SOURCE: "Aboard an Oil Tanker," in The New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1943, pp. 12, 14.

In the following mixed review, Sager praises Polonsky's vivid descriptions and dramatic sensibilities, but finds The Enemy Sea anticlimactic at key moments.

The merchant seaman has been rescued from his role of obscurity within the past year by several first-hand reports of terror, endurance and courage at sea. The stark facts of the hunt—the submarine stalking the slow, lumbering merchant fleet—need none of the artistry of fiction to supply color and climax.

Fiction, on the other hand, can deal with these same grim facts—as Abraham Polonsky does in The Enemy Sea—and out of the facts draw a pattern of purpose and hope. The Enemy Sea is facile melodrama; the story of a fated oil tanker, and the entangled lives of several of those on board. A bald telling of the...