Nevil Shute · 1945 · sea

Nevil Shute's 1945 novel, held back by the censor until the war ended. Four men and an idea nobody in authority wants to own: a Breton fishing boat, indistinguishable from a hundred others, carrying a flamethrower below her rail. She works out of Devon to the Brittany coast to attack German patrol vessels among the fishing fleet, and to give occupied Brittany something to hear about.

1. 1
   Dartmouth

   In the Dart estuary an unlikely operation is assembled out of a captured Breton crabber, a flamethrower from a disused weapons programme and four men whose reasons for volunteering are all different and none of them tidy.

2. 2
   The Channel

   The crossings are made at night in a boat that must pass as one of the local fleet by day - a slow, cold passage with no armament visible, into water patrolled by an enemy who checks papers and counts hulls.

3. 3
   Douarnenez

   Off the Breton coast, among the working boats, the flamethrower is used at close range on German patrol craft - and the point, as much as the damage, is the news of it reaching a country that has heard nothing good in years.