and FPP-Website visitors, is that manuscript. Publications 1999 Written September 23, 1970; revised and corrected THE PQ.17 LIBEL CASE A look at the first round of the High Court action, by DAVID IRVING , one of the defendants HEN MY ELDEST daughter was old enough to speak, her favourite question was, “Papa, what do you do all day long?” And I would stop typing and reply, “I am writing a book — a book about boats.”
That was in the summer of 1966, and I had been working on that book five years already. The first interviews of seamen had been late in 1961. Now my Olivetti was painfully extruding the second draft, as the first, a year’s work, had been killed in a legal dispute. “Why do you write?” Less easy to explain. I do not suppose any true author is principally interested in money or repute. There is a less easily defined, a rarer satisfaction.
Few hours have lingered longer in my memory than when I persuaded the kindly old radiochemist Otto Hahn to narrate to me in Göttingen just how he discovered atomic fission in 1938; or when Duncan Sandys described his bitter clash with Lord Cherwell in 1943 over the V-weapons; or when I stumbled across the Gibraltar governor’s own record of the night Sikorski was killed, while leafing through a pile of Scottish manuscripts.
How to explain that to a child of three? “We need the money,” I replied. By late 1966 the book about boats was finished. I called it The Knight’s Move : it was eventually published under the title The Destruction of Convoy PQ. 17 . I believed it was the best history I had ever written. More properly, it was a book about people. Some were to become famous in their own lifetime, or were famous already.
There was Douglas Fairbanks Jr., then a lieutenant in an American cruiser; Godfrey Winn , a well-known Express journalist and passenger; his brother, Rodger , now [1970] a Lord Justice of Appeal, and Commander (later Vice Admiral Sir Norman) Denning , both Intelligence officers In the Admiralty. There was Lieutenant Leo Gradwell, trawler skipper and later an illustrious London magistrate.
And there were ten thousand others in the Allied and German warships and merchantmen meeting in the icy Arctic waters in July 1942. I had their diaries, their photographs, their letters, papers, and memoirs; I had thousands of pages of notes, photocopies of ship’s papers and official documents. The research had got out of hand — it had taken me all over Germany several times, it took me to the naval archives in Washington.
Ironically, by late 1966 I knew that the book would never make me money, short of a miracle. I kept up with it because of my personal involvement with the story I was telling: having met the Merchant Navy captains, like the one now living for example with no pension and destitute in Liverpool, it became a grim duty for me to continue and to see the book through to public readership.
Even now I cannot read my own manuscript without emotion — a rare sensation for an author (on 19 September 1966, I find I wrote in my diary: “Worked during the rest of the day typing PQ.17 final manuscript, pages 366-389, the Hartlebury story. My blood still runs cold when I read this tragedy, familiar though it is to me.”) This convoy saw the first DSO’s ever awarded to Merchant Navy officers.
In my Author’s Introduction I wrote an apology for the method I had chosen to portray this heroism: “Lest this book be misunderstood, its readers should know before they enter into the narrative proper that the guiding light in deciding which incidents in this canvas of tragedy to dwell upon, and which to suppress, has been a conviction that gallantry is best portrayed in its real setting; the ships should be shown to be crewed by normal men with normal fears and feelings.
Too often one has read histories of individual acts of heroism, and one’s appreciation has been dulled by the picture’s lack of relationship to normal human character.” And, referring to the merchant vessels, I added “So The Knight’s Move is primarily a book peopled with ordinary people: we see how men reacted when confronted with a grim situation which meant certain disaster and probably death.
But against this sombre background we shall find that the individual jewels of gallantry sparkle most, emerging unexpectedly to dazzle us by their own unaccustomed shine.”[ 1 ] This was one of the passages I first read out to my publishers in London, William Kimber Ltd., in their Belgravia offices (long since vanished under a new hotel). Francis de Salis , the director to whom I owe much of my earlier success, was not enthusiastic about the subject.
In his Joyce-Grenfell voice he said ominously, “You know the market for these war stories is failing.” I insisted that this was a book with a difference, as all men were shown to be cowards, from which the real heroes then emerged. (I should have written a more complete diary entry on the conversation, for this was one of the passages to which a High Court judge later particularly referred.) Kimber’s accepted the manuscript nonetheless, and began editing it.
But de Salis’s attitude was a warning to me, and since I was uncomfortable about a royalty dispute with them[ 2 ] — for which my own unbusinesslike dealings with them were largely to blame — I wrote soon after to a rival publishing firm, Cassell and Company, and took a second copy of the current manuscript to them.[ 3 ] They were the most eminent firm I could think of, since they had published Winston Churchill ‘s The Second World War.
Besides, Cassell’s were a very large company, and thus better suited to handle a major war study like The Knight’s Move. Cassell’s director Bryan Gentry telephoned me early one morning, five days later: “I think you’ve written a very wonderful book,” he exclaimed. Cassell’s intended to make it their main Spring publication of 1968.
I promised that as soon as Kimber’s option period expired I would sign the book up with the rivals.[ 4 ] There were already legal problems, and I warned Cassell’s of them in a letter: A German author had had the impudence to declare that the book was his (he abandoned his claim after it had cost me £500 in legal fees to fight him off). There were, furthermore, parts of the book which might cause offence to surviving British officers.
The Royal Navy escorts had been withdrawn from the 1942 convoy before the massacre began, in consequence of orders from London.
In particular Captain “Jackie” Broome, RN, the famous senior officer of the twenty-strong close escort of destroyers, minesweepers, corvettes and trawlers in this his first (and last) convoy to North Russia, was disaffected.[ 5 ] Re-reading the first draft, seen by Francis de Salis and a number of naval officers at the revision stage, I admit it is not hard to see why.
A number of passages at that time reflected critical opinions expressed to me by the late Leo Gradwell and other naval escort officers about Broome, their Senior Officer.[ 6,7,8 ] Some of his orders were difficult for me, a layman (but equally so for the late Rear-Admiral Hamilton, the Cruiser Squadron commander) to justify or explain.[ 9 ] But while everybody else, from Vice-Admiral downward, had co-operated in reconstructing the story magnificently, Captain Broome himself had proven difficult
to get through to. He lived in an expensive Chelsea cottage. Years earlier, when I had begun the writing, he had written to me and invited me to leave him out of my research and interviews altogether and although that would clearly be impossible I postponed interviewing him for a year, until March 1963, when I had completed all the ground research.[ 10 ] A suitable entrée occurred to me.
The gunnery observer in one of Broome’s destroyers had referred to an incident during the convoy, from memory: “The destroyer Keppel picked up several German airmen, who were afterwards interned in the United Kingdom.
They can be traced through Keppel’s commander, Broome, perhaps; otherwise through German P.o.W. authorities.”[ 11 ] The reason I quote my contemporary note of the conversation (which I put on microfilm two years before the trial) will become obvious.[ 12 ] Subsequently I wrote to Broome to ask if we might use one of his famous drawings as an illustration; I mentioned a fee and he wrote