This picture was exhibited at an exhibition called War Pictures at the National Gallery in 1941. It was also reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. In his catalogue essay, the critic Eric Newton compared the war between Germany and Britain to 'the fundamental opposition between the sea's restless power and the land's opposing firmness'. The wave-like undulations of the figures lying in the foreground of the drawing and the vertical cliff of figures on the bunks correspond remarkably with Newton's analogy.