The Search for the Sydney will be in stock at Booktopia from Monday the 17th August. We will make every effort to deliver as promptly as possible after this time.
Booktopia offers two informative and fascinating books on Australian history for the price of one!
SIGNED COPIES of THE SEARCH FOR THE SYDNEY
She was the glory ship of the then fledgling Australian Navy: a modern handsome cruiser which carried a wartime complement of 645 men. But then on 19 November 1941 HMAS Sydney encountered the German raider Kormoran in the Indian Ocean off WA.
The violent battle that ensued left Kormoran destroyed. Sydney was glimpsed sailing off the horizon on fire shell-damaged and suffering a torpedo hit to her bow. It would be 66 years before anyone laid eyes on either ship again.
In 2002 shipwreck hunter David Mearns joined the long list of people who had tried to find the Sydney. The next six years would test Mearns's talents as detective engineer marine scientist and leader taking him from war archives in Germany to homes of Kormoran survivors to the depths of the Indian Ocean. He would navigate clues conspiracy theories maddening technical problems and cyclones but in 2008 he recorded the astonishing words 'HMAS Sydney found!'
Here for the first time David Mearns tells the action-packed story of the hunt for the Sydney - and the Kormoran - and reveals what really happened on that fateful day in November.
Accompanied by stunning photographs many of them never seen before historical imagery detailed maps and full-scale models of the cruiser this is a book to delight enthusiasts and general readers alike an incomparable adventure set on the high seas.
A MERCIFUL JOURNEY
In 1939 Marsden Hordern's mother refused to sign the paper allowing her seventeen-year-old son to fight overseas with the Royal Australian Air Force. 'I did not rear you to be killed in an aeroplane,' she said. 'Join the navy.' He took her advice and in doing so determined his future. In small patrol boats, Fairmiles and a Harbour Defence Motor Launch, he patrolled the shores of Japanese-held territory, assisted beleaguered commandos in Timor, and was finally caught up in the drama of collecting Japanese prisoners of war from the islands.
A Merciful Journey presents a vivid and compelling account of Hordern's life from a happy childhood growing up in Sydney during the Great Depression, to his years serving in the Royal Australian Navy from 1942 to 1947. Drawing on the letters and journals he wrote at the time, Hordern engagingly recounts his triumphs and disasters as a naval officer, detailing his rise from a young and callow sub-lieutenant to a lieutenant in command of his own ship. He recalls his hopes and fears, and, in the face of the horrors of war, reveals an appealing enthusiasm for new experiences and a growing love of the sea.
A Merciful Journey is a delightful memoir of a young man's coming of age in wartime.
Appendices, notes and fully indexed.
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