Trident of Death

TOMORROW NEVER CAME (223 pp.)--Max Caulfield--Norton ($3.95).

COLLISION COURSE (316 pp.)--Alvin Moscow--Putnam ($4.50).

THE LAST NINE DAYS OF THE BISMARCK (138 pp.)--C. S. Forester--Little, Brown ($3.50).

In man's agelong struggle against the sea there has been more than one death-filled night to remember, and Walter Lord's bestselling Titanic saga (TIME, Feb. 13, 1956) was bound to become the leader of a literary ghost-ship column. Authors Caulfield and Moscow are newsmen, and neither is as slick a writer as former Adman Lord. But they have raised their ships from the depths of forgetfulness and cast light into dark spaces.

Eve of War. The little (13,500 tons) single-stacked British liner Athenia was known for comfort and informality--her slow crossings rarely attracted millionaires or celebrities. She sailed from Liverpool with 1,102 passengers (including 311 Americans) the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, and she had hardly pushed into the Atlantic when Oberleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, commanding the Nazi submarine U-30, got orders to open hostilities. It was twilight, and Lemp thought she was an armed merchant cruiser--legitimate prey.

Lemp fired four torpedoes. One hit. It took 112 lives, including 16 children and 69 women, some of whom jumped to suicide when their children drowned. From Athenia's SOS, Lemp learned his victim's name. "So eine Schweinerei!" he exploded: "Warum faehrt der aber auch abgeblendet?" (What a mess! But why was she blacked out?) The British called it murder. Goebbels screamed that the villain Churchill had ordered Athenia sunk by British forces, to make a new Lusitania incident and drag the U.S. again into war.

In May 1941, with the Uno, Lemp attacked an Atlantic convoy. The escorts got him. The British picked up 34 survivors, but Lemp was not among them.

Cross-Eyed Radar. The story of the Andrea Doria sinking, less than three years ago, is far better known, but its retelling is no less exciting. The 29,000-ton Doria revived Titanic's builders' claims of being an unsinkable ship. Relying on her radar eyes, she barely slackened speed (from 23 to 21.8 knots) as she slammed westward through thick fog past Nantucket lightship on a July night in 1956. Approaching her, eastbound, was the Stockholm, also radar-equipped. Reporter Moscow, who sifted 6,000 pages of testimony, does not solve the mystery of how two ships with radar could collide so disastrously. The last vital blips of evidence were suppressed when the shipowners settled damage claims out of court.

By Stockholm's radar, the Doria was approaching on the left, and if she had held her course, she would have passed to the left, as required by rules of the road at sea. Doria's radar should have shown Stockholm to her left also; instead, it showed her to the right. When the gap between the two ships was closing too fast for comfort, each watch officer tried to widen the gap, but since they saw each other on different sides, their best efforts had the worst effect. Stockholm's bow smashed through Doria's side.

Author Moscow shows how the "unsinkable" Doria proved to have been as badly designed, for her day and in her way, as the Titanic. The number of lifeboats, ample in theory, proved woefully inadequate in practice, because half of them on the high (undamaged) side could not be launched. Undisciplined stewards and kitchen help swarmed into the first boats away and took them to the Stockholm, where they stayed idle. The rule "women and children first" gave way to "the strongest first." The wonder is that not more than 62 lives were lost.

B Script for BB. Both Authors Caulfield and Moscow skillfully let the facts unfold their dramas. Novelist Cecil Scott (Hornblower) Forester takes the opposite tack, prefaces his little Bismarck book with the warning: "This is as it may have happened. The speeches are composed by the writer." In The Ship (1943) Briton Forester showed that he could get inside the skins and skulls of British naval officers and ratings. But in his saga of the great BB (battleship) Bismarck, half the protagonists are German, and Forester's attempts at characterization lapse into caricature. The lines he has written for them are implausibly naive.

The story has been superbly and not too technically told by Captain Russell Grenfell in The Bismarck Episode (TIME, June 27, 1949). Forester's account subtracts many of the facts needed for clear understanding and adds only synthetic excitement. The book is intended as the basis for a British documentary film--a B script for a BB movie.

But nothing can leach the drama out of Bismarck's 1941 breakout, her four-minute sinking of the glass-jawed battle cruiser Hood (killing all but three of the 1,419 aboard), and the oceanwide net of ships and planes that eventually closed round the battleship. In that encounter, southwest of Ireland, Bismarck proved, in fact, almost as unsinkable as her builders claimed.

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