Three Corvettes - Nicholas Monsarrat navy WW2 sea war

This is a classic collection of three short books — all originally published during the Second World War — and covers time spent in the Royal Navy from 1940 to 1943.

It is not a complete picture (nor anything like it) of the whole of the Battle of the Atlantic during that period; it is an account of one man's naval service during three critical years of the battle, when the author had the luck to be serving in small ships in this crucial theatre of war.

“All these books stated as "notes" — notes for a future war novel. That was why I started keeping a diary, early in 1940; that, and for the pleasure and relief of writing, in the middle of bloody war, when I was a watch-keeping officer in a corvette on Atlantic escort, and the whole world seem composed exclusively of violence, fatigue, and worry.

The notes — though I didn't know this at the time — were intended to be the basis of The Cruel Sea. But The Cruel Sea turned out to be quite a different book, and a long way ahead in any case — ten years, in fact, though again I didn't know it at the time. Finally, I had the notes published as a series of smaller books, for a reason that impels many men to write and to publish — I thought I was going to be killed.

Basically, it's an arrogant idea — that you have something to say, and must say it while you can. But the Battle of the Atlantic was like that — death and fear at sea, and then, in harbour, the wish to tell people about it before you went out on convoy again. (It was a battle we had to win, if we were to exist at all — and that was something we did know at the time.) In addition, we all thought we were going to be killed: the war book that would shake the world seemed a very long time ahead: perhaps too long for one's current chances of survival. Meanwhile, here was a story.

Here is the story now — incomplete, disjointed, but first-hand. The three books are progressive, because by 1943 we had stopped losing the Battle of the Atlantic, and had started, very slowly and painfully, to win.

If you detect too much pride in this progression, or too much pleasure at having survived three years of watch-keeping at sea, or too much astonishment at attaining command, you may put it down to relief.”