Richard Woodman

For the last four gruelling years of the war, the Western Allies supplied arms and ammunition to Soviet Russia, essential to the Russian war effort. Allied merchant ships ran the gauntlet of the icy Barents Sea, outflanked by German bases in Norway, from where bombers, surface warships and U-boats could attack without warning. Each delivery of arms was an epic achievement; an eminent British historian described it as undertaking the impossible. Under pressure from both Stalin and Roosevelt, Churchill compelled the hardpressed British navy to fight convoy after convoy through to Murmansk and Archangel, with considerable loss. It was the Arctic that saw the last concentration of the U-boats; the Arctic that saw the last Royal Naval ship sunk in European waters; and the Arctic that saw the greatest defeat of a convoy in modern history. It was a theatre dominated by the weather: fog, storm-force winds and the ever-present numbing cold; and accretions of ice caused ships to capsize.The debacle of PQ17, the surface actions, the U-boat attacks and running air battles culminating in the final destruction of the Scharnhorst are fully covered, but so too are the personal angle and the perspective of the long-suffering merchant ships and their crews, together with the political implications.

Tras varios años de servicio, Nathaniel Drinkwater consigue, al fin, el mando de un navío. Se trata del Virago, una anticuada y decepcionante cañonera, que se une a la flota británica que se dirige al Baltico para una campaña de castigo contra Dinamarca. Pero Drinkwater es ambicioso y hara todo lo posible por cambiar el curso de las cosas, dejar de servir unicamente como barco de apoyo y participar activamente en los combates que se desarrollaran en las gelidas aguas de las costas danesas.Por si todos los problemas relacionados con su nave no fueran suficientes, su hermano le pide ayuda para escapar de la horca por un asesinato que tiene ramificaciones con el espionaje frances, de modo que Nathaniel se ve obligado a embarcarle de incognito en el Virago, poniendo en peligro toda su carrera y su propia vida.Richard Woodman, una de las voces mas autorizadas de la ficcion naval, recrea en esta novela uno de los pasajes mas desconocidos de la Historia europea: la alianza entre Napoleon y el Zar Pablo y el ataque de la flota inglesa a Copenhague.

* Fact and fiction are combined to produce a fascinating recreation of a bygone world at war. *The first omnibus of a successful adventure series featuring Nathaniel Drinkwater.