Authors Electric

On the night of 12/13 April 1943 Lieutenant-Commander Robert Peverell Hichens, Senior Officer at HMS Beehive , the Coastal Forces base in Felixstowe, Suffolk, was at sea. He was leading a unit of four motor gunboats (MGBs) protecting motor launches (MLs) of the 51st Flotilla - also based at Felixstowe -  who were mine-laying off the Dutch coast.  When their job was done, the MLs returned to Felixstowe while the MGBs went on the hunt. They stalked and attacked an enemy trawler (an armed offensive war vessel, not some innocent fisherman) and a gun coaster. The waters off the Netherlands and France were, at that time, an essential supply route for the occupying German forces, therefore a regular conflict zone for the British Coastal Forces. Peter Scott gave these fierce, small scale fights a collective title, The Battle of the Narrow Seas. On this night ‘Hitch’ and his small group had silently manoeuvred up wind of the enemy vessels, then sped at them out of the darkness, engines...

Heading from Yachting Monthly 'RNVR Journal' 1940-45 Since the publication of Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers of WW2 I’ve become more and more aware how little I know. I worked hard to research the book and can confidently say that I left out much more than I put in. That’s not hard when you’re researching from memoirs, lists, websites and histories. The source material fills several shelves; the book itself is a single volume. Even my bibliography had to be rigorously selective – only including the books I’d used directly in the finished product, not everything else I’d read along the way.  As it was, I got into trouble with the publishers for going over the contracted word count. I hadn’t fully realised how tightly managed their budgets must be and the extent to which rapidly rising paper costs could threaten the viability of a project. I felt rather sorry and amateur when I delivered 15k excess words – but I still fought like a pitbull for my Right to an Index....