HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean

Alistair MacLean was famous for his action plots and ‘HMS Ulysses’ runs true to type. It’s set aboard a light cruiser during World War 2, and the book opens with a mutiny. The crew has had a bellyful of the Russian convoys: 4 hours sleep a day, hundreds of days at a stretch in 60-below weather, TB incubating in the enclosed living quarters, and nothing to eat but corned beef sandwiches. To redeem themselves they are forced into a final run through the black-out route to Murmansk, before being allowed a period of rest in the Mediterranean. But luck is not on their side. The German fleet and U-Boats come fully prepared, and the bitter cold – treacherous at the best of times – takes a further turn for the worse.

Indeed, every miserable way in which a man can perish in and around a sinking ship is examined in unspeakable, gut-wrenching detail. From the quick and merciful plunge into water 100 degrees colder than body temperature to the ‘slow shrieking death by drowning, by burning, by asphyxiation’ in the fiery, oily sea.

Despite it’s fast-paced action the book is not without fault.  By his own admission, MacLean was more suited to story-telling and screen writing, and was long criticized for his poor characterizations.  And in this, his first novel, the individual crew members are not only one-dimensional but straight out of central casting. The captain, dying of TB, is a saintly creature who rallies his desperate men to the end, the junior officers largely sensitive, articulate and likeable. Hell, even the stokers, knuckleheaded and ignorant, are team players, stoically shoveling coal as the Ulysses nosedives into oblivion.

Yet it remains MacLean’s masterpiece - better than ‘The Guns of Navarone’, and streets ahead of the thinly-plotted genre fiction he churned out for much of the 1960s and 70s. Surprisingly, it was never filmed, perhaps because the logistics were too complicated or, as is more likely, because everyone dies and the Germans win.  

The loss rates on the Arctic routes were the highest of the supply convoys, and a movie would’ve been a fitting tribute, not to mention a reminder that war is a disgusting and terrible waste of human life.  Impeccably researched and well-written, ‘HMS Ulysses’ is that reminder, putting a name and face to the unfortunate man, already burned beyond recognition in the fiery waters, being finished off by the ship’s propellers.