PQ17 by Godfrey Winn.

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greendragon
Posts: 179
Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:16 am

PQ17 by Godfrey Winn.

Unread post by greendragon »

While on hot beaches on Malta I has labouring through the pages of the book.
This is slower reading rather than "regular" memories of the veterans. Need for submerge into the atmosphere of the book.
This is somewhere between novel and war correspondent account though only real stories are present and real people (also names) told.

GW was on the deck of AA ship HMS Pozarica ("Pozy") and his accounts are valuable and no doubt true.
Some information - though still reported in a novelist's style - are impossible to find somewhere else.
He - like many other British - was not impressed with the Soviet Russia and its citizens attitude to the Allies ship crews who went throgh the hell of Arctic convous battles - as he saw it in Murmansk.
Very vivid descriptions i.e. of some of the Soviet Admirals (..."the Russian Admiral....received him (the captain of a HM ship) like a mandarin...."
The Soviet authorities treated the crews as aliens rather than allies.
I will quote fragment which also enriched my English dictionary:
"...and finally Corbett -Singleton of Halcyon, like huge sheep dog with a shy , sleepy manner that did not prevent him from winning a double DSC ... or from sending - a lightning flash of relieving humour -... just as the news had been passed from ship to ship that our convoy had to scatter, he hoisted: "Now I know what the Itie (this is the word I was short of) fleet feel like !".
Worth reading indeed.

Regards,

GD

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