1. The Blooding of the Guns
2. Sixty minutes for St George
3. Patrol to the Golden Horn
4. Storm Force to Narvik
5. The Last Lift from Crete

6. All the Drowning Seas
7. A Share of Honour
8. The Torch Bearers
9. The Gatecrashers

Blurbs

At 2.28 p.m. on the last day of May sixty years ago, in the grey windswept North Sea off the coast of Jutland, the fire-gongs ring.
The champions : Sir John Jellicoe with his battle squadrons out of Scapa and Cromarty, and Sir David Beatty with his battle cruisers from Rosyth : one hundred and fifty ships, sixty thousand men.
Six thousand of them are to die.
The challengers : Admirals von Scheer and Hipper, with the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet. A hundred ships, forty-five thousand men.
THE BLOODING OF THE GUNS is an extremely dramatic, meticulously researched novel of a uniquely fascinating sea battle. The reader shares the excitement, fear and anxiety of those who fought at Jutland : this is how it felt to be in a tiny destroyer racing to launch torpedoes into a line of dreadnoughts' blazing guns : this is how men fought inside a battleship's fifteen-inch turrets : or on the bridge of a cruiser under pulverising bombardment. This is battle at sea.

Jacket H.M.S. LION leads cruisers WARRIOR and DEFENCE into action, painted by
W. WYLLIE RA (reproduced by permission of Earl Beatty)

The author

Alexander Fullerton is well-qualified to write novels with a naval background; he comes from a naval family, and went to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at the age of 13 in 1937. He went to sea as a midshipman at the end of 194i, serving first in the Mediterranean — in the battleship Queen Elizabeth, cruiser Orion and destroyer Hero, before joining submarines at Malta — and later in the North Sea and Far East; he ended the war as a lieutenant with a mention-indespatches for distinguished service. He resigned from the navy in 1949, and worked for ten years in South Africa. During this period, he had his first novel published — SURFACE! — based on his experience as gunnery and torpedo officer on the submarine Seadog. SURFACE! has so far sold nearly a million copies around the world. Since his return to England in 1958, he has published other kinds of fiction — including the novels CHIEF EXECUTIVE, THE PUBLISHER and OTHER MEN'S WIVES — but is now `back at sea' for good.
ISBN 0 7181 1448 5