‘Poor bastards’, then and now

An injured Iranian sailor arrives to receive treatment at the Karapitiya hospital in Galle on March 4, 2026 after his frigate, IRIS Dena sank off Sri Lanka’s coast. Picture: Ishara S. Kodikara / AFP 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. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the “poor bastards” comment when I saw a bewildered Iranian sailor being pushed in a wheelchair at a hospital in Sr Lanka. He was one of just 30 or so survivors of the 180 crew on an Iranian vessel torpedoed and sunk earlier this week by an American submarine.

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Video of the sinking, shot through the sub’s video apparatus on its periscope, showed the ship’s end being swift, as it was blown apart by the torpedo. A TV expert in the UK opined, in a monotone, that “very few” sailors ever live through something like that. The sinking underlined the importance of a comparatively old offensive technology – the torpedo – in modern war, as well as the fact that if you have annoyed America and they want to get you, you are not safe anywhere.

Now, lest you thinking I am simping for Iran, I am not. The regime in Tehran is backward, autocratic and brutally repressive of many of its own people.

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