Full Description
In 1939, young English naval signalman Geoffrey Holder-Jones began his career by surviving a German mine attack in the Thames estuary. World War II took him as naval officer to Iceland, the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, and the United States. Commissioned as a naval officer and given command of his own ship, Jones then patrolled the waters off Canada and Newfoundland before returning to Britain in 1944. This true story, written on the basis of personal conversations and a scrapbook entrusted to the author 60 years after the war, illuminates one of the great achievements of the war the beating of the German U-boat blockade of the American coast by squadrons of Allied ships that were little more than motley collections of armed trawlers and whalers. With a sense of humor and decency that sustained him through the ordeals of convoy duty in the Arctic Ocean, Signalman Jones has related his story to Tim Parker with vivid observations and an eye for the absurd.
Contents
Foreword by Rear Admiral John Lippiett
Preface
A message from Signalman Jones
Chapter 1: Early Years - Liverpool and the Great Depression
Chapter 2: At last I go to sea - and on a battle cruiser
Chapter 3: War
Chapter 4: I go back to school and meet Gladys
Chapter 5: Wastwater - the grim reality of war in the North Atlantic
Chapter 6: Iceland, 1941
Chapter 7: Spitsbergen, summer 1941
Chapter 8: We lose our captain but find a submarine
Chapter 9: Aberdeen, then back to the frozen north
Chapter 10: Churchill and Roosevelt order Wastwater to America
Chapter 11: New York, New York
Chapter 12: The Caribbean
Chapter 13: Canada
Chapter 14: Blighty
Chapter 15: My last command
Chapter 16: Thirty-nine steps
Tim Parker
