From the Blitz of Liverpool in 1940 to the Ruins of Hamburg in 1945

My WW2 book series, Death to Touch, series is complete and the final book, He Who Would Valiant Be, is being launched on Friday 16th October. Over the weekend, a novelette of nine chapters, Valiant Men, rounds off the series with some bonus material.

The series follows the lives and courageous exploits of two protagonists, Stephen Cunningham and ‘Monty’ Montcalm, and begins with, They Have No Graves as Yet. Stephen is a nervous science teacher from a working-class background. When his school in Liverpool is bombed out, he volunteers to join the Royal Navy’s newly-formed Rendering Mines Safe (RMS) teams engaged in bomb and mine disposal work on Britain’s streets. Meanwhile, aristocratic barrister, Monty, joins Naval Intelligence to investigate the mysterious losses of Allied shipping, crippling Britain’s maritime trade and threatening to lose Britain the war within six weeks! Hitler has deployed a new secret weapon – the magnetic mine.

Naturally, the Germans are furious that their plans are foiled and devise ever more ingenious underwater weapons designed to kill or discourage the RMS teams and Admiralty scientists probing their secrets. So begins a deadly cat and mouse game of increasingly sophisticated booby traps and decoys across the breadth of Britain. Both Stephen and Monty come chillingly close to lethal danger in defuzing the deadly weapons, forming a deep bond of friendship along the way.

In the second book, Death to Touch, Stephen and Monty are in the Mediterranean as the tide of the war turns with the invasion of Sicily and Italy. Stephen is tasked with port clearance and faces his most deadly peril yet at Messina. The port has been booby trapped and the team clearing the explosives has been wiped out. Unless Stephen is more successful, the Allied crossing into the toe of Italy cannot take place. Fortunately, Stephen has taught himself to dive and dismantle explosives underwater. Meanwhile, Monty has been recruited by Ian Fleming to join a new and élite team of intelligence commandos landed ahead of the advancing Allied armies to ‘pinch’ enemy secret documents and equipment.

In the book, He Who Would Valiant Be, Stephen’s diving skills are tested beyond his experience when he is ordered to dive on a sunken U-boat to retrieve a piece of equipment so secret, the Germans have booby trapped it. On the dive he makes a gruesome discovery. Monty is still operating with 30 Commando (later 30 Assault Unit, 30AU) and organises a humanitarian operation to liberate hundreds of Jews from a Fascist concentration camp. In late 1943, Stephen and Monty meet again by chance as they are both recalled to Britain to prepare for the D-Day landings. Whilst Stephen clears the beaches of Normandy and the port of Antwerp of unexploded bombs and mines, Monty now leads a team hunting down new developments of acoustic torpedoes, midget submarines and even V-1 rockets. The Allies advance into Germany, but must first cross the Rhine to penetrate the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr. Unsurprisingly, the Germans have plans to stop the Allies in their tracks and again, it falls to Stephen to clear the way.

With the surrender of Germany in May 1945, the war for Stephen might be over, but not for Monty and the men of 30AU. The series completes with nine bonus chapters, Valiant Men, describing 30AU’s discoveries in Germany and Monty’s role in preventing German saboteurs blowing up the bridge across the Rhine at Remagen. The novelette concludes in December 1946.

The first two books in the series have already received rave reviews, averaging 4.4*, for the nerve-wracking tension, blistering pace, character development and authenticity.