Almost in the middle of the North Atlantic

the two-dozen crew of a torpedoed

merchant ship are wet and cold in its lifeboat.

They are mainly Liverpool men, seafarers

from custom and necessity. The captain

is at the tiller. He has his charts

and a compass, has ordered the sail set,

water and hard tack rationed, and is steering

towards the rocky, treacherous west coast

of Ireland more than a thousand miles away –

a dangerous landfall at this time of year,

with its long seas, and a weakened crew.

 

***

 

Western Approaches Command during

the Second World War’s six yearlong Battle

of the Atlantic encompassed all

of the Irish Sea, St George’s Channel,

the north of the Celtic Sea, and longitudes

of the ocean to the west of Ireland.

 

At Liverpool’s Pier Head there is a

slightly pugnacious-looking bronze statue

of Commander Johnnie Walker RN,

famed for destroying twenty U-Boats.

 

The Liverpool docks were the destination

and fuelling station for the unceasing

convoys of merchant ships and their escorts

bringing food, fuel, munitions, tanks, aircraft,

and personnel from North America.

One hundred thousand died, Allies and Axis.

 

***

 

Key scenes in the movie WESTERN APPROACHES

were filmed on location at Holyhead,

Anglesey, in its deep breakwater harbour.

Wartime technicolor propaganda,

all parts played by non-professional actors,

some from the Royal most from the Merchant Navy,

the film is a thriller, and a work of

technical genius, and humanity,

where even the bad guys seem human.

 

The crowds that had gathered to watch the antics

on the water – the repeated set-ups

and retakes on the lifeboat, and the cutters

with all of the movie gear and personnel –

after the first week or so dispersed

not seeing then, beyond the palaver,

Pat Jackson’s script and direction, Jack Cardiff’s

photographing of the sea’s infinite

shifts and depths, its blues shading into greens,

its empty horizons, the pathos

of the seamen’s careful acting, their

unspoken remembrance of the drowned:

art as memento mori, as orison…

‘Out of the deep have I called unto thee’…