Saturday, August 29, 2009

In The Company of Heroes

In The Company of Heroes

By Ron Walsh RN
169 pages; £9.99
ISBN 1904744478
In 1940 Ordinary Seaman Ron Walsh was on HMS Foylebank in Portland Harbour as Porrtland's defence ship. An attack of 26 Stukas sank the ship after 22 direct hits. Ron survived, but his war was not over.

Atlantic convoy duty on HMS Bulldog among the U-boat packs, the invasion of North Africa, Gold Beach on D-Day for Operation Overlord.
Ron Walsh served on 55 ships and naval establishments in a 33 year career with the Navy, until retirement in 1969... and even then he worked as a civilian driver at HMS Collingwood until 1984!

This is a personal account of Ron's Naval experiences at home and abroad, through war and peace.

Mr Walsh, like many others wishing to recount their life story, have decided to go the route of self-publishing. While adding much to the historical record, most of these works are not scholarly in nature and do suffer from lack of editing.
Walsh does a reasonable job of telling what it was like in the Royal Navy as a prewar boy seaman, war and peacetime duty on several ships and shore establishments. A nice touch would've been to add comments and discussion on the various ships, something lacking from most technical publications.
This book is adequate for the casual reader but doesn't really add any new information to overall historical record. This could have been a very good book with more effort and research which precludes a recommendation. (DS)

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