Copyright & Information

Ride Out The Storm

 

First published in 1975

Copyright: Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1975-2011

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of John Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

 

Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

 

www.houseofstratus.com

About the Author

 

John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

Introduction

We shall…ride out the storm of war and outlive the menace of tyranny… That is the resolve of HM Government… That is the will of Parliament and the nation…we shall not flag or fail… We shall fight on the seas and oceans…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender…

 

Winston Churchill, 4 June, 1940

Author’s Note

Since this book is based firmly on fact, I have read everything possible on the subject by historians and by the soldiers who were there. I am particularly indebted to three books: Gun-Buster’s Return Via Dunkirk (Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), Sir Basil Bartlett’s My First War (Chatto and Windus, 1940), and David Divine’s detailed and authoritative The Nine Days of Dunkirk (Faber, 1969). I also owe a great deal to those men who agreed to go through the whole thing again with me in their homes, producing old maps and photographs and digging into their memories for modest accounts of how it had seemed to them. Like most old soldiers they were very casual about it, and for the most part seemed to consider only that it had been ‘a bit dodgy’.