CHARLES Whiting was a teenage lad playing on the streets of York when news of one of the great British naval disasters of the Second World War came through.
It was May 1941. The war was well into its second year. The arrival of a telegram had become synonymous with bad news, the author recalls - the death of a loved one.
He was playing outdoors in Penleys Grove Street when a woman went past screaming.
"She had just got the news that her son was one of the people missing on the Hood," says Mr Whiting.
HMS Hood had been the pride of the British Navy, the greatest battleship of the greatest navy on earth.
In the early hours of May 24, she and a small force of other British ships opened fire on the German battleship the Bismarck in the Denmark Straight between Greenland and Iceland.
The Hood was ageing and out of date. The Bismarck was state-of-the-art fast, and fearsomely well armed.
She fired back. A huge explosion ripped the Hood apart, and within minutes she had sunk. Only three of her crew of 1,421 survived. The Bismarck slipped away.
The sinking of the Hood came as a profound shock to a nation used to being masters of the sea. "We had the most powerful Navy in the world, but we couldn't cope with this modern German ship," Mr Whiting says.
The hunt for the Bismarck began a dogfight by sea in which a pack of pursuing British ships, including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, relentlessly harried the great German battleship.
She was eventually sunk three days later, after being shelled, torpedoed and attacked by air.
These events inspired Whiting, many years later, to write one of his cracking naval adventures under the pen-name Duncan Harding.
First published in the 1970s, Sink The Bismarck is fast, exciting, and incredibly vivid.
The author never served at sea, although he did see service on land with an armoured reconnaissance unit during the war.
"But I've a pal who was a sailor," he says. "He filled me in on the slang, the words they used, told me how they lived."
Sink The Bismarck is now being republished, for the first time in paperback, by Easingwold firm GH Smith & Son.
To keep it company, Smith has also brought out in paperback another Harding naval adventure, Flotilla Attack.
This depicts life on board HMS Rose, an antiquated American cast-off of a destroyer manned by a crew of Navy misfits, who have been sent out in 1940 to try to stop the German invasion of Norway.
The Rose is a stinking old tub, as most ships back then were, Mr Whiting points out.
"The Navy had better food than the Army," he says. "But they deserved it. TB was rampant on ships because of the conditions they lived in. It was one feller gets out of a bunk, another man gets in - that sort of stuff."
That is the sort of detail that makes Whiting's adventures so believable, and so compulsively exciting. These two are vintage stuff.
Sink The Bismarck and Flotilla Attack are both published in paperback next Saturday by GH Smith & Son, priced £6.99. They will be launched at a "meet the author" event at Borders in Davygate next Saturday from noon to 3pm.
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