Seapower in Culture: In Which We Serve

This is the story of a ship. That’s a great line; in its own way, it’s as memorable as “I believe in America.” In Which We Serve is surely the story of a ship, but it’s also the story of seapower. The film begins with the construction of HMS Torrin, a ship based on the K-class destroyer HMS Kelly (HMS Kashmir apparently filled in for several external scenes). This is an inspired decision; it connects modern war to the industrial base, which lays the foundation for how the rest of the film will explore the relationship between the sailor and the homefront. The action begins with scenes of HMS Torrin destroying (defenseless) German transports during the invasion of Crete, a powerful sequence reminiscent not just of Crete but of a number of similar operations, including the ROCN response to the invasion of Hainan Island. The next morning, German air attacks cripple and sink HMS Torrin, leaving her crew attached helplessly to a few life rafts. Most of the rest of the film is told in flashback; HMS Torrin has participated in convoy escort, in the defense of Norway, and in the evacuation at Dunkirk. The German return several times to strafe the survivors, but most of the crew is eventually picked up by another destroyer.

Noel Coward wrote the screenplay, stars as Captain Kinross, and co-directed with David Lean. In Which We Serve was the latter’s first directing credit. I think it could be plausibly argued that seapower hovers at the edges of most of Lean’s work; the connection between desert warfare and seapower is made explicit in Lawrence of Arabia, for example, and much of Dr. Zhivago feels like island hopping through the Russian steppe. Many of his other works evoke, often implicitly, an empire held together by command of the sea. In any case, an extraordinary level of talent is on display.

Although In Which We Serve is surely a film about seapower, with perhaps an ideal subject for an investigation of seapower in the 20th century, it nevertheless lacks the conversation about seapower that happens in many films about airpower. You find this conversation in Twelve O’Clock High, for example, when General Savage explains the importance of daylight precision bombing to his senior officers, and you get it several times in The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell. I’m not sure why this is; it may be that seapower is less deeply theorized than airpower (perhaps because of the need for a theory of airpower in order to justify service independence), or that the maritime forces are simply more secure in their existence and necessity than the air forces, or that seapower is less theoretically settled than airpower.

We certainly see seapower, though; Torrin interferes with German landings in Crete and Norway, protects British commerce, saves British troops in Dunkirk, and in general does the variety of Mahanian jobs that you would expect of a World War II British destroyer. A destroyer is the ideal choice for demonstrating the variety and value of seapower; it’s a ship sufficiently small to be “missed” and thus avoid awkward historical questions (“But there was no heavy cruiser at the Second Battle of Narvik! That would have changed the whole complexion of the fight etc. etc.”), but large enough to have an impact of consequence on battle action. The film evokes the history of the Royal Navy in plausible ways, with Kinross placing the purpose of HMS Torrin squarely within RN tradition, while other characters mutter such lines as “Remember Nelson!” “Yeah, look what happened to him!”

While In Which We Serve celebrates the RN, we see the other services in action. The RAF fights the Battle of Britain as Captain Kinross (literally) takes a pleasant nap below; a sailor from Torrin finds himself in a friendly argument with a Royal Marine (“You’re a Marine; you don’t know nothing about destroyers”); and the officers and men of HMS Torrin mix with British Army soldiers rescued from Dunkirk. The last includes one of the most poignant scenes of the film, when battered, demoralized soldiers form up and march away after disembarking, just as Torrin prepares another jaunt across the Channel.

Unlike some other films produced with substantial military support, In Which We Serve is mostly dialogue, much of it away from the fighting. Lean and Coward show the connections between the battlefront and the homefront as well as any war film that I’ve ever seen, creating well rounded female characters placed within plausible domestic settings. The film doesn’t skimp on the action; we get to see Heinkels dropping bombs on HMS Torrin, German destroyers torpedoing HMS Torrin, HMS Torrin blasting away at same German destroyers and German transports, etc. But we also see relationships on board both catalyzed and reflected in relationships at home, and we get a very good sense of why the sailors are fighting. Whereas most American war films demonstrate national solidarity by including characters from a variety of regional and ethnic backgrounds, British war films tend to concentrate on class distinctions, which allows a plausibly dense network of interactions across ship and home communities.

This is a genuinely fantastic film, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the subject of seapower. Fortunately, it’s available on Netflix streaming, and is well worth two hours of your time. The next subject of this series will be Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands.