Two rival sea captains, one in the destroyer on the surface, the other in the U-boat beneath, fight out a battle of wits and wills on a knife edge. It’s an age-old theme but never done so well as in The Enemy Below by someone called Commander D A Rayner  D.S.C and Bar  V.R.D., R.N.V.R. He wrote no other fiction that I know of, which is a pity because few books got me on the edge of my seat as this one did, nor resolved the matter more satisfactorily. Hollywood made a pretty good film from it—it would have been hard to achieve less—excepting that they changed the remarkable ending to one where the good guys win, and, most worryingly, from a British to a US destroyer. It was the first time I remember noticing American parochialism, and I couldn’t quite forgive them even if it did allow Robert Mitchum to be added to the cast. At least a German actor—the excellent Curt Jurgens—played the rival captain.
    Of course it was all a fantasy—the book admits that the war annals record no such one-on-one tangle between such vessels and if there had been, the sub would have won too easily to make such an riveting story.

Only anger—sheer body-trembling rage—was holding me back. As I watched his suffering, his terror, I wanted to absorb and savour the moment. Only then would my desires be sated. So I kept him lined up, stayed poised and ready to strike, but never went, because I could see there was still some residual agony, some tiny fragment of terror, left in him and I wanted it all. Then his sobbing stopped—he had nothing left, neither energy nor emotion sufficient even to sob. And that was when I had him where I wanted him. Around me, a thousand boys held their breath and watched in horror. Only one of them now had the power to move, and that was me.