Review
Title: The Immortals: The World War II Story of Five Fearless Heroes, the Sinking of the Dorchester, and an Awe-inspiring Rescue
Author: Steven T. Collis
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: World War II Biographies
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 256
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1629728489
ISBN-13: 978-1629728483
Price: $24.99
Reviewed by Christine Tensmeyer for the Association for Mormon Letters
The Immortals: The World War II Story of Five Fearless Heroes, the Sinking of the Dorchester, and an Awe-inspiring Rescue was a difficult book for me to get into. Not because of the subject, but the writing style made it less than enjoyable to begin reading. I started this book three times, only making it halfway or so before I would give up on the book. On my fourth attempt, I finished reading it, but I would have once more given up if I hadn’t felt so guilty about my delay in reviewing the book.
The Immortals starts with a very intriguing Prologue that did leave me excited about reading it. The first couple of chapters are about Germany during WWII. Chapter One is about Hitler, including his political and racial views. It also provides a summary of what the “Puritan Mistake” is. Chapter Two is about Germany’s U-boats and how they operated during the war, honing in specifically on Karl-Jung Wachter, a very high-ranking lieutenant in Hitler’s Navy. From Chapter 3 on, The Immortals dances around five men and their various histories. It first introduces four chaplains who serve together on the SS Dorchester: George L. Fox, Alexander Goode, Clark Vandersall Poling, and John P Washington. The book introduces each man with his own chapter and then throws in a chapter about a steamship USAT Chatham and its fate. It then introduces Charles David Jr, a young Black petty officer on the Dorchester. Then there is a chapter about the first US chaplain to die in WWII and his story while explaining the purpose of a chaplain. This chaplain personally has nothing to do with the other five men in the book and never interacts with them. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking story of sacrifice, and it does serve to show the duties of a chaplain, yet it does seem somewhat out of place in the book.
I had a very difficult time distinguishing the five men past their introductory chapters. The way the book is organized from here on out made it tricky for me to remember who was who, as there were multiple jumps in topic and points of view in most of the remaining chapters. In one chapter, the author switches the point of view 12 times, flipping between the original five men and the German lieutenant. Sometimes the author flips between the third person historian’s point of view and the five men. I found it difficult at times to distinguish between when one viewpoint had concluded and another started up.
I feel the main reason I had a hard time wrapping my head around this story is there are so many men in it, with all their different names and stories. Not just the five main men and all their family members, but it talks about the various captains of the small fleet and their officers, not to mention some of the regular soldiers who were passengers on the ships. This made it difficult to keep track of who was who and who was part of who’s story. I really appreciated all the photographs in this book, in particular the one of the deck of the Comanche that showed how much ice and snow was on the deck of the boat and the men trying to remove it so the deck could be functional again.
In all, The Immortals is relatively short for how many men this story is about. It felt like the author perhaps didn’t have a lot of information on some of the men and needed something to fill the pages. The parts from the German Lieutenant’s point of view came across as fictional to me, which felt out of place as a reader, as this book tried to use firsthand sources for the five heroes, and the author also took the trouble to explain things like the “Puritan Mistake,” the fate of the Comanche and Chatham, and the Fifth Column, racial tensions of the time, etc. to give the setting historical context. Whilst interesting topics, they did seem to be in the way of the main story; the sinking of the Dorchester and the rescue that followed.
Once I finished reading The Immortals, I was glad I had stuck it out to learn about Charles David Jr and Army Chaplains George Fox, Alexander Goode, John Washington, and Clark Poling. I feel like this particular aspect of WWII isn’t as widely written about. Most WWII books seem to focus on the war in Europe or the bombings in England. I enjoyed learning about the troubled waters of the Atlantic. I already knew that the Germans were deadly with their U-boats, but I never really understood how many ships were lost from North America during WWII, what a terrible process occurs when a ship is torpedoed and slowly sinks, and what exactly the men had to go through to try and survive. An estimated 72,200 Allied seamen lost their lives trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a very sobering fact. Steven T. Collis did an excellent job with the last few chapters describing the agony these men went through, from the despair of those on the sinking ship to the men left in the water, to the rescuers battling the ocean trying to save just one more man from the depths of the sea. Despite the slow and somewhat involute pacing of the beginning of The Immortals, it ended up being an interesting read about the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II.