The Naked & the Drowned

SHARKS AND LITTLE FISH (432 pp.)--Wolfgang Ott--Pantheon ($4.95).

There is an outguessing game, called "Who gets it next?", which authors of combat novels play with their readers. Will it be the tough sergeant or the hero's buddy who doesn't make it back from his 23rd mission? No such game is played in Wolfgang Ott's grim first novel about the frightful death by bleeding of the German navy during World War II. There is no question of what will happen to his characters; they are all doomed, and who gets it next makes no difference.

There is no hero--merely one character who, by chance, survives most of the others. Like the rest, Lieut. Hans Teichmann is sketchily drawn; nothing is told of his background, and--except for his sensations when he is drunk, or in rut, or in pain--little of his thoughts. He is brave; some of the others are cowardly, but courage and the lack of it do not matter; nor does brutality or kindness. The meaninglessness of war swallows everything. West German Novelist Ott is writing about men engulfed by the dark millennium Yeats foretold when "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

Horrifying Anonymity. With plodding determination, Novelist Ott follows a class of enlisted sailors through a tour of minesweeper duty, a session of midshipmen's school and a chilling succession of raiding cruises with the North Atlantic submarine wolf packs (Ott, 34, began the war as a minesweeper seaman, ended it as an ensign on a submarine). His style is lumpishly Teutonic, and the translator's cliches do not make it any smoother. Ott's impersonal handling of his characters, though it gives a horrifying anonymity to their cockroach deaths, also makes for interminable, dull stretches.

But for all his crudities, Novelist Ott has made a case against war that is as powerful as anything in a recent novel. It is also a savage attack on the German people. A young intellectual rants about the complacency that allowed Hitler's rise: "We have outstanding religious leaders and brilliant philosophers; we have gifted musicians and soldiers; we have smart bankers and remarkable whoremas-ters; we have everything--except human beings." Lieut. Teichmann agrees half-heartedly with the half-truths, then changes his mind, protests that there is some meaning, at least, in fighting courageously.

Into Madness. His own fight ends without any obvious meaning. Far from Allied planes and destroyers, his crippled submarine strikes a mine and sinks as it steams for port. Teichmann and 19 others put on escape lungs, reach the surface and float helplessly. A flight of gulls lowers, swoops hungrily at the eyes of a comrade Teichmann is trying to save. Exhausted, finally broken by the war, Teichmann slips into madness. Hours later, rescue boats save 9 of the 20 men. Novelist Ott does not say whether Teichmann is one of them. It does not matter.

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