The first British casualties of the Second World War occurred on Sunday, 3 September 1939, just nine hours after the conflict opened. They came not from the fighting forces, the Royal Navy, the Army or the Royal Air Force; they were British merchant seamen serving under the Red Ensign in the cargo/passenger liner Athenia, torpedoed without warning by U-30 some 200 miles west of Ireland. When the torpedoes struck, two men were killed in her engine room; seventeen other crew members gave their lives to save their passengers.
From that day onwards, until the war ended on 15 August 1945 with the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Britain’s merchant seamen were in the front line, bringing in the food, fuel and military equipment that saved their country from being crushed under the heel of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. In doing so, many of them paid the supreme sacrifice. Figures released by the Registrar of Shipping and Seamen reveal that 2,535 British ocean-going merchant ships were lost in the six-year-long war, and of the 185,000 men and women serving in the British Merchant Navy at the time 36,749 lost their lives, 4,707 others were wounded, and 5,720 ended up in German and Japanese prisoner of war camps. This was a casualty rate of 25 per cent, second only to that suffered by RAF Bomber Command.
This book tells the story of some of those brave seamen, volunteers all, who manned the thin line of grey-painted ships that stretched from horizon to horizon, keeping Britain’s vital sea lanes open in the face of a determined and ruthless enemy. Men who, when given the opportunity, fought to defend their ships and the cargoes they carried. Even today, more than seventy years since it all ended, this country is still heavily in their debt.