Book hails U-boat attack survivors
'Miracles on the Water' chronicles war stories of strength, endurance.

The face of war is all too often the face of an innocent child.

In "Miracles on the Water (Hyperion, $24.95), Tom Nagorski chronicles the fate of a group of children subjected to the horror of World War II when the ship carrying them from England to safety in Canada was sunk in the stormy North Atlantic.

Nagorski has a special stake in the story's telling. His father's uncle, Bohdan Nagorski, was an adult passenger aboard the City of Benares when it was torpedoed by a U-boat in September 1940.

The attack and the ordeal afterward cost the lives of 258 people including 77 of 90 children being evacuated. Most of the children were from working-class families.

The book recounts Winston Churchill's opposition to the relocation but notes that the wealthy already were sending their children to safety. It was seen in some quarters as only fair that the lower classes also have that chance.

If their children were fortunate to be selected for evacuation, parents faced the agonizing choice of risking their children on liners running the U-boat blockade or risking keeping them in England where children were regularly killed by Luftwaffe bombs.

There already had been sinkings that pointed out the terrible danger of a wartime Atlantic crossing. Among them, the Volendam had been torpedoed just two weeks before the City of Benares left port, but the 321 children aboard that ship were rescued.

Nagorski uses historical accounts and the recollections of City of Benares survivors to illustrate the hopes, fears, sacrifices and courage of the children, their adult escorts and the ship's crew.

But there is an expression that "the devil is in the details, and this book has a devil of a time with some details. At the climactic moment when U-48, commanded by Heinrich Bleichrodt, looses its fatal torpedo, we're provided a chapter that begins "Bleichrodt's torpedo was in the air for one minute and fifty-nine seconds. Huh? Torpedoes have propellers and run underwater.

Books that reviewers receive often are proofs or among the first copies off the presses and may contain typos or mushy grammar that will be fixed later. But getting something so basic so wrong must unfortunately call into question the remainder of the research.

There are other technical points that are questionable or just plain wrong.

But once U-48 and its flying torpedo sail out of the book and the pages fill with the heartrending and inspiring stories of the victims and survivors, the book is in its element.

Readers can only turn pages as the unrelenting frigid sea claims not only crewmen and adults but child after child. Unexpected heroes emerge to save lives, sometimes at the sacrifice of their own lives.

"Miracles on the Water is indeed the story of miracles of survival. The second part of the book is devoted to the saga of Lifeboat 12, which drifted out of the search area where other survivors were recovered. The open boat, packed with 46 people, including several children, spent more than a week at sea before its occupants were rescued.

Nagorski's book is a sensitive, powerful account of personal strength and endurance.

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