I was really excited to see the synergy between the introduction of the Silent Warriors audiobook and a boost in e-book and softcover sales. Hoping to see similar results, you’ll soon be able to obtain The Laconia Incident in the audiobook format. (Production was actually completed in early October, but ACX – that part of the Amazon empire that produces audiobooks – has been taking forever to actually get it on the market!)
Those of you who are familiar with the novel will remember that the main characters in the book are either British or German. Indeed, the story is told mostly through the eyes of a British Navy seaman, Robby Cotton. Because of this, I thought the Laconia story was best narrated by someone who is actually British! A call for narrators on ACX was answered by Paul Metcalfe, a British schoolteacher, who actually lives near Portsmouth, England, where Robby Cotton did his basic training. I was overjoyed to find that Paul also did an authentic Scots accent (Robby is a Scotsman), as well a great German one, and very good accents for Italians, Poles, and Frenchmen. Moreover, his pace and British diction are perfect for this book!
Both Paul and I have jumped through all the hoops required to get this project into fruition (ACX is a stickler on quality control) and the Laconia Incident audiobook should be available any day now!
It’s available now, The Wounds of Jonas Clark. This book is a radical departure for me. For once I have written a novel that is not about submarines, or military activity of any kind!
Jonas Clark is jolted awake one Friday morning with his girlfriend in bed next to him, screaming, covered in blood. He becomes even more alarmed when he discovers the blood is his, and he’s bleeding from painful puncture wounds in both his hands and his feet. He can’t remember anything about how they got there, or even who made them. Jonas struggles to come to terms with his wounds – and the pain – appearing, and then disappearing, every Friday thereafter. Is he subconsciously inflicting the wound himself, as the doctors claim, or is there something more surreal going on? Join Jonas on his journey of discovery as he searches for answers, finally finding them in the last place he thought to look.
The Wounds of Jonas Clark is now available from Amazon and other outlets.
The Wounds of Jonas Clark is available for purchase on September 15, 2020, from Amazon and other outlets.
Jonas Clark is jolted awake one Friday morning with his girlfriend in bed next to him, screaming, covered in blood. He becomes even more alarmed when he discovers the blood is his, and he’s bleeding from painful puncture wounds in both his hands and his feet. He can’t remember anything about how they got there, or even who made them. Jonas struggles to come to terms with his wounds – and the pain – appearing, and then disappearing, every Friday thereafter. Is he subconsciously inflicting the wound himself, as the doctors claim, or is there something more surreal going on? Join Jonas on his journey of discovery as he searches for answers, finally finding them in the last place he thought to look.
Sound interesting? Well, you can get your copy, ebook or paperback, here.
Leaving the military/adventure genre behind for a minute or two, I’m working on a new book I’ve entitled The Wounds of Jonas Clark. This book is a real departure from what my readers are used to seeing from me.
Jonas Clark is rudely awakened one Friday morning with his girlfriend in bed next to him screaming, covered in blood. He becomes even more alarmed when he discovers the blood is his, and he’s bleeding from puncture wounds in his hands and his feet – and he can’t remember anything about how they got there, or even who made them.
Jonas struggles to come to terms with his wounds – and the pain – especially when they begin appearing, and then disappearing, every Friday thereafter. Is he subconsciously inflicting the wound himself, as his doctors claim, or is there something more surreal going on? What will follow is Jonas on a journey of discovery, as he searches for answers, finally finding them in the last place he thought to look.
I expect it will be well into Fall 2020 before The Wounds of Jonas Clark is ready for release.
Meanwhile, as I was going nuts hunkering down and staying socially distant to avoid Covid-19, I pulled back Operation Exodus from the shelf (sales were really sluggish) and rewrote parts of it. Now reissued, I believe the revised story line hangs together far better, and whoever does read it will enjoy it far more.
Silent Warriors: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific continues to sell really well, now over the 1,000 mark, between ebook, paperback, and audio book sales. I am really blown away by how well the audio book, especially, is doing. My hat’s off to Bill Bird at Tweet Audio Productions for the fantastic job he did in narrating it!
Be smart, stay safe, and if you haven’t read The Laconia Incident yet, please do!
It’s the true story of Korvettenkapitan Werner Hartenstein, captain of the WWII German submarine U-156. It is Hartenstein’s boat that attacks and sinks the HMT Laconia on September 12, 1942. Aboard the Laconia, besides British passengers and crew, were 1,800 Italian POWs and their Polish guards. The subsequent, unprecedented, rescue operation undertaken by him, his crew, and the German U-Boat Command, after the actual torpedoing and sinking of the Laconia, makes a truly amazing tale. It’s a story of how civility and mercy survive, even amidst the savagery and brutality of all-out war. It also shows how even the best-intentioned efforts can be foiled by stubborn adherence to well-established preconceptions, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
My first novel, Silent Warriors, is a work of historical fiction centered around a WWII submarine, USS Orca, her skipper, Lt. Cdr. Jake Lawlor, and her crew of grizzled regulars and raw recruits. The book covers the entire Pacific campaign, 1941 through to final victory in 1945, as it follows Orca through eleven war patrols. It’s all about submarines, and the lives and loves of the men who fought in them. Military history buffs should enjoy this book. Silent Warriors is available as an e-book, in paperback, or as an audiobook. You can order your copy of Silent Warriorshere.
The Laconia Incident is the true story of Korvettenkapitan Werner Hartenstein, captain of the WWII German submarine U-156. It is Hartenstein’s boat that attacks and sinks the HMT Laconia on September 12, 1942. The subsequent, unprecedented, actions taken by him, his crew, and the German U-Boat Command, after the actual torpedoing and sinking of the Laconia, make a truly amazing tale. It’s a story of how civility and mercy survive, even amidst the savagery and brutality of all-out war. It also shows how even the best-intentioned efforts can be foiled by stubborn adherence to well-established preconceptions, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It’s almost done! I’m in the final stages of writing what amounts to a non-fiction novel about a little-known event that happened in the South Atlantic during WWII.
It was in mid-September, 1942 that the German U-boat, U-156, sunk the converted ocean liner HMT Laconia with just two torpedoes. The captain of that submarine, one Werner Hartenstein, was horrified to discover that the British troop transport he had just sunk was carrying 1,800 Italian prisoners of war, along with its British and Polish passengers and crew.
Why Hartenstein chose to launch an operation to rescue his surviving Italian allies is perfectly understandable. Why he also chose to include in that rescue the other surviving passengers and crew as well, is a bit of a mystery. What amounts to an even greater mystery is why the German U-Boat Command elected to pursue the rescue operation, convincing Adolph Hitler to go along with it, and even sending other submarines and Vichy French warships to aid in the mission. How the fog of war puts a violent end to Hartenstein’s mission of mercy is the stuff of high drama – a series of events that are no less gripping because they actually happened.
The Laconia Incident strings together a narrative of related actual occurrences in the war: the Clydebank Massacre, a German carpet-bombing of southern Scotland industrial targets; Operation Ariel, foiled by a German air attack on shipping in the Loire River Estuary; the sinking of the battleship HMS Barham in the Mediterranean; The sabotage of four British warships in Alexandria harbor by Italian frogmen; the construction of an American airbase on an island in the mid-Atlantic; the sinking of the Laconia; and finally, the sinking of U-641 by HMS Violet in the North Atlantic. How these events are related to one another is the story of one Robby Cotton, an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy. It is Robby’s struggle to make sense of these events that, in the course of the novel, changes his thirst for revenge and personal vindication into an understanding that justice and mercy are possible, even in the midst of a violent war.
More later!
The ocean liner Laconia, converted into a troop carrier by the British Admiralty for service in WWII.
I’m currently working on a new book; the working title is The Laconia Incident. It is about a series of events that actually took place in 1942, concerned with the sinking of the HMT Laconia by the German U-boat U-156.
The HMT Laconia was a British troopship that started life in the 1920s as an ocean liner plying the passenger route between Liverpool and New York. On 12 September 1942, the Laconia was en route from Cape Town, South Africa, to Liverpool, when, just after 8:00 PM, the German submarine U-156 sent two torpedoes into her hull. She sank just over an hour later. Aboard the transport were 2,732 souls, including 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. About 1, 400 people went down with the ship, and most of these were Italian POWs, who had been locked up in the ship’s holds.
When U-156 surfaced to survey the battle damage, her commander, Werner Hartenstein, was horrified to hear survivors calling out for aid in Italian. He ordered his crew to begin rescuing his allies, but was moved to rescue the other survivors as well. Soon the U-boat was crowded to capacity, with another 200 survivors in tow in lifeboats. Hartenstein then called U-Boat Command for direction, and, surprisingly, Command sent other U-boats and Vichy French warships to participate in the rescue operation.
The story gets even more bizarre from there, when, despite every effort being made by the rescuers to identify their operation as such: a broadcast message in the clear, and a red cross banner rampant, U-156 is attacked from the air by a U.S. Army Air Force bomber.
In telling the story from the eyes of Harry Cotton, a British Ordinary Seaman, I am making every effort to conform to the actual timeline of the events that led up to, and followed behind, the Laconia sinking. This is a great story, and I hope to do it justice!
The annual 2019 USS Angler (SS 240) reunion was held
in St. Marys, Georgia, on the weekend of September 20th through 23rd. St. Marys is a small coastal Georgia town,
just north of Jacksonville, Florida, with a population of about 18,000. Its
territory is immediately bordered by the 17,000-acre Kings Bay Naval Submarine
Base.
The base is home port to several Ohio-class nuclear
submarines, and is also the site of the Trident Training Facility.
The Angler group, some eighty strong submarine
veterans and their spouses, were treated to visits not just to the subase, but
also to tours of the nuclear fleet ballistic missile submarine USS West
Virginia (SSBN 736), the St. Marys Submarine Museum, and the Trident
Training Facility.
The highlight of Saturday September 20th, was the
tour of the boomer West Virginia (SSBNs are affectionately called
“boomers”). The boat, two football-fields long and four decks high, would have
dwarfed the WWII-vintage Angler. Equipped with twenty-four Trident II
ballistic missiles, the West Virginia is representative of the Navy’s
leg of the three-legged stool that makes up the nation’s nuclear deterrent
force. (The other legs being land-based ballistic missiles, and strategic
bombers.)
Of course, the Angler crew was not allowed to see a
good deal of what was aboard the West Virginia, but what was seen was,
nonetheless, very impressive. The boat’s control room was crammed with video
displays, switches, and indicator lights. It looked more like the cockpit of a
super-sized airliner than the boat depth-control and navigation center we were
used to aboard Angler. Also
included in the tour were the crew and officer living spaces, and visits to the
missile compartment, the missile control center, and the onboard atmospheric
control center. One thing has not changed in the forty-seven years that
separate the commissioning of Angler and West Virginia, every bit
of space aboard is still crammed with machinery, pipes, cables, valves,
switches, and indicator and control panels!
While the mechanical and electrical features of the West
Virginia were most impressive, even more impressive still was the caliber
of her crew. These young men and women
were, besides being polite and respectful, articulate and knowledgeable. It
speaks well for the level of training they receive, and the quality of today’s
submarine force.
USS West Virginia (SSBN 736), U.S. Navy Photo
Sunday was a day set aside for worship and sightseeing.
Some of the group chose to visit the St. Marys Submarine Museum, located
downtown, right on the waterfront, facing the St. Marys River. The museum is devoted to preserving the
history of the submarine force. On
display are photos, plaques, models, submarine paraphernalia, WWII battle
flags, and much more. There is even a
working periscope.
St. Marys Submarine Museum
On Monday, the Angler crew visited the Trident
Training Center. We were given a hands-on tour of the damage control training
center and observed the “wet room” in action. In the damage control center,
submariners learn to repair leaks aboard ship, first learning the techniques in
quiet of the workshop, then applying the skills learned under actual conditions
encountered aboard ship: with the water shooting out of the broken pipe or
fitting under pressure, just as it would at depth. The group then visited the
diesel workshop (yes, the boomers do have a diesel aboard, and will even
snorkel under diesel power on occasion). Once again, the petty officers that
acted as tour guides were articulate and knowledgeable. After the tour, a
memorial service was held in the training center auditorium, commemorating our
Angler shipmates on eternal patrol.
A short walk from the training center was the base mess
hall, where the CO of the base treated the Angler group to an excellent
lunch, complete with a special cake baked just for the occasion, supplied by
retired Senior Chief Keith Post, the Executive Director of the St. Marys
Submarine Museum.
That evening, the reunion officially came to a close with a
banquet held in the hospitality room at the Cumberland Inn and Suites in St.
Marys. The guest speaker was Capt. Louis
Springer, CO of the USS Georgia (SSGN 729), which is also home-ported in
Kings Bay. He explained the mission of his boat, and how it differs from that
of the West Virginia. The Georgia is also an Ohio-class
boat, but berthing spaces have been added to accommodate a SEAL team, two of
its missile tubes have been converted to lockout trunks for egress and ingress
of SEALs and their equipment, and the remaining tubes have been converted to
fire a battery of Tomahawk missiles (author’s note: an SSGN is used for
infiltrating a SEAL team into Iran in my book Operation Exodus).
USS Georgia (SSGN 729) transits the Saint Marys River, Georgia, returning to Kings Bay after more than a year forward deployed. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class James Kimber/Released)
The evening ended with a special tribute to 95-year-old
WWII veteran Bob German, an Angler plankowner, and veteran of four war
patrols. Bob was unanimously elected “Honorary Chief of the Boat,” by all
present.
You may have noted elsewhere on this website that I have had a continuing battle with the forces that be at Facebook. For the past year or so, I have attempted to open a Facebook account – and actually posted it one for about 24 hours – only to turn around the next day and have it disabled.
They don’t give to a reason, just refer you to their help center, which is about as much help as a mud bath. There they give you a bunch of reasons why they disable accounts, but no clue as to which of those, if any, applies to you. But they do tell you that you can appeal their decision. Click on that and a form comes up that you can fill in and send back to them. I did. Heard nothing. Nada.
I recently – just for the heck of it – tried to log in again. Of course, I got the message that the account was disabled, and so on, but my cursor happened to hit on the last two words of the notice, and they lit up, so I clicked on them. Lo and behold, there was a procedure to actually reinstate a disabled account! Who knew? The gist of this process was, that in order to prove to them that I was actually a flesh-and-blood person, I could send them a copy of my driver’s license, or other picture ID (such as a passport). I scanned my license, and sent it off to them.
I waited to see if that did any good, and again, heard nothing. Otra vez nada.
A few days ago I tried logging on again, and – lo and behold – my account was back up and running! So far it’s still viable, and you can find me there under my given name, Eugene Masters. Or click on the Facebook icon!
