Narrow Seas [3]

As always, any project that I embark upon has a reading list of books to accompany it, the contents of which I almost always have stockpiled in the groaning bookshelves. The coastal warfare project is no excpetion and I've spent the last hour or so up in the loft digging out the various tomes that I've accumulated on the subject over the years.

The downside is that I've read pretty much all there is to read on coastal warfare in WW2, primarily through the medium of tatty old secondhand paperbacks that I've picked up for peanuts on Ebay, although my original 1945 edition of The Battle for the Narrow Seas is an exception to the rule. It is, however, showing it's considerable age and needs to be handled with care.

These old dog-eared yellowing paperback really are a thing of beauty, especially when they cost the equivalent of a BLT sandwich and have superb cover art to get the blood racing. I love the covers on the old PAN, Corgi and NEL military history paperbacks from the distant 60's and 70's, which is often of a decent artistic standard and based on imaginative, if not always historically accurate imagery. 

Anyway, I have stack of books to re-read over the next few weeks including Bryan Cooper's War of the Gunboats and The E Boat Threat,  Home Waters MTB's and MGB's by Len Reynolds and Night Action by Peter Dickens. I've also bought myself a brand new hardback copy of The Battle for the Narrow Seas by Peter Scott, which is a bit of an extravagence but well worth for the contents alone.