Last Run Ashore

Last Run Ashore is the often grim but frequently hilarious story of mainly lower-deck life on a Flower Class corvette of the Royal Navy. Set near the end of World War II, the crew of the Dandelion is charged with giving coastal support to the 14th Army in Burma. A colorful cast of characters that includes an officer's wife and an ordinary seaman stranded together on a drifting buoy, a down-on-his-luck scrap metal dealer, and a ship's dog with its own rum ration makes for entertaining reading as the story builds to the eventual, spectacular fate of their warship. About the author: John Moger is a retired Fleet-Street journalist, now 80. He served in the Royal Navy 1943-46 on a "Big Ship," a cruiser, and later on the more relaxed mess deck of a corvette, typified by the pipe-call: "Hands to Bathe and Skylark!"