Book description
November 9th, 1942. Amid the cloaking gloom of the Liverpool docks lay
the Dunedin Star. A ship of the Blue Star Line, she was bound for the
Middle East, her consignment of munitions for the 8th Army supplemented
by twenty-one fare-paying civilians escaping the Blitz for the colonies,
all forced to take the long haul round the Cape.
As an unescorted merchantman sailing U-boat infested waters, Dunedin
Star's passage was, at best, a risky undertaking. But her eventual fate
was to defy all expectation. Three weeks into her voyage, her hull
mysteriously holed, Dunedin Star ran aground off Namibia's infamous
Skeleton Coast - five hundred miles of raging surf and burning desert,
the most violent and desolate shore on earth. Sixty-three men, women and
children were to defy mountainous waves and unfathomable odds to reach
land . . . but their struggle for survival had only just begun.
From interviews with survivors, eyewitness testimony, historical
resources and personal journals, Dawson skilfully reconstructs the
Dunedin Star's doomed voyage, the terror of the wilderness and the
painstaking rescue missions. From the grim waters of the North Atlantic
to the blistering African wastes, he narrates a classic tale of pluck,
set against the backdrop of World War II. “… touching and hilarious in
equal measure, a story of determination and a slightly embarrassed, very
English kind of bravery. Dawson's recreation of events is a sensitive
blending of archival work, interviews and imaginative projection, and a
thrilling testament to a remarkable group of people” Jeff Dawson is
the author of Tarantino: Inside Story, and Back Home: England and the
1970 World Cup. A former US editor of Empire magazine he writes on film
and travel for The Sunday Times.
