loaded with personal accounts and great photos, artwork and symbols of the merchant sailors participation in WWII. Those early deaths were to be multiplied a thousandfold and more within the next five years, nearly double those sustained in World War I. By the time VE-Day came in 1945, 22,490 British merchant seamen had been killed, plus 6,093 Indian Lascars and 2,023 Chinese; to these must be added 5,662 seamen from the USA, 4,795 from Norway, approximately 2,000 from Greece, 1,914 from the Netherlands, 1,886 from Denmark, 1,437 from Canada, 893 from Belgium, 182 from South Africa, 109 from Australia and 72 from New Zealand. The figures do not include the deaths of nearly 4,000 gunners of the Royal Navy and the Royal Artillery who lost their lives while serving on board merchant ships, nor the many thousands incurred by neutral countries. I highly recommend this book if you want to fill in the gaps on a vital part of the Allied success. 4 Stars

[David Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reasonable introduction, mainly worthwhile for the illustrations, which include some magnificent photographs and paintings. Without those it would be worth two stars at best.

The text has the appearance of having been written in a hurry. There are a lot of mistakenly repeated bits of writing, some poor organisation, and a few statistics that seem to be someone's vague memory of numbers he saw in a comic book once - notably wildly exaggerated figures of merchant sailor deaths on the Murmansk run and Operation Pedestal, as if the reality wasn't bad enough. However the text is on surer ground when it quotes - sometimes briefly, a couple of times at length - the experiences of those who were actually there, and the commentary at least gets the gist across.

But it's the illustrations that make this book better than going online, plus a few of the stories. The story of the merchant marine in WW2 deserves to be better known, and in that regard this book is better than nothing.