Felsen, Gregor Some Follow the Sea

Earnest, occasionally stolid account of World War 2 convoy life. Felsen’s hero is 17 year old Chris Hollster who joins the merchant marine after he fails the physical when attempting to enlist in the U.S. Navy. The work can be read as a coming of age tale as well as a paean to the merchant marine. Early on Chris’ father, horrified that his son would actual become a merchant mariner tells him “The worst sort of riffraff go to sea, while another character observes that merchant mariners are “a very low class of people ... hard, dissolute, radical and untrustworthy.” Felsen attempts to show how incorrect such commonly held sentiments were. Indeed, the author is often so vehemently pro-merchant mariner that the reader may wonder whether the National Maritime Union, described in glowing terms, may have had a hand in Felsen’s book project.

For the most part the novel presents a fairly authentic and very graphic look at convoy work in the North Atlantic and Murmansk Run, though Felsen’s concluding chapter, in which Chis and several other boys destroy a German U-boat on a deserted Russian Far North island, does strain the reader’s credulity. Of particular interest is Felsen’s depiction of the actual horrors of war, something often omitted in period fiction from the war years. Chris’ first ship is torpedoed in the North Atlantic under such horrifying circumstances that he suffers what today would be termed post-traumatic stress disorder after being rescued. Felsen doesn’t shy away from graphically presenting Chris’ ensuing near-mental breakdown. His subsequent recovery occurs when, on the Murmansk Run, Chris is forced to take over a Navy anti-aircraft artillery piece when its crew are killed by Luftwaffe attackers.

Also of great interest today are a series of period photographs included in the book which portray individual merchant mariners as well as scenes of shipboard convoy life. Finally, it should be noted that Some Follow the Sea appears to have been an example of crossover fiction, appealing to both an older teenage as well as adult audience.