A Harry Gilmour Novel
3 primary works
Book 1
Norway, 1940: Sub Lieutenant Harry Gilmour’s first encounter with battleship action is not the adventure he had hoped for. Faced with a thankless task and ill equipped to handle it, Gilmour’s inexperience leads to a damning allegation. His future hangs in the balance.
But then Lieutenant Peter Dumaresq steps in to offer him a lifeline—an advanced navigation course that will take him aboard a crack submarine, HMS Pelorus, under the command of a Royal Navy hero. Faced with a possible court martial, Harry chooses life underwater. Once aboard, however, Harry is confronted for the first time by the full horror of submarine warfare. If he can just overcome his fears, it will be the making of him.
Because survival itself is the challenge now. For Harry and the rest of the crew, the next depth charge could be the one that sinks them.
Book 2
Spring, 1941. France has fallen but the Free French naval forces are in no mood to surrender. Royal Navy Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour is also ready for action, despite the horrors of his first taste of submarine warfare.
When he is appointed as British Navy Liaison Officer aboard the Free French submarine Radegonde, he finds it anarchic, disorientating—and very French. Within its claustrophobic confines, suspicion and misunderstanding are rife.
So when Radegonde is sent on a mission to Martinique, it’s vital that these proud men learn to work together, especially as it seems everyone from Churchill to de Gaulle—not to mention Hitler—has a stake in the outcome.
Will Harry be able to navigate these dangerous waters safely and return with hard-won wisdom, or will old enemies arise to sink him?
Book 3
As 1941 draws to a close, brave young men are fighting for freedom in countries across the globe. But for Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour, washed up in neutral Spain alongside ‘interned belligerents’ from both sides of the war, hostilities have come to a pause.
Before long, his unlikely comrades must once again become his enemies, and he is back at the frontline of the battle for the Mediterranean. But aboard the submarine HMS Umbrage, operating in the waters off Malta, Harry is soon reminded that allies can be more dangerous than foes. When his volatile skipper is lost at sea, it falls to Harry to take charge of the boat—and of the lives of the men who now depend on him.
Ashore, there is another lesson: how war drives its wedge between more than just nations. Shirley is waiting for him back in Scotland, but the world offers many distractions for a young man…As Malta is besieged from the air and home seems ever further away, Harry must summon all his courage not only to stay alive—but also to forge in himself the nerve and the wisdom necessary to shoulder the responsibility of command.