Westbound, Warbound by Alexander
Fullerton
First In An Excellent Series About Merchant Ships In Wwii
In 1939, as the S.S. PollyAnna sails from Cardiff on yet another tramping
voyage, the world is shifting into war. By the time the ship has discharged
her coal, Chamberlain has warned Hitler that Britain will stand by Poland—
and Poland is invaded on the day she enters the Suez Canal, bound for
Calcutta. It’s September 1st, a Friday; on Sunday the 3rd, when Britain
declares war, PollyAnna is ploughing south through the Red Sea. The
crew has no idea that a fortnight earlier, the German pocket-battleship
Admiral Graf Spee left Wilhemshaven, slipping away into the Atlantic under
cover of darkness. Her mission is to seek out and destroy all the British
and Allied merchant vessels she can find. Five days out of Cape Town,
PollyAnna is westbound for Montevideo, Uruguay—which, as it happens, is
just where the Graf Spee is heading.

Personal Review: Westbound, Warbound by Alexander
Fullerton
The first in a series of novels featuring Andy Holt, a merchant navy officer
caught up in the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic.
To date there is one sequel, "Noncombatants." As he served in Royal
Navy ships and submarines throughout the second half of World War II,
Fullerton must be over eighty, but he is still turning out novels as good as
anything he has ever written, and he apparently intends to write at least
one more in this series: he writes in the afterward to "Noncombatants" that
"we haven't finished yet with Andy Holt."
The vast majority of novels about war at sea are told from the viewpoint of
men serving on British or US warships, and where merchantman feature at
all they are the helpless targets who the heroes are escorting. For
example, four of the best and most famous WWII seafaring novels,
Montsarrat's "The Cruel Sea", Forester's "The Ship" and "The Good
Shepherd" and MacLean's "HMS Ulysses" are all about convoy escorts.
But there have been a few brilliant works by writers such as Brian Callison
("The Bone Collectors" & "The Judas Ship") and Jan de Hartog ("Stella" &
"The Commodore") which told the story of the merchant seaman who were
just as vital to the lifelines of the free world during the war. With this highly
entertaining book and its sequel, Fullerton adds to that cannon.
The hero, Andy Holt, who turns 21 during the book, is third mate in the
tramp cargo ship Pollyanna, which sailed from England in late summer
1939. While she is heading south, and through the Suez canal, war breaks
out. And as Pollyanna heads from South Africa towards the River Plate,
her crew become uneasily aware through distress calls from other ships
that the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee is also in the South
Atlantic, and that Graf Spee too may be heading for the River Plate ...
Andy is also the son of a merchant navy captain, Charlie Holt, who had
joined the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR)in the first world war and remained
a member ever since: he had been heavily involved in defence planning
and at the time of "Westbound, Warbound" was appointed second in
command of an Armed Merchant Cruiser. Charlie Holt is himself the hero
of one of Fullerton's recent novels, "Flight to Mons" in which he takes an
airship behind German lines to rescue a lady in distress during the First
World War.
Indeed, both the men in the Holt family seem to make a habit of rescuing
damsels in distress, but we'd better not say more than that for fear of
spoiling the book.

The biggest disagreement between Andy Holt and his father had been that
Charlie wanted Andy to follow him into the RNR and spend World War II
on serving on warships.
Listening to his dad's arguments, Andy had asked "You're saying I'd have
a better chance of survival in a fighting ship than in a merchantman?"
Though Charlie was not willing to openly agree that this was what he was
saying, they both knew that this was a major part of it. And further, these
novels so vividly bring to life the dangers of serving in merchant ships at
sea during the early days of World War II as to leave the reader suspecting
that Andy's father might well have been right to make that point.
Not having served in either the British Royal Navy or the merchant navy, I
am not able to comment on the minor points of detail about the minutiae of
life on board a tramp steamer which have been criticised by some
reviewers. I do know enough about the history of the war at sea to
recognise the general setting as containing a lot of authentic details,
particularly about the enormous heroism of the Royal Navy cruisers who
took on and defeated a far more powerful ship at the Battle of the River
Plate.
I can strongly recommend these engrossing and very entertaining novels
which make you feel like you'd been there. I also strongly recommend that
you read "Westbound, Warbound" before "Noncombatants", because
some of the events in the second book are serious spoilers for this first
one.
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