Out of the Italian Night - Wellington Bomber Operations 1944-45

During 1944 and 1945 the squadrons of 205 Group were launching air attacks from bases in Italy. In many ways their efforts were the same as those of aircrew attached to Bomber Command in Britain, yet conditions for the men were very different. The men fought their war as much against the weather, as against the enemy. The Wimpy, as the Wellington was affectionately known, had been operational when war was declared and five years on their young crews were still taking them into battle.

Maurice Lihou joined the RAF in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. He trained as a wireless operator to become aircrew, but found himself working in ground stations. He decided to re-muster as a pilot and completed his training in Canada where he was awarded his wings. He soon became captain of an aircraft and ferried a Wellington to North Africa. He was then posted to Italy and joined No 37 Squadron, becoming involved in various operations to harass the retreating German army.

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Prisoner of the Rising Sun

This is the story of Stanley Wort, a young man thrust into the Royal Navy in distant Hong Kong. He relates some of the humorous situations in which he found himself and provides a realistic account of what life was like for servicemen in pre war Hong Kong.

It describes the prelude to war from his point of view and his part in the Battle for Hong Kong. There follows the story of what happened to him when taken prisoner and life and death in prison camps in Hong Kong and Japan. It tells what it was like to be shipped to Japan in the hold of Japanese merchantmen with constant fear of being torpedoed.

In Japan itself he and his fellow prisoners were used as slave labour. Treatment was harsh and brutal and although many of them died the Japanese never broke the spirit of the survivors.

The author explains how it felt to be a prisoner working in a Japanese factory when a major earthquake struck. He also relates what it was like to be on the receiving end of a B29 fire raid and what the Japanese did to downed American airmen. In August 1945 he saw the Japanese bow before loudspeakers and although he did not realize it then, heard the Japanese Emperor announce the surrender of Japan. The book contains a tribute to the efficiency and kindness of the American forces that got him out and on his way home.

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Cockleshell Commando: The Memoirs of Bill Sparks DSM

One of only two survivors of the famous Cockleshell Hero raid, Bill Sparks' war and post-war career has never before been told in full. In this gripping book, he describes not only his part in Operation FRANKTON, the daring Gironde raid, and his escape back to Britain, but how he fought with the Greek Sacred Squadron thereafter. Operating in small groups they raided and liberated islands in the Aegean Sea. After the war, bored with life as a bus driver, he joined the Malayan Police and saw action aplenty during the Emergency. Always something of a military maverick, Bill's memoir is truly action-packed. The book benefits from the inclusion of the official German investigation report into the Cockleshell Raid.

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Night Action: MTB Flotilla At War

This memoir is Peter Dickens' account of his experiences as the young commander of the 21st MTB Flotilla during 1942-43, mainly in the North Sea and the Channel. In all the annals of the war at sea, comparatively little has been written about the role of the torpedo boat, and yet these small and vulnerable boats, travelling at high speed amid storms and gunfire, and usually under the cover of darkness, managed to closely engage enemy convoys and escorts in high-speed attacks and wreak havoc among the German supply lines.

Like the sailors who fought against the U-boats in the battle of the Atlantic, Dickens and his comrades were experiencing a new kind of warfare and had to hit upon the techniques and tactics as they went along; their kind of action called for great courage, spilt-second timing and complete understanding between captain and crew.

Night Action is a lively and thrilling account, but also one which is frank and carefully considered; there is humour but the horror of war is never far away and the author conveys to the reader a sharp sense of the reality of those operations in a way that no history book can do.

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