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"At lunchtime on January 30 1945 a large German cruise liner, the Wilhelm Gustloff, left the port of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia in Poland) bound for Kiel in western Germany. She was laden with thousands of German refugees fleeing from the Red Army’s advance into East Prussia. It was beginning to snow and very cold. Just after 9pm, about 12 miles off the coast of Pomerania, the Gustloff was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. She sank in less than an hour. It was the worst disaster in maritime history. This flawed but vivid book brings it to life.

Even today, this story is little-known outside Germany. In 1973, when this book was published, very few people in the English-speaking world would have known of it. The author of this book says in the introduction that he first heard of it by accident as early as 1948, when he was a journalist on assignment in Berlin, covering the Berlin Airlift. In later years, as he researched several books about the war at sea, he heard more, and began to get an inkling of what an enormous disaster it had been. According to the blurb for The Damned Don’t Drown, published in 1973, about 6,500 people were aboard. To put this in perspective, the number of dead on the Titanic was about 1,500; the worst peacetime maritime disaster, the loss of the ferry Doña Paz in the Philippines in 1987, killed about 4,400 people. In fact Sellwood’s figure was far too low; later research by a Gustloff survivor, Heinz Schön, eventually put the death toll at 9,343, mostly civilians, and many of them children.

Sellwood seems to have been very much a journalist, not an historian. He wrote a number of popular non-fiction books, sometimes co-written with his wife, Mary, or others. Most were on the war at sea but they included one on Victorian railway murderers, and a 1964 “startling exposé�� called Devil Worship in Britain. This journalistic approach is very evident in The Damned Don’t Drown. It sometimes grates. Sometimes he adopts the viewpoint of an eyewitness, which of course he was not, or writes as if he knew someone’s thoughts: “In one of the few intervals he could spare... [Captain] Petersen found time to wonder briefly how the passengers were finding it. ...he felt a twinge of sympathy for their plight.�� Petersen did survive, but died a year or so later and won’t have spoken to the author. There’s a fair amount of this sort of thing. There is also very little explanation of how the ship came to be caught by the submarine; Sellwood simply says that it was “waiting in their path�� and saw them by accident. In fact Petersen was so worried about collision with other German vessels that he was not taking evasive action, and had the navigation lights on.

But it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not what you read this book for. The strength of The Damned Don’t Drown is its vivid survivors�� accounts. Here, Sellwood’s book really excels. And if I had a choice of being on the Titanic or the Gustloff, I know damn well which I’d choose.

As the ship started to sink, literally thousands of people were trapped below deck, and the stories of those who did get out are gripping. So are the accounts of the fights to get into the lifeboats, the struggles to launch them from frozen davits, the attempts by the crew to keep order at gunpoint, and the bitter cold as the temperature dropped to (Sellwood says) -20 deg C.

There is cowardice; a Party official shoots his wife as part of a suicide pact, then lacks the courage to kill himself (a passing soldier, disgusted, does the job for him). There is brutish behaviour; people on an already overloaded raft “used feet and fists to batter swimmers struggling to join them ...until finally the float itself was overturned. Dozens drowned in the ensuing panic.��

But there is also great courage and selflessness. A teenager who Sellwood names as Ilse Bauer (it won’t have been her real name) is being evacuated after being raped by Soviet troops in East Prussia. She is slipping down the icy, sloping deck into the sea when a sailor rescues her and wedges her behind a deck fitting, where an older woman hugs her to keep her warm; later, the woman gives Bauer her fur coat, then jumps into the sea, presumably to her own death. The coat protects Ilse and she survives, just. A newly-married naval auxiliary, Ruth Fleischer, is literally flung onto a lifeboat by a burly seaman who thrusts aside others who are fighting for a place. Fleischer too survives, although her new husband �� the communications officer on a nearby cruiser �� is convinced for some days that she is dead.

The Damned Don’t Drown isn’t a history book and doesn’t pretend to be. There’s no index, and nothing is referenced; presumably it’s all from survivor interviews and some of it will have been secondhand. It’s also quite brief (the US edition is 160 pages). Anyone who wants a well-researched book in English should read Dobson, Miller and Payne’s The Cruellest Night (Cruelest in the US), published not long after, in 1979; this is an outstanding book that combines journalism and historiography, both to a high standard. It also covers the sinking, a few days later, of the General Steuben by the same Soviet submarine, which caused similar loss of life. There is also a much more recent book on the Gustloff, Cathryn J. Prince’s Death in the Baltic (2013); this is not as complete or well-researched an account, but does give a moving portrait of some of the passengers.

Still, journalism is the first draft of history. In any case, The Damned Don’t Drown, whatever its flaws, is a quite extraordinarily vivid book that does give just a taste of what that appalling night must have been like �� in particular, the 45 minutes or so between the torpedo hits and the sinking. After all, the naval archives are still with us; the survivors, increasingly, are not.

This and other books about the disaster are reviewed on my blog at "