Contents Page The following lists gives the chapter titles and the briefest of synopses. For fuller synopses of the chapters please click on the individual chapter headings to the left.
Chapter One Front-line Farmers – 12 August 1940 Under an almost constant storm of long-range, high-explosive shells, a courageous farmer and his family remain on their small Kentish holding to defy Hitler by continuing to produce urgently needed food for Britain’s war effort.
Chapter Two The St Patrick Ferry – 13 June 1941 A plucky stewardess bravely defies death to rescue women and children from the most dangerous, rapidly flooding cabins of a sinking ship.
Chapter Three The Wing-Walker – 7 July 1941 He is just an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation but when co-pilot James Ward climbs out onto the wing of his burning bomber at 13,000 feet he has only one desperate mission – to save his aircraft and the lives of his fellow crew-members.
Chapter Four The Killer Trawler – 4 October 1941 When first launched this little ship was never designed to be a U-boat killer. However, when pushed, the Lady Shirley is not only ready to take on one of Hitler’s deadliest naval weapons, it is also to provide the Allies with one of the most important life-saving intelligence coups of the war.
Chapter Five Look Up at Sparrowfart – 14-22 January 1942 No one could have foreseen the defeat and the coming massacre or the terrible cost in blood, but the heroic withdrawal to the small Malayan village of Parit Sulong in January 1942 will always be remembered as one of the most poignant and courageous actions of any war.
Chapter Six Empire Star – the Ship That Would Not Die – 12 February and 23 October 1942 With bombs and machine-gun bullets smashing up their ship, killing many of those on deck, two astonishingly brave Australian nurses defy all odds to protect their wounded, even at the risk of sacrificing their own lives.
Chapter Seven The Scamp from Tyneside – 27 June 1942 He had been called a ‘mischievous scamp’, but when Adam Wakenshaw saves the lives of his fellow soldiers by remaining at his gun while being pounded remorselessly by enemy shells, loading and firing even when one arm has been blown off, the ‘Scamp from Tyneside’ becomes an indelible desert legend.
Chapter Eight Inferno - the Donald Owen Clarke Story – 9 August 1942 He is only an apprentice, but when the tanker San Emiliano explodes into a white-hot inferno, young Donald Clarke is able to show his shipmates how to die like a man.
Chapter Nine Gravestones on the Garbage Tip – The Heroes of Cowra – 5 August 1944 It isn’t just sheer guts and determination that keeps two old soldiers at their precarious post, even when being overrun by hundreds of knife-wielding, suicidal Japanese prisoners-of-war. There is just one thing on the minds of these two doomed ‘Dad’s Army’ soldiers – to defend their Vickers machine-gun to the end and to prevent it from being turned murderously on their mates. But more than this, it is the story of Lieutetant Harry Doncaster, a man who faced deadly odds armed with nothing more than his fists.