Tag: WW2

#GuestPost Sea of Wolves by Philip K. Allan @PhilipKAllan

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I’m delighted to welcome best-selling author Philip K. Allan to What Cathy Read Next today. Philip’s latest novel, Sea of Wolves, was published on Tuesday 15th September 2020. Set during World War 2, I’m delighted to bring you a fascinating guest post in which Philip reveals the historical facts that inspired the book. It also contains a mention of one of my favourite war films.

Sea of Wolves Philip K AllanAbout the Book

1941 and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Across the stormy North Atlantic battle rages between wolf packs of U-boats and escort ships fighting to protect the Allies’ vital convoys. Meanwhile teams of code-breakers at Bletchley Park struggle to penetrate the German Navy’s top-secret Dolphin code, and unlock the flow of vital intelligence that will swing the battle in the Allies’ favour.

Sea of Wolves plots the lives of three people caught up in the centre of the battle. Vera Baldwin, a young crossword enthusiast, lifted from her quiet suburban life and thrown into the middle of the greatest code-breaking effort the world has seen. Otto Stuckmann, the rookie commander of U70, a German naval veteran struggling with the ceaseless demands being placed on him. Leonard Cole, the newly appointed first lieutenant of HMS Protea and a man with unfinished business to resolve.

Each is unknown to the others as their fates spiral around each other, touching and twisting towards a final encounter that will change their lives forever.

Format: ebook (284 pages) 
Publication date: 15th September 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction, WW2

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Guest Post: The Battle of the Atlantic by Philip K. Allan

I am known as an author of nautical fiction set in the Royal Navy of Nelson’s time, but after the publication of the eighth book in my Alexander Clay series, I felt the need to try something fresh. My main love is the sea, so my writing needed to contain this element, and I have long felt drawn to the Battle of the Atlantic in World War 2.

This was the longest and hardest campaign of the war. German U-boats were on station there from the day Poland was invaded until the day Germany surrendered, locked in battle with Allied escort ships trying to shepherd their vital convoys of merchantmen through to safety, often in appalling weather.

The Cruel SeaIt was also the only theatre where the whole war could be won or lost, and both sides knew it. About 3,500 Allied ships were sunk, almost two for each day of the war, and over thirty thousand merchant sailors were killed. The German navy lost 783 U-boats and twenty-seven thousand crew, which was three-quarters of the men who served. This rate of fatalities was the greatest of any service in any armed force in the Second World War. Yet it is a campaign that has been largely ignored by historical fiction, with the honourable exception of Nicholas Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea and C.S. Forrester’s The Good Shepherd (both published over sixty years ago). A fresh novel was long overdue, I concluded.

Sea of Wolves follows the lives of three individuals caught up in the centre of the battle. Vera Baldwin, a codebreaker at Bletchley Park working on the German Naval Enigma codes, Otto Stuckmann a young U-boat commander and Leonard Cole, the newly appointed first lieutenant of the escort ship HMS Protea. Over a six-month period in 1941 we see the tide of battle ebb and flow across the ocean, as the three stories come together.  © Philip K. Allan

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Philip K. AllanAbout the Author

Philip K. Allan comes from Hertfordshire where he lives with his wife and two teenage daughters. He has an excellent knowledge of ships and the sea. He studied naval history as part of his history degree at London University, which awoke a lifelong passion. A longstanding member of the Society for Nautical Research, he is also a keen sailor and writes for the US Naval Institute’s magazine Naval History.

He is author of the Alexander Clay series of naval fiction. The first book in the series, The Captain’s Nephew, was published in January 2018, and immediately went into the Amazon top 100 bestseller list for Sea Adventures. The sequel, A Sloop of War, was published in March 2018, and was similarly well received, winning the Discovered Diamonds Book of the Month. He has since published six further books in the series, as well as Sea of Wolves.

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#BookReview V2 by Robert Harris @HutchinsonBooks

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V2 Robert HarrisAbout the Book

“The first rocket will take five minutes to hit London. You have six minutes to stop the second.”

Rudi Graf used to dream of sending a rocket to the moon. Instead, he has helped create the world’s most sophisticated weapon: the V2 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound. In a desperate gamble to avoid defeat in the winter of 1944, Hitler orders ten thousand to be built. Haunted and disillusioned, Graf – who understands the volatile, deadly machine better than anyone – is tasked with firing these lethal ‘vengeance weapons’ at London.

Kay Caton-Walsh is an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and a survivor of a V2 strike. As the rockets devastate London, she joins a unit of WAAFs on a mission to newly liberated Belgium. Armed with little more than a slide rule and a few equations, Kay and her colleagues will attempt to locate and destroy the launch sites.

But at this stage in the war it’s hard to know who, if anyone, you can trust. As the death toll soars, Graf and Kay fight their grim, invisible war – until one final explosion of violence causes their destinies to collide.

Format: Hardcover (320 pages)               Publisher: Hutchinson
Publication date: 17th September 2020 Genre: Historical fiction

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Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
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My Review

Like his novel Munich which I read recently, V2 is set over the course of just a few days. However, this time it’s 1944 at the height of the German onslaught on London with deadly V2 rockets, the devastating effects of which are vividly described. The book alternates between the stories of two main characters – German engineer, Dr. Rudi Graf, and British WAAF Officer, Kay Caton-Walsh. Despite being on different sides, their lives will intertwine in a number of ways.

The book contains many powerful scenes including the intricate and highly risky process involved in launching the V2 rockets and the resulting scenes of devastation on the streets of London caused by their impact.  Most memorable for me was Graf’s recollection of his visit to witness the construction using slave labour of the vast subterranean factory at Nordhausen where the rockets are to be manufactured. “The stench of it. And the noise of it – the rumble of cement mixers, the ring of pickaxes, the muffled boom of explosions…the clank of railway trucks moving up and down the line… And the sight of it, wherever one looked in the eerie dim yellow light: the moving sea of striped uniforms, an undifferentiated mass unless one made an effort to fix one’s eyes on one of the pale, emaciated figures that were hurrying everywhere.”

The tension builds as an exciting but deadly cat-and-mouse game takes place in which Kay and her colleagues – slide rules and logarithm tables at the ready – race against time to locate the launch sites of the V2 rockets so that bombing raids can be launched by the RAF.

War is never straightforward and Kay, in particular, lets her feelings override her judgment resulting in unintended consequences for others. I found Graf an especially interesting character. He becomes increasingly appalled by the use to which the technology he helped develop is being put and the motivations of those higher up in the command chain. “He felt himself to be like one of the rockets – a human machine, launched on a fixed trajectory, impossible to recall, hurtling to a point that was preordained.” The end of the book sees him faced with a similarly difficult moral choice.

In V2 Robert Harris once again blends historical fact and fiction to produce a fascinating and utterly gripping story. 

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Hutchinson via NetGalley.

In three words: Compelling, authentic, dramatic

Try something similar: Nucleus by Rory Clements

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About the Author

Robert Harris is the author of thirteen bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy – Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator – Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich and The Second Sleep.

Several of his books have been filmed, including The Ghost, which was directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into forty languages and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He lives in West Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby.

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