Q-Ships and Their Story, Classics To Go
During the First World War, Britain relied heavily on resources imported across the Atlantic by its merchant marine. From the very beginning of the war, German U-boats targeted the merchant convoys, sinking millions of tons of essential produce and threatening Britain’s war effort. Were it not for the heroic efforts of the Q-ships, the naval war could have proven disastrous for the allies. Between 1914 and 1918, nearly 200 commercial vessels were transformed into armed decoy ships that lured U-boats into attacking them at close range before responding with their own deadly fire at the very last moment. (Amazon)
E. Keble Chatterton
Edward Keble Chatterton (10 September 1878 – 31 December 1944) was a prolific writer who published around a hundred books, pamphlets and magazine series, mainly on maritime and naval themes. Edward Keble Chatterton undertook a number of small-boat voyages through the English Channel and the Netherlands; out of these voyages came magazine articles and books describing the passages as well as several books on the maritime art collections of the Low Countries. At the outbreak of the First World War, Chatterton joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (R.N.V.R.), ultimately commanding a Motor Launch flotilla[5] at Queenstown, now Cobh, in Ireland. He describes these years in Q-Ships and their Story (1922), The Auxiliary Patrol (1924) and Danger Zone: The Story of the Queenstown Command (1934). He left the service in 1919 with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. In the inter-war years, his output was continuous, and included a series of monographs on model ships, many narrative histories of naval events, and a number of juvenile novels. Most of his books were republished in the United States and several were translated into French and German editions.
