Lower Deck

Lower Deck , first published in 1945, is a journal-like, exciting recounting of life aboard a Royal Navy destroyer, the H.M.S. Sikh (due to wartime regulations, the ship's name in the book is the H.M.S. Skye ); the ship is stationed in the eastern Mediterranean in the defense of Malta. Centering on the lives of the crewmen who are part of a gun crew, the book portrays the ship's almost daily encounters with German and Italian ships and planes (as the author states: "...Daylight each morning brin