What a miserable, rotten, hopeless life. An Atlantic Ocean so rough it seems impossible that we can continue to take this unending pounding and still remain in one piece. The crew is in a stupor from the night marishness of it all, and still we go on hour after hour.

 

The bulkheads and deck head had once been cream. They badly needed repainting and were patterned by the dried out remains of hundreds of cockroaches and other seafaring insects. A limp cobweb dangled from a corner over my pillow. Brass fittings were pitted and rusting. The small sink was a network of grease-filled cracks held together by veined porcelain. Overall hung the odor of resident filth. Insect droppings lay everywhere like the residue of a city smog. I ran my fingers along the edge of the bunk board. They came away black. I opened the door covering the pipes under the washbasin. The place swarmed with cockroaches, bugs and slugs, and it stank.

 

Lived in the fo’c’sle in the most arduous conditions and without chance of any moment of privacy within it. Space was set at a premium and encroachments could lead to anger between exhausted, cold, soaked men. In the tropics it became an oven plagued with flies and cockroaches. In gales with portholes closed and ventilators canvassed over it reeked of rubberized clothing, wet wool and body odors.”

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The men in the engine-room suffered the tortures of the damned, never knowing when a torpedo might tear through the thin plates of the hull, sending their ship plunging to the bottom before they had a chance to reach the first rung of the ladder to the deck.

These men know, that the Battle of the Atlantic means wind and weather, cold, strain, fatigue, and fear, all in the face of a host of enemy ships above, and submarines below the water, awaiting the specific moment to send them to deaths.

 

They have not even the mental relief of hoping for an enemy humane enough to rescue them, nor the certainty of finding those people they love safe and sound when they return to their homes, which may have been bombed in their absence.

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