Customer Reviews

The Judas ship

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The Judas Ship is a riveting sea-faring yarn of a (doomed) ammunition ship in World War Two that ends up in a Mexican standoff with a German surface raider off the coast of South America. The British crew is decimated in the first minutes of being ambushed and is set on fire. The first mate takes charge, and is soon caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. While his remaining crew fight desperately to keep the fire away from the artillery shells that are heating up hot enough to fry eggs, the first mate has to make a series of painful and uncompromising decisions on how to safeguard the ship--pursuing the disobvious and eschewing the easy route--by steering his ship AWAY from the nearest help for the burning ship and critically injured crewmembers. The struggle just to survive taxes the men's endurance as they toil bleeding and ragged under the tropical sun without food and drinking water--and then they run up against the very same surface raider that devastated them earlier. Again, they are confronted with the most difficult choices known to Man--do they take the easy way out, and surrender to the Germans (to get medical help), compromise with them (to escape), or do they do their duty as members of the Merchant Marine so that the raider cannot kill any more allied seamen, even at the expense of their own lives?

The Judas Ship is told in a very naturalistic style that seems to complement that heroic (Romanticist) themes involved, instead of undermining them. The characters aren't noble Saturday morning cartoon heroes, they are British seamen, uneducated and uncouth, but they fight to uphold the values of seamen everywhere--to survive with honor.