Флот / Corvettes Canada: Convoy Veterans of WWII Tell Their True Stories

Название: Corvettes Canada: Convoy Veterans of WWII Tell Their True Stories
Автор(ы): Mac Johnston
Издательство: Wiley
Год: 2008
ISBN: 978-0470154298
Страниц: 256
Язык: English
Формат: True PDF
Размер: 82 MB

To the casual observer, World War II was won on land, but the war was actually decided by the Battle of the Atlantic. It was control of the seas that enabled the Allies to fight on land in Europe, and in the air. The victory at sea was a dangerous and deadly six-year struggle to deliver the necessities of life and war from North America to the United Kingdom. On the one side were the hunted -merchant ships sailing in convoys protected by warships. On the other side were the hunters-German submarines determined to sever the Atlantic Supply line and strangle the United Kingdom into submission. Canada played a significant role in this struggle by producing and sending to sea more than a hundred small escort vessels known as corvettes. In Corvettes Canada, Mac Johnston re-creates life aboard corvettes through the worlds of the veterans themselves. Within a framework of the basic events of the war, this book is an epic piece of oral history and is essentially the product of the memories of more than 250 men, collected by correspondence in a project that got underway with an initial personalized letter to several hundred corvette veterans in 1990. Hundreds of additional letters followed as more veterans were identified. The letter count rose to 1,400 and then 1,900 to flesh out the corvette story.