It may have been unfortunate that those in a position to
influence the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell debate probably did not read C.
S. Forester’s World War II novel, The Ship. My own copy,
printed on wartime paper, is falling to pieces and it is high time
there was a reprint.
The Ship is fiction but closely
based on the real British light cruiser HMS Penelope at
the second battle of Sirte in 1942, when a British force of
cruisers successfully defended a convoy to Malta against a much
more powerful Italian force led by a 15-inch-gunned battleship.
Forester spent some time at sea in Penelope (nick-named
HMS Pepperpot from the number of shell-holes in her), and,
as one would expect from the creator of Hornblower, the story has a
wealth of technical detail and knowledge. Also, as one would expect
from the creator of Hornblower, it is a story of duty — duty
over-riding any personal attachments or likes and dislikes, and
over-riding life itself.
Although nearly 70 years have passed since it was written,
The Ship’s themes of fighting men’s ingrained duty and
loyalty to a unit enabling them to achieve the apparently
impossible are timeless.
The Ship examines about 20 men
scattered about the vessel, including the loneliest — the lookout
at the mast-head and a stoker checking the bearings in the
propeller-shaft tunnel, as well as the loneliest of all, the
Captain, never leaving the bridge, sleeping on the deck there under
a tarpaulin when it rains. There is the fanatical anti-fascist and
the ex-IRA Man who has come to love the Navy in spite of
himself.
The men are by no means supermen — the man in the
shaft-tunnel is struggling to make atonement before God for some
largely imaginary sins. The captain’s secretary, a reservist, feels
painfully inferior and resentful in the company of officers who
have been in the Navy since they were 13. The Captain knows his
worst enemy is his own black rage which, under his mask of icy
control, could overthrow his judgment to the ruin of them
all.
There is the ship’s chronically bad character, an
exceptionally stupid man who the Captain has been trying to get
transferred out of the Navy before he does any harm, now out of the
way in one of the shell-handling rooms.
There is the Commander, the second-in-command, who is
being turned into a fussy old woman by the demands of running the
ship, fretting about paint-work and paper-work, and whose job is to
sit and wait for something unpleasant to happen, such as the
Captain getting killed or his beloved paint-work damaged. There is
a clever young petty officer, marked out for promotion, in charge
of the after gun-turret. In a compartment near the bottom of the
ship the marine bandsmen are controlling the gun-directors. There
is the chief electrician, even the chief cook, all entirely focused
on what they have to do.
The light cruiser is no match for a battleship. We learn a
great deal about this “egg-shell armed with
sledge-hammers.”
The ship is hit twice, with, as the Captain laconically
reports “slight damage” and then “moderate damage.” The after third
of the ship is an inferno of flame. The clever
young petty officer, we learn almost as an aside, is “baked to
death in a steel box” because after ordering “Clear the turret!” he
remains in the turret to report it is out of action, and by the
time he has done this it is too late for him to get out. If he had
failed to make the report, the gunnery might have suffered. The
fire threatens the after magazine, and the wheels that control the
valves that flood it are red-hot. In a terrible, almost unreadable
scene, the stupid stoker forces himself to turn them with his bare
hands. The Commander leads the damage-control party through the
exploding shells cooking off from an anti-aircraft-gun.
The man in the shaft-runnel, his collar-bone broken and in
darkness, with several feet of water slopping about, continues his
reports, feeling that now perhaps God will be a little less angry
with him. Turning back into its smokescreen the ship almost
collides with another cruiser, and the captain raises his voice
slightly. The point is that, as a result of discipline and
tradition, every man aboard feels loyalty to the entire ship, but
also to whatever task he is responsible for.
As the British ships leave their smoke-screen, the enemy
admiral sees this, the leading ship, is on fire aft, but its
forward guns are still firing as regularly as clockwork. Night is
coming on, and the British destroyers are preparing an attack with
torpedoes. He turns away. Aboard the British ship the Captain notes
that the behavior of the ship’s company was “most
satisfactory.”
The real Battle of Sirte was a brilliant victory by a
greatly inferior force, though tragically after the convoy reached
Malta it was destroyed by air-attack with only a few thousand tons
of supplies unloaded.
What has this got to do with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, an
issue which, when Forester wrote The Ship, would have been
as remote as the moon? It suggests, I think, that Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell was basically a good and civilized idea. In a combat unit
people’s sexuality is their own business.
There must be areas of privacy but there must also be an
awareness, even if it is not expressed in so many words,
of an over-riding loyalty to the whole unit. My own feeling is that
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which asked no more than that private lives
be kept private, made this easier.
