50 North

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous conflict of the global sweep of WWII. When it began, as it did from the first day of the War, Canada's navy, The Royal Canadian Navy, was not much more than a handful of ships to join in the fight for two great oceans. By the end of the War the Canadian Navy was the third largest after the USA and Great Britain. Alan Easton, the author, was already a hardened merchant fleet officer when War was declared. With little hesitation he volunteered for the RCN which desperately lacking in skilled officers almost immediately gave him command of a Canadian-built corvette. Easton is one of those quiet heroes who fought at sea throughout this campaign of attrition that Winston Churchill described as the one thing that frightened him the most. Popular memory these days forgets the role of men like Easton, the Navy of Canada and the gritty determination with which they unarguably helped save Great Britain from starvation. Almost half of the burden of escorting the vital trans-Atlantic convoys was shouldered by the Canadian Navy, and men like Alan Easton. This book, written by Easton immediately after the War while still vividly fresh in his memory puts the reader right there, on the bridge of these cockleshell ships as much at war with the North Atlantic as with the insidious treachery of the U-boats. You can feel the cold, taste the salt, sense the anguish of finding the empty lifeboats of torpedoed freighters. This book, published now in electronic form for the first time is a true classic, it ranks among the finest accounts from the front-line of conflict, on land, in the air or on the boundless stage of the North Atlantic. Illustrated with a wealth of period photographs and featuring a chapter not published in the original book as well as explanatory notes this is a book relating the cruel, violent realities of the war that reads like a novel. An epic account by a man who was there, every day of it.