100 books like Operation Pedestal

There are many valuable memoirs that can take you inside the stories of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Changing technologies and the grand strategy of winning the Second World War tend to dominate many accounts but memoirs give insight into the lives, emotions, and thoughts of those called on to fight in great waters. Gretton was one of the most capable Royal Navy commanders whose skills and professionalism helped to turn the tide in the Battle. 

Read this and see the campaign through his eyes as a professional hunter of U-boats and a good shepherd to the merchant ships under his protection.

I met Douglas Reeman only once but I owe him a debt since he inspired me on that occasion to start writing seriously. He served as a Royal Navy officer in WW2 and saw extensive service in destroyers and motor torpedo boats. He survived a sinking, during which he was injured, and was wounded again off Normandy. He wrote many novels about war at sea—those of WW1 and WW2 under his own name, and as “Alexander Kent” about the Age of Fighting Sail. They’re all splendidly exciting reads in which fortitude, duty, and loyalty—to one’s ship, crew, and country—and the brutal realities of war are portrayed with a great feel of realism. He claimed HMS Saracen as his favourite—and, when read, it’s easy to see why!

During the Battle of the Atlantic, it was the Merchant Seamen of many nations that kept the flow of supplies running across the Atlantic despite attacks from ship, submarine, and aircraft, together with all the normal hazards of storm and sea.

Civilians from diverse backgrounds, multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-faith they came together as crews to fight their ships through. This is a sympathetic study that takes us into their world to understand why and how, by dogged determination, they withstood the constant dangers to bring their cargo home.

After almost 80 years you might think that there was nothing new to say about the Battle of the Atlantic.  This volume shows the scholarship remains vigorous and ongoing. 

It highlights the multi-faceted nature and complexity of the Atlantic campaign the understanding of which goes well beyond traditional images of U-Boats hunting convoys in the mid-Atlantic. The team of scholars writing for this study provides fresh perspective on the Battle and the struggle for control of Britain’s sealines of communication between 1939 and 1945

Professor Lambert is the doyen of present-day naval historians.

In this book he tells the story of an incomparably great strategist and historian, Julian Corbett, whose pre-war views on naval strategy were well constructed and sought by men such as Admiral Jacky Fisher, the founder of the modern navy. Unfortunately, Corbett’s ideas were catastrophically ignored in 1914 but shaped Britain’s success in the Second World War and beyond.

The author, Ludovic Kennedy, was a very junior officer aboard one of the Royal Navy destroyers in the thick of the hunt for Bismarck, which lends a palpable “I was there” immediacy to his account of one of the most dramatic episodes in the naval war on the North Atlantic in World War II.  His presentation is well-balanced, and his writing style makes for an easy but thoroughly engaging read, while the vignettes of shipboard life and the naval service, in general, are by turns fascinating, gripping, and sometimes tragic.

Not just another book on World War II—Sailor’s Heart by Martin Campbell is a story that has not been told before. It is the fictionalized (but heavily and exhaustively researched) story of three Royal Navy sailors who experienced traumas that rendered them unable to go on. Campbell says the condition “sailor’s heart” is the loss of interest in the battle and then the will to fight or the will to live.” With no end to the war in sight, the men are sentenced to an undefined period of rehabilitation in a Royal Navy hospital that has anything but the men’s best interests at heart. Their plight and struggle to survive are palpable and gripping.

The Shetland Bus was a great operation fighting against the German occupation of Norway and David Howarth, second in command of the organization, brings a personal and knowledgeable telling of its history in The Shetland Bus. This book inspired me to write my novel. It is an amazing story of courage and skill. Fishermen on the west coast of Norway began to run fishing boats to England at the beginning of the war. Known as the North Sea Traffic, it eventually became formalized under British command. The Bus only worked during the dark of winter, when sea and weather conditions were dangerous, bringing over arms and agents, taking back refugees. Later, submarine chasers, the Hessa, Hitra, and Vigra, served from 1943 to the end of the war. 

The German invasion of Norway was sudden and thorough, capturing major ports from Oslo to Bergen and Trondheim on a single day in April. Their only failure was not capturing King Haakon, the cabinet, and Norway’s gold bullion. Robert Pearson’s Gold Run is a thrilling account of the efforts of “a visionary bank chief,” loyal Norwegians, and ships and men of the British Royal Navy. While under bombardment, immense courage was displayed as 50 tons of gold were moved by road, rail, and fishing boats. Pearson provides documents, photos, and personal accounts as well as a great narrative. If you don’t know anything about Norway during WWII, this book is a great way to understand the history of the invasion, how it unfolded and what was at stake. 

One of the official histories of the war at sea, Roskill was a distinguished naval officer and a brilliant historian.

This is history that is written with an eye to post-war British politics in which the Royal Navy was struggling for funds to meet the Soviet submarine menace. He also in his writings maintained the wall of secrecy around ultra-derived intelligence. This is a landmark history but one that has the added interest of being shaped by the exigencies of the Cold War.