Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Great story about the adventures of a tramp steamer and her captain sailing around Europe in 1941.

Captain DeHaan and his ship, the Dutch tramp steamer Noordendam, are co-opted by British intelligence to carry a load of commandos to a headland on the north coast of Tunisia in the Mediterranean. The object of the commando raid is to take out a German post that is watching ship traffic using Bolometers, a new, high tech, whiz bang  infra-red detector gizmo. They drop anchor just offshore in the middle of the night, the commandos take small boats into shore and do what commandos do. Naturally, there are complications, but they mostly get away, raise anchor and steam away without anyone being the wiser. Just another tramp steamer sailing east in the Mediterranean.

Thermal Imaging Sensor

I didn't find any good pictures of WW2 German Infrared Detectors, but I did find this very cool image in a story about current infrared research. 

Breguet 730 Flying Boat
Page 55. Never flew during the war.

As they are sailing away from the commando raid, they see a couple of enemy patrol aircraft but nothing comes of it.

Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero
Page 55.

Browning GP35  Automatic
The captain's gun

They dock in Alexandria, Egypt, where all is chaos as the Germans have launched an invasion of Crete. Our ship gets loaded with munitions along with a couple of tanks and a couple of airplanes. They convoy to Crete. No sooner are they docked than the harbor is attacked by a squadron of Stuka dive bombers. The anti-aircraft guns on the British warships dispose of most of them, but they do some damage. Our ship and crew escape with only minor damage.

Nothing like a little success to get you assigned more of the same. Now it's back to the west end of the Mediterranean where they pick up a cargo of black-ops radio gear which includes some largish antennae masts and trucks to haul them. They have to sail north around England and Ireland, across the North Sea and into the Baltic, passing between German occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden.  Somehow they manage to arrive at their rendezvous at the southern tip of Sweden, in the middle of the night again, and manage to unload their cargo onto a fishing trawler that makes several trips carrying the gear the mile to shore. It is well after dawn when they finish, but they are underway by the time the regular Nazi patrol aircraft comes by. 

Now they are home free, all they have to do is navigate the minefield between Denmark and Sweden, the same one they had to navigate on the way in, but a German patrol boat spots them and decides to inquire. Well the jigs up now, sailing under false colors, looks like they are heading for a German prison or worse. Well, except the mess boy and the cook deliver coffee to the bridge, and boy do they deliver. The guard gets a coffee pot to the head and the Nazi lieutenant gets a knife in the back. Their ship is faster than the German boat by maybe two knots, but with a thick cloud of black smoke, night falling and confusing radio messages indicating chaos onboard the ship, they manage to evade the patrol boat.

With the Germans alerted to their presence, the way west seems closed, so they head East to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania). They arrive just as Germany has forgotten their pact with Russia and has mounted an attack. The port is under attack, so they pick up a load of refugees and head north toward Finland. Their ship is part of a rag tag convoy that gets attacked by German airplanes. Their ship is damaged, damaged, damaged, but it keeps limping along well enough to carry them aground on a Finnish island.

On page 38, Captain DeHaan reviews the 40 book library he keeps in his cabin.

• Multatuli  Max Havelaar
• Louis Couperus
• William Shakespeare Henry V
• Joseph Conrad  The Mirror of the Sea
• Joseph Conrad  Nostromo
• Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness
• Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer
• Joseph Conrad  Lord Jim
• T. E. Lawrence The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• Malraux Man's Fate
• Malraux  Man's Hope
• Stendhal The Red and the Black
• Stendhal  The Charterhouse of Parma
• Tolstoy  War and Peace
• Bowditch The American Practical Navigator
• Nicholl's Deviation Questions and Law of Storms
• Baedeker for France
• Colette My Mother's House
• Colette  The Vagabond
• Colette Claudine in Paris
• Colette  Claudine at School

On page 184 Furst mentions Captain Claude Farrere of the French minesweeper Lieutenant Borri
Serebin. Kind of weird just throwing in a couple of specific names like that since they don't seem to have any bearing on the story, so I do some checking. Found nothing about the French minesweeper, but Captain Claude, well that's another story. 

J. P. Sauer & Sohn, Suhl CAL 7,65
Page 222 - The Nazi lieutenant's gun

Map of Noordendam's Travels