The Laconia Incident

It was in mid-September, 1942 that the German U-boat, U-156, sunk the converted ocean liner HMT Laconia with just two torpedoes. The captain of that submarine, one Werner Hartenstein, was horrified to discover that the British troop transport he had just sunk was carrying 1,800 Italian prisoners of war, along with its British and Polish passengers and crew.Why Hartenstein chose to launch an operation to rescue his surviving Italian allies is perfectly understandable. Why he also chose to include in that rescue the other surviving passengers and crew as well, is a bit of a mystery. What amounts to an even greater mystery is why the German U-Boat Command elected to pursue the rescue operation, convincing Adolph Hitler to go along with it, and even sending other submarines and Vichy French warships to aid in the mission. How the fog of war puts a violent end to Hartenstein's mission of mercy is the stuff of high drama – a series of events that are no less gripping because they actually happened.The Laconia Incident strings together a narrative of related actual occurrences in the war: the Clydebank Massacre, a German carpet-bombing of southern Scotland industrial targets; Operation Ariel, foiled by a German air attack on shipping in the Loire River Estuary; the sinking of the battleship HMS Barham in the Mediterranean; the sabotage of four British warships in Alexandria harbor by Italian frogmen; the construction of an American airbase on an island in the mid-Atlantic; the sinking of the Laconia; and finally, the sinking of U-641 by HMS Violet in the North Atlantic. How these events are related to one another is the story of one Robby Cotton, an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy. It is Robby's struggle to make sense of these events that, in the course of the novel, changes his thirst for revenge and personal vindication into an understanding that justice and mercy are possible, even in the midst of a violent war.