The explosive force would be equivalent to that of a small nuclear bomb. It would have very bad effects. Old houses and perhaps new ones would collapse. It would be a disaster area. The roofs of factories and large buildings would be sucked in. The most serious effects would be felt within a two-mile radius. It would be a very unhappy situation… In addition the blast would send up a giant fireball, capable of hurling large chunks of debris a mile away.49
Johnson makes his own oblique entrance into this game. Although he relies heavily on the Sunday Times’s facts and predictions, his contribution is also fired by a sense of justice that, while both ironic and avowedly secular in tone, may still be allowed to resonate with the fiery Judgement Day harangues of Blue Town’s great shipwright preacher William Shrubsole. So it is that Johnson augments Connell’s comparatively restrained broadsheet blast with a “tidal wave” and does everything he can to bounce the explosion’s impact as far upriver as possible in the hope of visiting just deserts on the negligent London powers that had allowed the Richard Montgomery to haunt the estuary for so long:
An explosion of this mixture will be among the largest in human memory, not counting the nuclear ones. If you take the Richard Montgomery as the centre of a circle with a radius of two miles, the first land to be hit will be the north-west corner of the island, with the town and port of Sheerness. The older buildings and unreinforced walls will collapse, and the gas and water pipes will shatter. Within a radius of seven miles, broken glass and the collapse of any wobbly chimneys or loose roofs is likely. That circle includes half of the town of Sittingbourne, as well as the oil port and refinery complex on the Isle of Grain, west of Sheppey. The detonation may cause a fireball whose air pressure will fling heavy objects and debris more than a mile, perhaps into one of the supertankers with a hundred thousand tons of oil in its belly. (The Richard Montgomery lies near the extremely busy shipping channel of the Thames. A few miles farther north, Her Royal Highness’s Ministry of Defence maintains and runs a naval artillery range in the ocean, whose detonations reach the windows of Sheerness like fist blows.) A simultaneous explosion of the whole cargo will cause a tidal wave to rush up the Medway and Thames rivers, destroying additional settlements near the banks. At low tide, the effects would be multiplied, due to there being less water to absorb the shock. The ultimate extent of the damage will be determined by the weather. Any heavy, low-lying cloud cover above the exploding cargo of bombs will bounce back ascending shock waves and the multiple ricochets will reach Canvey Island, ten miles upstream, where they will hit storage tanks with a holding capacity of almost forty thousand barrels of oil as well as chemical and methane gas containers. A chain reaction or domino effect could produce damage in the eastern suburbs of London, to a greater or lesser extent. It is unlikely that the House of Commons or Whitehall would be affected.
Mr. Tweedy, The Montgomery Mermaid, Recreation Ground, Sheerness, 2015.
33. EXPLOSION: FROM THE RICHARD MONTGOMERY TO THE CAP ARCONA
When I put a question about “The Unfathomable Ship” to the German sociologist Renate Mayntz, widow of the artist Hann Trier and a friend of the Johnsons over many years, she re-read the essay and described it as “very characteristic of [Johnson’s] way of looking at reality: incisive, cold, as objective as possible, a camera that catches all details and even the legacy, the history inscribed in the present… I think in his passionate search for descriptive exactness, for ‘truth’ without implied protest or some normative ‘message’, he was a true representative of Enlightenment. There are things you don’t have to say, you just need to show them”.1
With that point in mind, we may wonder (“poetically”) what brought the stranded Richard Montgomery to Johnson’s mind in connection with the “spiritual situation of the age” Karl Jaspers had described in 1931. For Jaspers, that “situation” had been shaped by a secular equivalent to the “Death of God” imagined by Jean-Paul in his eighteenth century nightmare about the atheistic claims of the Enlightenment. Jaspers associated the modern epoch with a “shipwrecking” of enlightened ideas of truth, reason and reflection, which was causing a “widespread conviction” that “human activities are unavailing; everything had become questionable; nothing in human life holds good; that existence is no more than an unceasing maelstrom of reciprocal deception and self-deception by ideologies”.2 It was by no means only for the chapel-goers of Sheerness that the “shipwreck” of reason implied “the revelation of a depth which nothing other than Transcendence can fill”.3
Jaspers’ insistence on the “stranding” and “shipwreck”4 that must be undertaken by philosophical reflection if it was to fully engage with the “historicity” of modern experience, was by no means the only parallel Johnson’s text suggests but does not explicitly spell out. Given the evocative, if not strictly allegorical nature of his essay, we might also come to suspect that there is also more than is explicitly stated to his account of the crack, which he dislodges from the sunken and disintegrating hull of the Richard Montgomery and attaches (“magically”) to America’s Liberty Bell. Once cast into motion in this way, the crack may connect itself (“poetically” again) to other bells in the reader’s mind: the cracked bell that sounded, to the mid-nineteenth-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire, like the “death-rattle” of his own broken soul in a poem titled “La Cloche fêlée” in Les Fleurs de Mal, or the one the American psychologist William James used, nearly half a century later, to describe the “irremediable sense of precariousness” suffered by the “sick soul”, famously likened to “a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident”5. From here, we may quickly come to suspect (“biographically”) that the crack, now back in its actual place on the ship, turns the Richard Montgomery into a witness both to the trauma of its century, the evils it has made of some forms of enlightenment and also, as it pokes into his view from the “murky reality” that is actual as well as symbolic, into a dim reflection of Johnson himself: not a stone colossus any more, nor a man lost inside a glass bell jar, but a sunken wreck, traumatised and broken but still containing great force within its hull of encrusting steel. A “death-wish”, as we may well be tempted to conclude, although Johnson discourages that thought by including it in his essay as a joke.
In the “historical” register, meanwhile, other explosions echo in the blast that Johnson could not quite persuade to reach all the way upriver to engulf the Palace of Westminster. For some, including David Cotgrove, the likely devastation had been dwarfed by the memory of Britain’s atom bomb test on the Montebello Islands. In Sheerness, however, the primary supplier of remembered explosions remained the First World War. The term “great explosion” may remain attached to the disaster that took place on 2 April 1916, killing 106 people at the Explosives Loading Company gunpowder works at Uplees, across the Swale from Sheppey.6 Worse things, though, had by then already happened in Sheerness’s naval harbour: 741 men had died when the battleship HMS Bulwark (formerly commanded by Scott of Antarctica) blew up and vanished in seconds when moored alongside three other battleships just off Sheerness on 26 November 1914. Six months afterwards another vast explosion destroyed HMS Princess Irene, a liner built in Scotland for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1914 but immediately requisitioned for war use as a minelayer. This vessel disappeared in a great sheet of fire on the morning of 27 May 1915 when its newly loaded cargo of mines were being primed in hasty preparation for a mission. Cases of butter, engine parts, severed heads and limbs were scattered for miles around. 352 men died this time, a much smaller loss than the HMS Bulwark, but one that ripped a far larger hole in the life of Sheerness, claiming no less than seventy-eight dockyard workers who had been on board the Princess Irene to reinforce the ship’s decks.
Johnson only had to look at the names engraved on the town war memorial across the road from the railway station to know how faithfully Sheerness had remembered these losses from the First World War. Yet these were not necessarily the examples that resonated
in his mind as he surveyed the masts of the Richard Montgomery through his sash windows. One Johnson scholar, D.G. Bond, has suggested that he might have found a precedent for his portrayal of the Richard Montgomery’s version of the “Great Explosion” in the writings of the German schoolmaster, churchman and dialect poet Johann Peter Hebel, whose early nineteenth-century “calendar” stories, collected in his Treasure Chest, included one telling of a ship loaded with over 37,000 lbs of black gunpowder which blew up in the Steenschuur canal in French-occupied Leiden on 13 January 1807. Bond sees various “correspondences” between Johnson’s account of the Richard Montgomery and Hebel’s evocation of the Leiden disaster, which left 152 dead and over two thousand injured, and destroyed some two hundred buildings at the very heart of the town.7 Both texts, he points out, combine historical research with an “allegory of the apocalypse”. Both see the “little people” as providing “the moral and the hope”, praising them for retaining “inner dignity” when faced with “outer historical barbarism”. Both are concerned with the defence of “the good and the proper” against diverse degradations.
This is a suggestive parallel, to be sure, but we will find a different ship if we follow the example of the readers who sometimes wrote to Johnson describing how they had used his books as guides to the places in which they were set. One had thanked him for his book about Ingeborg Bachmann, claiming that it had helped her find her way around the Austrian town of Klagenfurt. He also had a postcard pinned up in the kitchen at Marine Parade from an American lady who claimed to have achieved good results by following Anniversaries around Staten Island, using the novel as if it were a weird kind of Baedeker or Pevsner guide.8 Encouraged by these examples, I went back to Mecklenburg in order to test a similarity I had noticed when looking at maps of the Thames Estuary and the Baltic coast east of Lübeck.
From the resort of Travemünde, I took the ferry across the Trave, and then drove along the spit at Priwall to reach the place where, until 1989, “the fence” had divided the two Germanies. Various characters in Anniversaries pass this way and it may also have been to this checkpoint that Johnson brought Michael Hamburger’s eleven-year-old daughter Claire and tried to impress upon her the importance of the division. Nowadays, however, the whole place seems benign, and there is nothing — no watchtowers, notices, wire, nor red-and-white poles — to interrupt anybody’s walk along the beach.
I found a suitable viewpoint a mile or so east of the removed frontier, near a little village named Rosenhagen. Standing on that no longer forbidden strand, with my back to a low sandy cliff inhabited by a teeming colony of sand martins, I looked out over the “scrabbly” Baltic waves and tried to compare this sea view with the one Johnson knew in Sheerness. Although the Bay of Lübeck is not really an estuary, the resemblances I had noticed when comparing maps of the two geographies persisted. In both views there was a navigable and working waterway coming into the wider sea from the left: the Medway in the case of the Thames Estuary and the Trave which enters the Bay of Lübeck between Travemünde and, on the eastern side, the Priwall spit. In both views, one could also see signs of land on the far shore. In Sheerness, this was the Essex coast at Southend and Shoeburyness. Here in Mecklenburg, the land across the water was West Holstein and the just discernible buildings were in and around Neustadt and the sandy bay at Timmendorf. The distances were not identical, but it was still easy to imagine how, under weather conditions that could indeed be the same in both places, the framed view from Johnson’s window in Marine Parade might, in certain lights, have oscillated between North Sea and Baltic.
There were no masts sticking out of the water in Neustadt Bay, but it was the site of traumatic explosions that surely haunt Johnson’s essay “An Unfathomable Ship” even though not explicitly mentioned. The unspoken parallel, as I already knew from Anniversaries III, lay between “Liberty” as the Richard Montgomery represented it in Sheerness and “Liberation” as British forces had brought it to this stretch of the now rapidly re-emerging “German Riviera” in the last days of the Second World War. For the child who was Gesine Cresspahl at this time, the reality of that disaster could still be counted in corpses washed up all along the stretch of Baltic shore on which I was standing: a horrifying glut in May 1945, followed by a slower stream that extended for decades after that — the last sea-washed skeleton is said to have emerged in 1971.
This horror had its origins in Nazi policy, as Johnson goes on to explain in a chapter that makes its own “montage” using information found in a book written by the German survivor Rudi Goguel and published in 1972.9 When it came to “evacuating” a concentration camp, the Nazi’s preferred policy was, as Johnson reminds his readers, to obliterate all trace of the place, first putting gangs of prisoners to work — digging up the mass graves, grinding up remains and scattering the “bone meal” over the fields — and then murdering the prisoners who had been forced to carry out these hideous tasks. So quick was the Allied advance through northern Germany in early 1945 that they had no time to erase the camp at Neuengamme, twelve miles south-east of Hamburg, or, presumably, the “Mecklenburg branch camps of Boizenburg and Reiherhorst at Wöbbelin”.10 Instead, having released Swedish and Danish nationals who had been concentrated at Neuengamme prior to being repatriated in the Swedish Red Cross’s famous “convoy of ninety-two White Buses” in April 1945, they crammed the remaining six thousand prisoners into freight cars and took them to Lübeck harbour. Drawing on Goguel’s account of an episode he himself had only known through fragmentary local memory, Johnson records that five hundred died on the journey, and that four car-loads of sick “weren’t even loaded onto the ships, they were screaming with fever, they were shot, and anyone who didn’t hear that in Lübeck’s outer harbour might well have heard the festive sounds of the German SS in the adjacent grain silo, celebrating final victory with the finest cognac and delicacies from stolen Red Cross parcels”. After some ten days, through which many remained confined in German Reich Railway cars at the quayside, the surviving prisoners, “whom the people of Lübeck knew absolutely nothing about”, were crammed onto three ships, all of them “easily visible from land, and known to not only the fishermen”. An estimated 2,800 were loaded into an already bombed freighter called the Thielbeck, which was then towed out into the Bay of Lübeck. A smaller motor launch, the Athen, was used to carry successive batches of prisoners out to a larger vessel, the Cap Arcona, already anchored in the bay off the town of Neustadt.
Built for the Hamburg-South America Line in 1927 and named after a chalky headland on the north-eastern shore of the Pomeranian island of Rügen, the Cap Arcona had gone into service as an exceptionally fast and luxurious liner: a “floating palace”,11 which became known — in Britain and other countries as well as Germany (where it had been launched as a symbol of resurgent national prestige) — for its grandiose facilities, which included electric lifts, a salon with Gobelin tapestries and marble fireplaces, a sea-plane mail service, and a full-sized electrically lit tennis court on the deck between two of its funnels. In the old advertising, a cruise to Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires aboard the SS Cap Arcona (“one of the most beautiful ships afloat”, as a travel agent was pleased to advertise in the Yorkshire Post12), was presented as the ideal way to escape the northern winter for southern sea and sands.
Strauss melodies may still have been playing, but prospects had changed for some aboard the Cap Arcona by March 1939, when there was especially good reason to fear for the twenty-five so-called “wandering Jews”13 who, according to a brief article syndicated through many of Britain’s local papers, were found to have remained aboard the “Queen of the South Atlantic”14 when the liner passed through Southampton on its return voyage from the south in March that year. These desperate émigrés had embarked in Boulogne a month or so earlier, hoping to find refuge in South America. Having been refused permission to land there on the grounds that the quota had already been filled, they were now uncertain whether they would be allowed to disembark
at Boulogne (no landing was apparently offered in England), or find themselves obliged to stay aboard all the way back to Nazi Hamburg.
By the end of 1939, the Cap Arcona had been commandeered by the German navy, painted gray and put into service as a floating barrack at the Nazi port of Gotenhafen, now Gydnia, on the Baltic in conquered Poland. It had served in that role for the length of the war, with an unusual intermission in 1942, when it was employed as a set for a grandiose Nazi film called The Sinking of the Titanic. Things did not go well, despite the extravagant resources allocated to the production. The well-known director, Herbert Selpin, who is said to have rivalled Goebbels in his megalomania, was denounced by his own scriptwriter for having committed “verbal treason” as he railed against both the navy and the Nazi leadership: he is thought to have been murdered by “suicide” in his cell a day or two after Goebbels handed him over to the Berlin police.15 As Germany’s eastern front collapsed during the last weeks of the war, the Cap Arcona was used until its engines were destroyed during three desperate voyages evacuating German troops and civilian escapees west to Copenhagen from East Prussia across a heavily mined Baltic Sea in which Soviet submarines had free play. The dangers of these voyages were demonstrated by the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, originally built as a cruise ship for the Nazi Strength Through Joy organisation, which was torpedoed at the end of January 1945 with more than nine thousand lives lost, an estimated five thousand of them children. After the first of these voyages the captain of the Cap Arcona, Johannes Gerts, shot himself while anchored in Copenhagen harbour, allegedly unable to face the prospect of making the same run again. With its turbines wrecked over the course of two further crossings, the Cap Arcona was decommissioned by the German navy in Copenhagen at the end of March 1945 and ordered to the Bay of Lübeck, where the catastrophe remembered by Johnson awaited.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 59