One Common Enemy
The Laconia incident: A survivor’s memoir
Jim McLoughlin with David Gibb
PB 224 PP 210 x 135 ILLUS B&W 1862546908
$24.95 Autobiography / True Stories EAN 9781862546905
Wakefield Press
‘I’ll see the world,’ Jim
McLoughlin told his parents as he set off to join the Royal Navy
in 1939. ‘It’ll be fun.’
Months later, this Liverpool lad was sailing
to war aboard the massive battleship HMS Valiant.
He saw some of the world, but it wasn’t fun.
In One Common Enemy, he recounts how
the chaos and carnage of war at sea in the Norwegian and Mediterranean
campaigns led him to a fateful rendezvous with a much-loved ship
from his boyhood, the passenger liner Laconia. Nostalgia
turned to disaster when Laconia was torpedoed by a German
U-boat in the South Atlantic. Despite a remarkable rescue attempt
by a courageous, compassionate foe, Jim was condemned to a drifting
lifeboat and a harrowing voyage of death and madness.
One Common Enemy is a story of a desperate
personal battle for survival, but also a moving narrative of innocence
lost and a lifelong battle with confronting memories.
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