Turbulent seas abroad

June 2023

War Sailor
Maria Ekerhovd (Producer). Gunnar Vikene (Writer and Director). (2022). (Norwegian: Krigsseileren). Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/

Review by Webb Chiles

Singapore. 1948. A European man is comatose in what appears to be an opium den. Another European man arrives, deliberately seeking him. “War Sailor,” a Norwegian-made, three-part Netflix series, tells us with restraint and compassion how they came to be there and to an extent what happened afterward. They were among the hundreds of millions whose lives were destroyed or traumatized by war beyond their control, and among the most innocent.

The next scene goes back to Bergen, Norway, 1939. Alfred – Freddy to those closest to him – the man in the opium den, and Sigbjorn, the man who found him, are working as day laborers on a ship in dry dock. This is still the Great Depression. They are paid and we learn they have worked only that one day in the past three weeks.

Freddy is married and the father of three, the oldest of which (a daughter about 10-years-old) walks with a limp and wears a leg brace. Freddy’s wife is loving and understands when he tells her he has no choice but to sign on a merchant ship and will be gone for 18 months. His daughter desperately does not want him to go. Sigbjorn is single at the time. As Freddy’s best friend, he also signs on for the voyage.

Freddy will not see his family again for nine years. Germany invades Poland in September 1939 and Denmark and Norway in April 1940, partially to protect supplies of iron ore and later, heavy water [water composed of deuterium and oxygen] needed to produce an atomic bomb. Consider what would have happened had Hitler obtained the bomb before the United States.

The Norwegian merchant marine fleet is ordered to Great Britain. We learn at the end of the series that half that fleet was sunk and one in nine sailors killed and many more wounded.

I am limited by not wanting to supply spoilers, but in part the series turns on erroneous reports of deaths, not uncommon in the chaos of war.

“War Sailor” shows the effects of war not only on Freddy and Sigbjorn, but on Freddy’s family in Bergen, caught between the German occupiers and the British who bomb the city with inevitable civilian casualties.

The war ends. Sigbjorn returns to Norway and again becomes a part of Freddy’s family. And then news comes that Freddy is alive.

The story moves forward and ends on Freddy’s 70th birthday. Sigbjorn, who has remained single and a sailor, appears briefly. The two men have a drink. The final poignant image is of their two empty glasses on a table.

All this is told with consummate skill. No melodrama, though there could have been. Excruciating decisions are made. Among them to allow some, while aboard merchant vessels in convoys, to drown when their ships were torpedoed in order to preserve the lives of the others in the convoy. The filming, writing, direction, and acting are superb.

I am glad that Netflix has given this impressive and moving Norwegian production the larger audience it deserves. I have now watched it twice with admiration. I recommend you do, too.

Webb Chiles is a six-time circumnavigator whose last time around, which ended in 2019 when Chiles was in his late 70’s, was aboard the ultralight-displacement Moore 24 Gannet. Today the author and adventurer, who once wrote “Almost dying is a hard way to make a living,” leads a relatively sedate life on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island in a house overlooking the ICW’s Skull Creek. To see what he’s up to check out his always interesting and informative blog (https://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com/).