The Battle of the Narrow Seas; The History of Light Coastal Forces in the Channel and North Sea, 1939-1945 by Scott, Peter - 2009

Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2009. First U. S. Printing Thus. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Format is approximately 7.75 inches by 10 inches. xii, 228 pages. Includes a new Introduction by Antony Hichens. The book is beautifully illustrated, including many of the author's own vivid action paintings. This book deals almost exclusively with the British point of view. German sources had not yet become available, beyond the transcripts of propaganda broadcasts which could be dismissed. Neither side had a balanced picture of what damage it had inflicted on the other in those brief moments of contact, with night vision blinded by tracer and the flash of exploding shells and boats racing past each other at combined speeds of over eighty knots. This is a magnificent story of how these young men fought and ultimately overcame their doubts and well armed opponents. Sir Peter Markham Scott, CH, CBE, DSC & Bar, FRS, FZS (14 September 1909 - 29 August 1989) was a British ornithologist, conservationist, painter, naval officer, broadcaster and sportsman. The only child of Robert Falcon Scott, he took an interest in observing and shooting wildfowl at a young age and later took to their rearing and breeding. He established the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge in 1946 and helped found the World Wide Fund for Nature, the logo of which he designed. He was also a gliding and yachting enthusiast from an early age. He was part of the British sailing team that won a bronze medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He was knighted in 1973 for his work in conservation and was also a recipient of the WWF Gold Medal and the J. Paul Getty Prize. During the Second World War, Scott served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. As a Sub-Lieutenant, during the failed evacuation of the 51st Highland Division he was the British Naval officer sent ashore at Saint-Valery-en-Caux in the early hours of 11 June 1940 to evacuate some of the wounded. This was the last evacuation of British troops from the port area of St Valery that was not disrupted by enemy fire.[10] At a light coastal forces base, HMS Vernon, Operational Officer Lt Cdr Scott, briefs motor torpedo boat officers before they set off on anti E-Boat patrols, June 1944 Then he served in destroyers in the North Atlantic but later moved to commanding the First (and only) Squadron of Steam Gun Boats against German E-boats in the English Channel.[11] Scott is credited with designing the Western Approaches ship camouflage scheme, which disguised the look of ship superstructure. In July 1940, he managed to get the destroyer HMS Broke (D83) in which he was serving experimentally camouflaged, differently on the two sides. To starboard, the ship was painted blue-grey all over, but with white in naturally shadowed areas as countershading, following the ideas of Abbott Handerson Thayer from the First World War. To port, the ship was painted in "bright pale colours" to combine some disruption of shape with the ability to fade out during the night, again with shadowed areas painted white. However, he later wrote that compromise was fatal to camouflage, and that invisibility at night (by painting ships in white or other pale colours) had to be the sole objective. By May 1941, all ships in the Western Approaches (the North Atlantic) were ordered to be painted in Scott's camouflage scheme. The scheme was said to be so effective that several British ships including HMS Broke collided with each other. The effectiveness of Scott's and Thayer's ideas was demonstrated experimentally by the Leamington Camouflage Centre in 1941. Under a cloudy overcast sky, the tests showed that a white ship could approach six miles (9.6 km) closer than a black-painted ship before being see.