About the Book

After my father, Louis Edward Wren, passed away we discovered two hand written journals that he had painstakingly maintained during the six years he spent in WWll.  When war broke out he was engineer aboard an oil tanker, the MV Corbis, in the British Merchant Navy. His journal entries describe harrowing convoy trips through the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean to pick up valuable cargoes of oil for delivery back to the United Kingdom. The journal describes voyages in severe weather while zig zagging to avoid U boat attacks. Losses of both ships and merchant sailors were very high. Despite all this my father displayed amazing empathy for the German sailors in U-boats as they were being depth charged by convoy escort ships. He frequently refers to his wife and young daughter back home when his own life is in danger and also when England is threatened with invasion by the German army.

My father then joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1941. He trained as a mechanical engineer in the maintenance of Wellington and Lancaster bomber engines and was assigned to Bomber Command while in England. In 1943 he was sent to the middle east and the second journal describes a 13 week voyage aboard three different troopships including a near mutiny which he describes with detached humour. He describes stops in South Africa and India before disembarking in Iran. He spends time in RAF bases in Iraq and Libya and travels through the location of previous fierce battles at El Alamein and Tobruk. Living conditions at the bases were very basic with heat, wind storms and disease common. I have supplemented my father’s journal entries with research to place some of his observations within the broader context of WWll.