'Poor bastards', then and now

From Malaya in 1941 to Iran in 2026, sailors pay the price of geopolitics. Less than 1 000 dead so far, but Iran's missiles, drones, regime resilience keep conflict alive.

- Brendan Seery

In December 1941, my wife's grandfather was a boy-sailor on a British Merchant Navy vessel off Malaya when two of the Empire's most powerful warships - the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battle cruiser HMS Repulse - were sent to the bottom of the Indian Ocean by air-launched Japanese bombs and torpedoes.

It wasn't the realisation that airpower had just made capital ships obsolete which stuck with him, though. After his ship later took aboard some of the survivors, initially plucked from the oil-soaked and burning sea, his comment, decades later, was: "Poor bastards."

War is hell. Those of us who've been through it know that. Those of us who haven't like to toss around concepts like bravery and patriotism to justify death.