The Damned Don't Drown

London: Allan Wingate, 1973. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 159, [1] pages. Arthur Sellwood was initially a newspaper journalist covering crime stories. In 1945 a heavily overloaded cruise liner with some 6,500 fleeing Germans was torpedoed. This finely written book recounts the disaster. The Damned Don't Drown is a quite extraordinarily vivid book that does give just a taste of what that appalling night must have been like - in particular, the 45 minutes or so between the torpedo hits and the sinking. MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German cruise ship converted into an armed hospital ship and which while functioning as a military transport ship was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating German civilians, German officials, refugees from Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Estonia and Croatia and military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) as the Red Army advanced. By one estimate, 9,400 people died, which makes it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history. Constructed as a cruise ship for the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) organization in 1937, she had been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine (German navy) in 1939. She served as a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. She was then assigned as a floating barracks for naval personnel in Gdynia (Gotenhafen) before being put into service to transport evacuees in 1945.