U-boat Prey: Merchant Sailors at War, 1939-1942: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives (Images of War)
Philip Kaplan
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: B00QVZPRSI
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“The Merchant Seaman never faltered. To him we owe our preservation and our very lives” - The Right Hon. Alfred Barnes, Minister of War Transport. During the first stages of the Second World War, all forces were rallied in an attempt to support the Allied effort. With trade and supply routes to Britain suddenly being placed at great risk, a stalwart team of merchant sailors were required to protect vital supplies for the British people, as well as shipping vital army necessities back and forth. The efforts of the sailors involved really can't be overstated. Despite the fact that they didn't wear uniforms, and few were rewarded with medals or memorials, they were certainly as worthy of the title 'front-line warrior' as the guardsmen and fighter pilots to whom they transported necessary combat supplies. Indeed, many are in agreement that their efforts stood between the might of German forces and the domination of the world. Over 30,000 men fell victim to the German U-boats between 1939 and 1945. This publication serves as a tribute to their efforts, and will be followed by a second volume covering the final stages of the war, from 1943-45. Images of some of the most imposing merchant ships feature, accompanied by a lucid narrative describing the various roles enacted by the sailors on board and the wartime context in which they worked.
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Invention which dated from the First War. This was the magnetic mine, of which large numbers were “sown” by U-boats in British coastal waters, and by aircraft in harbour mouths and estuaries. Approximately one in every four mines laid caused damage, and many merchant ships were sunk. An Admiralty team had been examining the problem for some time, but it was not until an unexploded mine, dropped by parachute off Shoeburyness in November 1939, was hauled ashore and taken to pieces (with courage and.
Produced the inevitable bagpipes, and commenced the process of putting them in tune. A recumbent Bren gunner propped himself up on an elbow and voiced a protest. “Give me bloody dive-bombing every time,” he proclaimed. From the beginning of April until 20th May 1941, twenty-five British merchantmen, totalling over 140,000 tons, were sunk, most of them by bombing, in the pleasant blue waters of the Mediterranean. For many months, indeed until the Allies were established in Sicily and on the toe.
As she was to prove some years later. The carpenter was Norwegian and he gave me two good pieces of advice: get all your drinking and hell-raising done by the age of twenty-one, and always buy the first round when ashore with your shipmates—everyone remembers who bought the first round, but by the fifth or sixth memories begin to be unreliable. He also advised me never to argue with a woman or a wire rope, and how right he was. “Cadets were considered to be the lowest form of marine life, and.
Field guns, white-starred armoured vehicles and trucks for the troops in Normandy. The Allied Air Forces commanded the skies above the assault route, the beaches, and deep into France. The Luftwaffe’s impact was minimal, and the few U-boats, E-boats, and midget submarines which set out from their Bay of Biscay bases, with orders to attack the invasion fleet, were harried by aircraft all the way. Theirs was a hopeless, if not a suicidal mission. To put the Allied armies ashore, to breach the.
Steamer and a motor yacht had arrived to rescue the survivors. Eighty-three civilian passengers, including twenty-two of the Americans, were lost. The eighteen members of the crew who also died, were, like the passengers, unarmed civilians, and they were the first Merchant Navy casualties of World War Two. On the North Atlantic with a convoy in World War Two. Those early deaths were to be multiplied a thousandfold and more within the next five years, nearly double those sustained in World War.