Roosevelt and Churchill on USS Augusta where they agreed the text of the Atlantic Charter.
I first read this book more than ten years ago and would not have come back to it had I not recently come across some reference to Morton’s style. It occurred to me that this might be useful in writing my Torpedo Terror.
Morton has a capacity to make much of little. The book is his account as a journalist on HMS Prince of Wales when it took Churchill to Placentia Bay to meet President Roosevelt on the cruiser USS Augusta in 1941. When the Prince of Wales reached the bay, all the journalists stayed on board while Churchill went off for talks with Roosevelt. Morton and his fellows did not know what the talks were about (the rumours were all – wrongly – to the effect that the US was about to enter the war) and even after Churchill had returned, they still did not know. Nevertheless, Morton was able to write a book about the voyage! His lack of content did not inhibit his wonderful way with words:
The blacked-out warship closed for action, escorted by three spectral destroyers, was forging ahead at full speed through seas where U-boats lay in wait, not dreaming what the supreme prize of a pirate’s life lay upon those waters. The battleship was ready for action. The guns were manned. From bridge to crow’s-nest experienced eyes swept the ocean with night glasses. The whole ship knew that at any moment it might have to fight … – p. 49.
In the ward-room, too, as in peace-time, the same limp forms snatched a sleep between watches, the same figures solemnly read an antique number of The Illustrated London News, the same silent breakfasts were eaten, the same innocuous pink gins circulated before dinner. Yet in the twinkling of an eye the scene would change. An alarm upon the ship’s siren would send feet clattering up iron stairs, the ward-room would empty in a flash, steel doors would be shut; while on deck sailors in steel helmets would stand to A.A. guns and in a sinister silence the fourteen-inch turrets would smoothly swing round and the big guns would nose the sky. – p. 72.
On the Sunday, British and American sailors massed on the foredeck for a church service:
It was difficult now that the little white [American] caps had been doffed to say who was American and who was British; and the sound of their voices rising together in the hymn was carried far out over the sea. In the long panorama of this War, a panorama full of guns and tanks crushing the life out of men, of women and children weeping and of homes blasted into rubble by bombs, there had been no scene like this, a scene, it seemed, from another world, conceived on lines different from anything known to the pageant-makers of the Axis, a scene rooted in the first principles of European civilisation … – p 100
Source:
Morton, H V. Atlantic Meeting. Methuen & Co. 1943.
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