We Fought Them On the Seas: Seven Years in the Royal Navy

Book excerpt: "Three months after Hitler's storm troopers marched into Poland on September 1, 1939, Ian Stuart Menzies was called from his job as an embryo reporter on the Glasgow Herald to become an embryo midshipman in the Royal Navy. His service took him from the Shetland Islands to the West Indies, to Africa's Belgian Congo; from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from Dakar to Malta and then to Algiers, and on five different ships, three of them destroyers. He took part in the landings in North African [sic], Sicily, Italy and on D-Day in Normandy... His first visit to the United States was in 1943 to take over as executive officer of H.M.S. Stayner then being built at the Hingham Shipyard. The second visit in 1945 was to become British Naval Information Officer in New York City and to marry Barbara Newton of Hingham, Massachusetts, whom he had met at the shipyard on his first visit. The marriage took place in the oldest church of public worship in continuous service in the United States - The Old Ship Church in Hingham on June 16, 1945."--p. [4] cover.