Does anyone know the name of this book? When I was in a UK hospital as a child, 60 years ago, this fascinating book was serialised over several weeks on the radio. As I remember it, the story took place during World War 1, near a small rocky island in the Mediterranean. Anchored just off the island was a German cruiser, and on board were a few British captives. One of the captives, a Private in the British Army, managed to escape by boat at night to the island, with a stolen German rifle and one or two hundred bullets. He made his way high up into the rugged mountainside and to an almost impenetrable crack between massive boulders.
The heart of the story is how the British Private then picked off German officers and crew as they ventured out on the deck of the German cruiser. This single-handed attack on the cruiser goes on day after day, with German gunners firing ineffectively at where they think the rifle shots come from. Eventually the British Private runs out of food and he rations his water to just a few sips each day. He knows the German artillery will never finish him but the relentless heat and thirst will. By now he has dispatch about twenty German crew.
Then the German cruiser gets orders to sail. As the cruiser gets under way, a German sailor on deck turns and curses the island. In frustration, he swung his rifle aimlessly toward the island and pulled the trigger.
You know, I never made that connection before. :smack:
Another one: Rifleman Dodd from Death to the French shows up as a minor character in Cornwell’s Shapre series. It is of course a tribute: Cornwell makes no secret of having been inspired by Forester.
Yet another interesting bit of gossip: Forester essentially got Roald Dahl into writing.
Roald Dahl was a British fighter pilot in WW2, who was injured in a bad crash and invalided out of flying. He was sent to the US as a liason officer. Forester (by that time a famous writer) was asked by a magazine to write a story about aerial combat, about which he knew nothing. Forester sought out Dahl and interviewed him about what aerial combat was like, as Dahl was one of the few in the US at that time who had ever done it post-WW1. Dahl found it difficult to explain in words, said he’d try to write a few notes to help Forester, and wrote a complete short story. Forester thought it was very good and basically sent it to the magazine with Dahl’s name on it, and gave Dahl the money. That was what made Dahl think of writing as a postwar career.
