Lifeline: The Merchant Navy at War, 1939-45 - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

The Merchant Navy suffered proportionately the highest casualties of any of the Services in the Second World War, approximately 30,0000 of the 185,000 seamen who served being killed. Yet their experiences and their sacrifices, vital to the maintenance of the war effort and the survival of Britain, have been overshadowed by those of the armed forces. Peter Elphick tells the story of the Merchant Navy in a series of individual accounts. From countless interviews with survivors he has succeeded in portraying, what it was really like to serve under the Red Ensign in every theatre of the war. As well as the convoy battles in the North Atlantic and the epic stories of survival at sea by torpedoed sailors, he covers the role of merchant ships in the evacuation of Singapore in 1942, the secret runs by high-speed motorboats to Sweden, through the German-dominated Baltic, to pick up vital supplies of ball-bearings, and escapes by merchant seamen from POW camps. This study redresses the baglance in the history of the maritime side of the Second World War, showing just what the sailors of the Merchant Navy had to face in keeping Britains's "life-line" open.

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