It would not be possible in a single book to mention every ship lost during the Second World War, let alone every person, so Mike Kemble has chosen to focus on a small number of events in which an unusually large number of lives were lost.

Some of these are well known, such as the sinking of the SS Athenia, HMS Hood or the German warships Bismarck and Scharnhorst, but other incidents have been less well documented in the past – such as the loss of the German vessel Wilhelm Gustloff (in which possibly as many as 10,000 people died) the British hunter/killer HMS Kite or the 900 US servicemen killed in Operation ‘Tiger’ – a D-Day rehearsal off the coast of Dorset that went tragically wrong.

Backed-up by first-hand accounts from survivors and eyewitnesses, the narrative places these incidents in the context of the Second World War as a whole and gives readers an excellent insight into the terrible price paid in human lives in the battle for dominance of the seas.