According to the timeline I found in Appendix 3 of Paul F. Ford's revised edition of his Companion to Narnia (2009) VDT took place in 1942. The LWW events took place in 1940 which is when the Battle of Britain also took place.

No, Susan wasn't sunk. But many of a whole shipload of evacuated children on their way to Canada did get killed when their ship was torpedoed. It's a good thing that Von Cholnitz had a few more scruples than did his dear leader, wasn't it?

I still see Eustace as a gatecrasher. Just as well he wasn't mistaken for a stowaway.

Submarines and torpedos are on Chesterton's list of what was barbaric about Berlin already in WW-I. Sorry for the shipload.

I just wanted to demonstrate that Eustace showing off about the ships in this world did not mean he was any safer on them than on the Dawn Treader, or that Susan's trip to America with her parents didn't mean she wasn't running risks as well.

Fair point that it was Aslan who put Eustace on the Dawn Treader! In Silver Chair, when Eustace this time asks to go to Narnia with Jill, he tells Jill that they would not be calling Aslan if Aslan wasn't already calling them.

On the other hand, what about the White Witch in Magician's Nephew? Was it really Aslan's plan to call Jadis into Narnia?

That means that forcing someone to engage in a lot of stable social relationships not of his choice is depriving him of opportunities to engage in stable social relationships OF his choice. And in a way that is part of what one is doing to me.

Making one's chosen social relationships inaccessible is another part of such deprivation.

I do not really know what is meant here. I don't feel sorry for Eustace to be put on the Dawn Treader if he found he didn't like the company he was forced to keep on it. He had it easy compared to many such. The list is long.

Evacuated children, sailors shanghai'ed in the pre-scurvy days to man the ships needed for war, soldiers, especially those that were conscripted, and many such. What about the forced labourers, prisoners, and other unfortunates in World War 2? What about stolen children, the Leaving of Liverpool and other schemes which uprooted children from familiar environments into horrible ones because some government body or other thought it was in their best interests?

I also fail to see that being prevented from socialising with the people I might prefer to be with is so dreadful. It might be grand to socialise with the rich and powerful, but why would they want to socialise with the likes of me? As a better example of what I mean, I might like the idea of being welcomed with open arms into UK as one of the family, but as a descendant of the convicts they transported to their 19th century colonies, UK might still insist I line up with the foreigners.

We might get some sort of choice in life as to what sort of work we want to do and where we might live, though that is often determined by income or lack of it. We definitely can choose what interests us and what does not. But we still have to make the best of it when thrust into company not of our choosing. For instance, we can't always choose our neighbours or our future workmates or supervisor, and we can only hope that the job screening and membership conditions screen out people we might not want to socialise with because of involvement with crime.

Even when Eustace went to school he had to learn to get along with his school mates, many or most of them strangers, even if his strategy was sucking up to anyone stronger than he was and picking on others that were weaker. So how was it different when he was pulled from the water into the Dawn Treader?

There is an old saying, You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. That is, if you still have relatives alive that are not 'in-laws'. The only thing for Eustace to do is to see what 'stable relationships' he can learn to make in his current environment, that is to say, the Dawn Treader.