This book tells the story of Larne man Tommy Shields and his remarkable journey through the Second World War. It is based largely on a diary that he kept as a Prisoner of War in Germany and the manuscript of a short memoir which he left after his death in 2005. It tells of his joining the Royal Navy and his survival after the sinking of HMS Gurkha off the coast of Norway in 1940 and continues to Dunkirk and then to Crete where in the heat of battle his motor launch was pursued and sunk by the Luftwaffe. Adrift in the sea for two days with nine other crew members he made it back to the island where he went into hiding in the mountain interior. Wounded and eventually captured he was transported to Germany as a Prisoner of War where after three years in Stalags near Berlin, in 1944 he was moved to a work camp in the Harz mountains. It was here that Tommy began a life-long friendship with a young German woman and here that he survived the Allies' air raids and later artillery barrages. He made another unsuccessful escape bid as the Allies and Russians converged on a defeated German army before taking advantage of the chaos to make a break for freedom along with five other prisoners. Travelling like a hobo across Europe he eventually arrived back in England in May 1945. A Royal Navy reservist, a merchant seaman and an inveterate traveller, Tommy Shields also served in Korea and later Suez. But his experience in the war was to haunt him many years later in several unexpected encounters with his eventful past. Stranger than fiction, this is not a Colditz or a Great Escape but it is a story of courage and cruelty, of human kindness and the risks we take for others as well as ourselves. It is also a story of survival in extremis, and of the part that chance plays in our lives, in love and in war.
