Showing results by author "Douglas Reeman" in All Categories

From the author of The First to Land, a novel set during World War II. They called them the Scrapyard Flotilla. After a quarter of a century of service, the eight destroyers had seen all kinds of action. Now they were to be used in raids to open the way for the invasion of Occupied Europe.

Western Ocean, 1942... From the bridge of HMS Gladiator, Lieutenant-Commander David Howard’s orders were chillingly clear. There could be no mercy. To the men who fought to protect the vital, threatened Merchant Navy convoys in the Western Approaches, the Battle of the Atlantic was a full-scale war. A relentless, savage war against an ever-present enemy and a violent sea - in an arena known only to its embittered survivors as the killing ground. HMS Gladiator was part of that war.

February 1943. As the balance of the war slowly shifts in Britain's favour, Lieutenant-Commander Steven Marshall brings his battle-scarred submarine into home port. Captain and crew are exhausted after 14 months' continuous service, but for most there can be no thought of leave. If the enemy collapse in North Africa is to be exploited, every experienced man will be needed. Marshall must return to the Mediterranean, but this time to a very different kind of war.

As the Second World War progresses, the destruction of Allied shipping mounts. Fighter pilot Tim Rowan is posted to an escort carrier to help guard the precious convoys. His adventures take him first to the Arctic and then the Indian Ocean.

When Captain Guy Sherbrooke joins HMS Reliant in 1943, he knows he may be her last Captain. Sister battleships have been destroyed, and Sherbrooke cannot alter the bitter truth that there will be no half measures for HMS Reliant.

As captain of the crack Tribal Class destroyer HMS Hakka, Commander Graham Martineau must once again call from the ordinary seamen the ultimate in courage, and prepare to defend to the death vital convoys to Russia. No man and no ship is immortal.

HMS Royston, Coastal Forces Depot Ship, is mother ship to a battered, war-worn bunch of MTBs and MGBs. New on board is Sub-Lieutenant Royce: commissioned for three months, sea experience three months in an Asdic trawler, and aged 20. His commanding officer is Lieutenant Harston, aged 23.

His predecessor has been killed in action 48 hours earlier and is now hardly remembered. The crew are all young - some very young - but all old before their time....

It was in 1943. On the Black Sea, the Russians were fighting a desperate battle to regain control. But the Russians’ one real weakness was on the water: whatever they did, the Germans did it better, and the daring hit-and-run tactics of the E-boats plagued them. At last the British agreed to send them a small flotilla of motor torpedo boats under the command of John Devane. Devane had been in the Navy since the outbreak of war.

Twenty-five years ago HMS Terrapin was part of a crack hunter/killer group in the Battle of the Atlantic. Now she is working out her last commission in the Gulf of Thailand. To Lieutenant-Commander Standish, the frigate seems to mark the end of his hopes of a career in the navy. Then a new captain arrives, a man driven by an old-fashioned, almost obsessive patriotism. And under his stubborn leadership, Standish and the crew discover a long-forgotten unity of purpose.

The Mediterranean, 1943... The HMS Rob Roy. A tiny machine, just 230 feet from stem to stern. In peacetime she would have trawled for cod. Now her catch is deadlier by far. Lieutenant-Commander Ian Ransome is a veteran of the treacherous front line of naval combat. Under sealed orders in the battle-tossed waters of the Mediterranean, he and his jack-tired crew face one final test of their courage....

January, 1944. When the British light cruiser Andromeda arrives at Williamstown naval dockyard to be handed over to the Royal Australian Navy, she is already a legend - having earned her young captain, Richard Blake, the Victoria Cross in her last victory against overwhelming odds in the Mediterranean. Blake has grown to love Andromeda, so has few regrets when he is unexpectedly told to retain his command with a British and Australian ship’s company.

The year: 1943. Now there was to be no more retreat for Britain and her Allies. At last the war was to be carried into enemy territory. And from captured bases and makeshift harbours in North Africa, the Royal Navy's Special Force was to be the probe and the spearhead of the advance. To this unorthodox war came the corvette H. M. S. Thistle and her commanding officer, John Crispin.

HMS Wagtail is a river gunboat, a ship seemingly at the end of her unusual life, lying in a Hong Kong dockyard awaiting her last summons to the breakers' yard. Commander Justin Rolfe is also seemingly at the end of his useful naval life, an embittered man, brooding and angry from a court-martial verdict. Then the offshore island of Santu is threatened with invasion from the Chinese mainland.

HMS Temeraire: latest and most advanced of Britain's nuclear submarines. When Temraire's trials are cut short and she is ordered to the Far East to reinforce the fleet against a threat from Red China, her captain, David Jermain, knows that this is no routine exercise in flag-waving. And once in Asian waters, he and his submarine find themselves involved in a hidden, undeclared conflict beneath the sea.

In 1941, when she was turned into an armed merchant cruiser, the SS Benbecula was already old. Yet even she was needed to protect the vital Atlantic sea lanes. Commander Lindsay, her new captain, had to work desperately to mould the ship’s company - raw recruits and old-timers - into a fighting force. And better than anyone, Lindsay knew this could be his last command, his last chance.

It was an age of empire, an age of contrast, and an age of dramatic change - and one which would determine the destinies of nations as well as of men. Captain Philip Blackwood of the Royal Marines rejoins his ship, HMS Audacious, in August of 1850, anxious to get back into action. "Per Mare - Per Terram" is the marines' motto. In the torturous heat of Africa, where they are sent to stamp out the remaining strongholds of slavery, and later, in the bitter war of the Crimea, Philip Blackwood and his men learn to obey it without question.

In November 1941, Lt Ralph Trewin, DSC arrives at Singapore as second-in-command of HMS Porcupine. To the shell-shocked Trewin, the gun boat and her five elderly consorts symbolise the ignorance and blind optimism he finds in Singapore.

It is 1943 and Captain Mike Blackwood, Royal Marine Commando, is a survivor. Young, toughened, and tried in the hellish crucible of Burma, he labours beneath the weight of tradition and the burden of his own self-doubt. For him, the horizon is not the lip of the trench seen by men of the Corps in the previous war, but the ramp of a landing craft smashing down into the sea, and the fire of the enemy on a Sicilian beach.

Hong Kong, 1941... To the residents and defence forces of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the war in Europe remains remote. Even the massive build-up of Japanese forces on the Chinese border cannot dent their carefree optimism. Yet one man suspects the truth. Lieutenant-Commander Esmond Brooke, captain of HMS Serpent and a veteran of the cruel Atlantic, sees all too clearly the folly and incompetence of Hong Kong’s colonial administration. To Brooke, attack by Japan seems inevitable.

The dramatic sequel to Badge of Glory, China 1900. When the Boxer Rebellion erupts into bloody war. The Royal Marines, true to their motto, are the first to land - and the last to leave. Again, a Blackwood is in command.