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Author Moscow shows how the "unsinkable" Doria proved to have been as badly designed, for her day and in her way, as the Titanic. The number of lifeboats, ample in theory, proved woefully inadequate in practice, because half of them on the high (undamaged) side could not be launched. Undisciplined stewards and kitchen help swarmed into the first boats away and took them to the Stockholm, where they stayed idle. The rule "women and children first" gave way to "the strongest first." The wonder is that not more than 62 lives were lost.
B Script for BB. Both Authors Caulfield and Moscow skillfully let the facts unfold their dramas. Novelist Cecil Scott (Hornblower) Forester takes the opposite tack, prefaces his little Bismarck book with the warning: "This is as it may have happened. The speeches are composed by the writer." In The Ship (1943) Briton Forester showed that he could get inside the skins and skulls of British naval officers and ratings. But in his saga of the great BB (battleship) Bismarck, half the protagonists are German, and Forester's attempts at characterization lapse into caricature. The lines he has written for them are implausibly naive.
The story has been superbly and not too technically told by Captain Russell Grenfell in The Bismarck Episode (TIME, June 27, 1949). Forester's account subtracts many of the facts needed for clear understanding and adds only synthetic excitement. The book is intended as the basis for a British documentary film—a B script for a BB movie.
But nothing can leach the drama out of Bismarck's 1941 breakout, her four-minute sinking of the glass-jawed battle cruiser Hood (killing all but three of the 1,419 aboard), and the oceanwide net of ships and planes that eventually closed round the battleship. In that encounter, southwest of Ireland, Bismarck proved, in fact, almost as unsinkable as her builders claimed.