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Description: | Printed volume (189pp including illustrations) compiled in the 1990s and containing edited copies of his letters, diaries and journals describing how, as a 16 year old cadet at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth, he was mobilised at the beginning of August 1914 and his subsequent service as a midshipman in the battleship HMS AGAMEMNON during her deployment on patrol duties in the English Channel when she was based on Portland and Sheerness (August 1914 - February 1915), her attachment to the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron throughout the Dardanelles campaign (February 1915 - January 1916) and her deployment with the Mediterranean Fleet based on Salonika and Mudros (January - September 1916); as a Sub Lieutenant in HMS PINCHER (5th Destroyer Flotilla, Mediterranean Fleet) which was employed on patrolling troopship routes in the Aegean, the Dardanelles patrol and escort duties (October 1916 - July 1917); and as a Sub Lieutenant / Lieutenant in HMS NONPAREIL (14th Destroyer Flotilla, Grand Fleet) which was deployed in the North Sea on sweeps and exercises with the Grand Fleet, supporting minelaying operations and escorting convoys to and from Norway (September 1917 - November 1918). The volume includes graphic accounts (mostly in the form of letters) of the destruction by internal explosion of HMS BULWARK (November 1914), the attempt to force the Dardanelles (March 1915), the landings at Gallipoli at Cape Helles and Suvla Bay (April and August 1915), the destruction of Zeppelin LZ 85 over Salonika (May 1916), the torpedoing of the storeship FIRFIELD (July 1917) and the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet (November 1918), while there are also interesting references to gunroom life and daily life in AGAMEMNON, his patriotism at the outset of the war, his distress at the death of his elder brother in HMS RUSSELL and the impact of the war on his family's life (12 September 1916), a visit from a Lena Ashwell concert party (21 September 1916), the Gallipoli peninsula a year after the evacuation (1 January 1917), the shortcomings of patrolling troopship routes (31 January 1917), his intense dislike of two of his commanding officers in NONPAREIL, his low opinion of the American minelaying squadron (10 August 1918) and the harsh nature of service in a Grand Fleet destroyer in winter.
Cataloguer RWAS
Catalogue date 2003-01 | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Williams, H W | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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