Divisions at sea: Class, gender, race, and nation in maritime films of the Second World War, 1939-60

The configuration of the war at sea in the popular memory of the Second World War has been relatively neglected. In particular, historians have overlooked the division between the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy. Yet portrayals of the two navies differed widely. Maritime films both during and after the war followed a well-established tradition of representing the navy as a force of disciplined and respectable men led by gentlemen heroes that reliably defended nation and empire. Such representations rarely acknowledged the existence of the Merchant Navy with its globally recruited and racially mixed workforce and its troubling associations with indiscipline. Yet naval operations largely concerned its protection, and the British war effort depended on the goods it transported. In the context of the leftward drift of wartime politics, the Merchant Navy received rare attention in a 1943 film that nevertheless avoided depicting non-white merchant seaman or disturbing the gender division. After the war the focus of maritime films returned to the Royal Navy. The liminal presence of the Merchant Navy in films of the 1950s was, however, significant. It was, variously, the vector for the expression of British insecurities about the wartime victory, the occasion for the portrayal of the enemy as an honourable foe, and a means to both romanticize, and hint at the fragility of, imperial masculinity. © The Author [2011]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.