Additions to Your Bookshelf

The Story Of A Submarine

EVEN if you hate the sea, can not imagine anyone in their right senses committing them selves to a submarine, and have had war books (as I do and have) it could be that you will be so completely enthralled by this one that you will sit up all night to finish it (as I was and I did).

The book is called Unbroken (which is the name of the submarine) and is written by Alastair Mars, DSO, DSC and Bar, a young sub marine commander of World War ll’s darkest days in the Medi terranean.

Mars is not unknown to the Pacific. About 1948 he was in the Pacific on the RNZN’s Bellona when that ship made a flag-showing winter cruise to Fiji, Tonga and other Pacific Groups. In the follow ing year he wrote some articles for PIM under the penname of Star shell. But Unbroken is his first book —and he writes a great deal better about submarines than about the Pacific islands.

According to the publisher’s notes, Mars went to sea in 1932; in 1942 took command of Unbroken which in the next 12 months sank 30,000 tons of enemy shipping in the Medi terranean; in 1944 took the sub marine Thule to the Pacific, returned to the UK in 1945; had a variety of Naval appointments after the war, including some in the Pacific; and in 1952 “following an altercation with the Admiralty over appoint ments and conditions of service in the post-war Navy, he was dis missed the service at one of the most sensational and mysterious Courts Martial in Naval history.”

His story of Unbroken is a human, intimate and always in teresting account of the small 600tons ship and the score or so men who sailed in her. Unbroken saw the light of day about the time of Pearl Harbour and by the time she had reached her field of operations in the Mediterranean in early 1942, the Japs had occupied Malaya, Repulse and Prince of Wales had been sunk, Hong Kong had fallen.

Malta was beleaguered and Rommel was making his last desperate offensive towards Egypt.

WHEN Unbroken arrived at Gibraltar she was the sole sea worthy submarine at that end of the Mediterranean. The rem nants of the 10th submarine flotilla, which in previous months had created such havoc among Rommel’s reinforcements and equipment had brought down on the submarine base at Malta such attention from German and Italian

airforces that the surviving British submarines had had temporarily to run for Alexandria. With these out of the way, Rommel began anew to build up strength for a new desert offensive.

This was the background against which Unbroken and her men played their part in the next 12 months. But read it for yourself in all its drama and grim humour —how they ran blockades; lay low near the sea’s bottom like sardines in a can and six times less com fortable, while depth charges rained down from above; negotiated mine fields; or landed commandoes and secret missions on enemy shores; and even blasted railway trains from their coastwise railway lines.

Beyond all this there is the very human story of men cooped up in oversmall spaces in far from com fortable conditions and their very human reactions to same. One of

the best of the war books.

J.T.

Published by Frederick Muller, Ltd., London. Obtainable from Australian book sellers for 15/6.

DARK MOON —by Helen Heney.

A very readable novel, sufficiently different not to be dismissed as merely entertaining; it has some thought-provoking moments for the average reader.

Set in New South Wales and Victoria in the early days of 1846, it is a psychological study of a clergyman whose sorrow, carefully nurtured over six years, is suddenly shattered by the news that the ob ject of it—a fiancee lost in a ship wreck —is miraculously alive but living with an aboriginal tribe.

He is torn between his inclination —which is to remain basking in the sympathy of his lady parishioners and his own tranquil peace of mind —and what he now conceives to be his duty. Most of his sufferings, however, are on what he might himself have called a high plane.

Full realisation of what the girl herself must have suffered —she had, for example, borne her aboriginal captor two children—is left to his more realistic friend.

This is an Australian novel with a novel twist. Few writers have cared to explore the realities of white women cast away among “the blacks.” And if Helen Heney’s characters of 1846 employ much of the same thought processes we attribute to our own period of 1953, it merely gives occasion to feel that, possibly, the thought processes of a hundred years ago were, after all, little different from what we expect of our own moderns.

Published by Angus and Robertson, Sydney. Price, 16/-.