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Brown on Resolution is a 1929 nautical novel written by C. S. Forester, set during World War I. The hero of the novel, Leading Seaman Albert Brown, is the sole able-bodied survivor of a sunken Royal Navy warship, who single-handedly delays its attacker, a German cruiser, long enough to ensure its destruction by its pursuers.
The novel opens with Brown, wounded and dying, on fictional Resolution Island in the Galápagos Islands. The story is then told in flashback.
The first part of the story tells of Brown's birth, as a result of a liaison between his mother, Agatha Brown, and a Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Richard Saville-Samarez. It describes his upbringing in late Victorian and Edwardian England, with Agatha as an unmarried mother pretending to be a widow, and her instilling into him a sense of duty to the Navy and to his country. As soon as he is old enough (fifteen years of age), Brown joins the Navy, and at the start of World War I is serving on the cruiser HMS Charybdis at Singapore.
In the second half of the story Charybdis is sunk by the fictional German armored cruiser SMS Ziethen in the eastern Pacific, and Brown, along with two severely-wounded men, is picked up as POWs by the German ship. As the Ziethen was damaged in the exchange, her captain postpones his commerce raiding mission to Australasian waters, and has to find a deserted anchorage to repair his ship. In the novel, he chooses the fictional Resolution Island in the Galápagos Islands. The resourceful Brown steals a rifle and a small amount of ammunition, water and food, escapes, and makes his way ashore, where he is able to pick off exposed crew members who are trying to repair the ship's damaged hull. As her captain has already careened his vessel, the Ziethen's guns cannot be brought to bear on Brown, and German landing parties are sent ashore to hunt him down. In Forester's description, Resolution Island is an almost-impenetrable tangle of sun-blasted sharp-edged lava blocks covered with cacti, making it extremely difficult for the Germans to locate Brown.
Brown is able to delay the repairs for two days, but is eventually mortally wounded by a lucky rifle shot from a German sailor as the crew is being recalled to the ship. He never learns that his actions delayed the Ziethen long enough to ensure that she is intercepted and destroyed by a pursuing Royal Navy force. Coincidentally, the senior officer of the British force is the now Captain Saville-Samarez, Brown's father, although they never know of each other's existence.
As so often with Forester's novels, the action takes place against a background of carefully researched historical fact. During the early part of World War I, Germany had a small squadron of modern vessels in the Far East. When war was declared, the larger vessels of the squadron set out to return to Europe. The light cruisers Nürnberg, Leipzig and Dresden, on detached duty, rejoined after brief periods of raiding, while SMS Emden was detached to serve as a commerce raider. The fictional Ziethen is supposed to be on a similar mission.
Most of the German squadron was eventually destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, but the British eventually found Dresden anchored and essentially non-operational at an isolated Pacific island. The British then fired on the anchored ship, and unable to effectively fight back, her crew scuttled her.
The German cruiser Ziethen described in the novel does not match any real German warship. She seems to more resemble the Austrian cruiser Kaiserin Elizabeth, which was deployed extensively in the Pacific in the years leading up to WWI.
This novel has some parallels to Forester's Death to the French . In both novels the hero is an enlisted man, cut off from friendly forces and acting alone. In both, the protagonist's dogged and surprisingly effective actions stem from instinctive shrewdness rather than conscious planning.
The novel has been filmed twice. John Mills played the title role in the 1935 version, called Brown on Resolution . [1] The 1953 version which starred Jeffrey Hunter as Brown, was called Single-Handed in the UK and Sailor of the King in the US, and was set during World War II.
The Battle of the Falkland Islands was a First World War naval action between the British Royal Navy and Imperial German Navy on 8 December 1914 in the South Atlantic. The British, after their defeat at the Battle of Coronel on 1 November, sent a large force to track down and destroy the German cruiser squadron. The battle is commemorated every year on 8 December in the Falkland Islands as a public holiday.
SMS Leipzig was the sixth of seven Bremen-class cruisers of the Imperial German Navy, named after the city of Leipzig. She was begun by AG Weser in Bremen in 1904, launched in March 1905 and commissioned in April 1906. Armed with a main battery of ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) guns and two 45 cm (18 in) torpedo tubes, Leipzig was capable of a top speed of 22.5 knots.
SMS Dresden was a German light cruiser built for the Kaiserliche Marine. The lead ship of her class, she was laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg in 1906, launched in October 1907, and completed in November 1908. Her entrance into service was delayed by accidents during sea trials, including a collision with another vessel which necessitated major repairs. Like the preceding Königsberg-class cruisers upon which her design was based, Dresden was armed with ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/40 guns and two torpedo tubes.
HMS Ajax was a Leander-class light cruiser which served with the Royal Navy during World War II. She became famous for her part in the Battle of the River Plate, the Battle of Crete, the Battle of Malta and as a supply escort in the siege of Tobruk. This ship was the eighth in the Royal Navy to bear the name. In February 1942, she was adopted by the civil community of Halifax, West Yorkshire.
The Battle of Cocos was a single-ship action that occurred on 9 November 1914, after the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, under the command of John Glossop, responded to an attack on a communications station at Direction Island by the German light cruiser SMS Emden, commanded by Karl von Müller.
The German East Asia Squadron was an Imperial German Navy cruiser squadron which operated mainly in the Pacific Ocean between the mid-1890s until 1914, when it was destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. It was based at Germany's Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory in China.
The Battle of Penang occurred on 28 October 1914, during World War I. It was a naval action in the Strait of Malacca, in which the German cruiser SMS Emden sank two Allied warships.
HMS Cleopatra was a Dido-class cruiser of the Royal Navy. She was built by R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Company, Limited, with the keel being laid down on 5 January 1939. She was launched on 27 March 1940, and commissioned on 5 December 1941.
Asian and Pacific theatre of World War I consisted of various military engagements that took place on the Asian continent and on Pacific islands. They include naval battles, the Allied conquest of German colonial possessions in the Pacific Ocean and China, and an anti-Russian rebellion in Russian Turkestan and an Ottoman-supported rebellion in British Malaya. The most significant military action was the careful and well-executed Siege of Qingdao in China, but smaller actions were also fought at Bita Paka and Toma in German New Guinea.
Single-Handed is a 1953 British war film directed by Roy Boulting and starring Jeffrey Hunter, Michael Rennie and Wendy Hiller. It is based on the 1929 novel Brown on Resolution by C. S. Forester. Set largely in the Pacific, Hunter stars as a Canadian sailor serving on a British warship who battles single-handedly to delay a German World War II warship long enough for the Royal Navy to bring it to battle. The film was released in the United States as Sailor of the King.
Brown on Resolution is a 1935 film adaptation of the 1929 C. S. Forester novel Brown on Resolution, with John Mills in his first lead role playing the title role. The film is also notable for being the first film to use actual Royal Navy ships. The plot is centred on the illegitimate son of a British naval officer helping to bring about the downfall of a German cruiser during World War I.
The Battle of Más a Tierra was a World War I sea battle fought on 14 March 1915, near the Chilean island of Más a Tierra, between a British squadron and a German light cruiser. The battle saw the last remnant of the German East Asia Squadron destroyed, when SMS Dresden was cornered and scuttled in Cumberland Bay.
The Bombardment of Papeete occurred in French Polynesia when German warships attacked on 22 September 1914, during World War I. The German armoured cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau entered the port of Papeete on the island of Tahiti and sank the French gunboat Zélée and freighter Walküre before bombarding the town's fortifications. French shore batteries and a gunboat resisted the German intrusion but were greatly outgunned. The main German objective was to seize the coal piles stored on the island, but these were destroyed by the French at the start of the action.
SMS Markgraf was the third dreadnought battleship of the four-ship König class. She served in the Imperial German Navy during World War I. The battleship was laid down in November 1911 and launched on 4 June 1913. She was formally commissioned into the Imperial Navy on 1 October 1914, just over two months after the outbreak of war in Europe. Markgraf was armed with ten 30.5-centimeter (12 in) guns in five twin turrets and could steam at a top speed of 21 knots. Markgraf was named in honor of the royal family of Baden. The name Markgraf is a rank of German nobility and is equivalent to the English Margrave, or Marquess.
The cruiserBogatyr, launched 1901, was the lead ship of the Bogatyr class of four protected cruisers built between 1898 and 1907 for the Imperial Russian Navy.
The High Seas Fleet was the battle fleet of the Imperial German Navy and saw action during the First World War. The formation was created in February 1907, when the Home Fleet was renamed as the High Seas Fleet. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was the architect of the fleet; he envisioned a force powerful enough to challenge the Royal Navy's predominance. Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Emperor, championed the fleet as the instrument by which he would seize overseas possessions and make Germany a global power. By concentrating a powerful battle fleet in the North Sea while the Royal Navy was required to disperse its forces around the British Empire, Tirpitz believed Germany could achieve a balance of force that could seriously damage British naval hegemony. This was the heart of Tirpitz's "Risk Theory", which held that Britain would not challenge Germany if the latter's fleet posed such a significant threat to its own.
The German commerce raiders of World War I were surface vessels used by the Imperial German Navy for its Handelskrieg, a campaign against Allied seaborne trade. The ships comprised warships, principally cruisers, stationed in the German colonial empire before the war began, express liners commissioned as auxiliary cruisers and later, freighters outfitted as merchant raiders. These vessels had a number of successes and had a significant effect on Allied naval strategy, particularly in the early months of the war.
SMS Leipzig was a German flush-deck steam corvette, the lead ship of the Leipzig class, named after the 1813 Battle of Leipzig. She was built for the Kaiserliche Marine in the 1870s, being laid down in early 1875, launched in September that year, and commissioned into the fleet in May 1877. She had one sister ship, SMS Prinz Adalbert. Intended for long cruises abroad, the ship was fitted with a full ship rig to supplement her steam engine if coal was unavailable. She carried a battery of twelve 17 cm (6.7 in) guns.
SMS Emden was the second and final member of the Dresden class of light cruisers built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. Named for the town of Emden, she was laid down at the Kaiserliche Werft in Danzig in 1906. The hull was launched in May 1908, and completed in July 1909. She had one sister ship, Dresden. Like the preceding Königsberg-class cruisers, Emden was armed with ten 10.5 cm (4.1 in) guns and two torpedo tubes.