After my father passed away, we discovered two handwritten journals that he had painstakingly maintained during the six years he spent in WWll. When the war broke out he was an engineer aboard an oil tanker in the British Merchant Navy. The first diary describes harrowing convoy trips across the Atlantic Ocean in severe weather while zigzagging to avoid U-boat attacks. Losses of ships and merchant sailors were very high. Despite all this, my father displayed amazing empathy for the German sailors in U-boats as they were being depth-charged by convoy escort ships.

My father then joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1941. In 1943 he was sent to the Middle East, and the second journal describes a 13-week voyage aboard a troopship, including a near mutiny by rowdy troops, which he describes with detached humour. He spends time in RAF bases in Iraq and then Libya, and travels through the location of previous fierce battles at El Alamein and Tobruk. I have supplemented my father's journals with research to place some of his observations within the broader context of WWll.