Destroyer Series

HMS Rose had a history of tragedy. The old sailors, who could remember her past, said that she was jinxed and ought never sail again. But in the last days of 1940, as the phony war drew to an end, Britain needed every ship she could lay her hands on, to challenge the might of Hitler's Kriegsmarine. So it was that Lieutenant-Commander John Lamb found himself commanding the old destroyer Rose, with a crew of misfits and troublemakers, and set sail across the dark and icy seas in a desperate race to prevent the German invasion of Norway.

Already two German battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, had slipped through the English Channel under the bows of the British Fleet. Now, the Third Reich's largest and most deadly warship, the Tirpitz, had only one possible destination on Europe's Atlantic coast: the formidable dry dock of St Nazaire. HMS Rose, an aged and jinxed destroyer, was detailed to join the daring mission to destroy the entire dry dock of St Nazaire. She found herself not, as planned, backing up Operation Chariot as a troop ship, but fighting alone in the icy, fogbound seas.