Dawson Saga: A Naval Adventure Omnibus by Christopher Nicole (#1-4)
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Overview: Espionage, deceit, love, betrayal and death are all featured in the wartime sagas of a Dorset family. From the relative peace of Edwardian England up until World War Two, the Dawson omnibus follows the crises of love and war experienced by one family. With each book centering on the disruptions caused by global major conflicts in the first half of the twentieth-century, the drama remains riveting and varied throughout.
Genre: Historical Thriller
1. Days of Wine and Roses
Edwardian England. When the sun shone brightly and the western world was at peace. But would the peace last?
Far away, Japan was at war with Russia in 1905 and there the seeds of friendship were being sown which would eventually tear apart the Dawson family with their long naval tradition.
Back home in Dorset the Dawson family was growing up. Rear Admiral Ralph Dawson had retired from the Navy after nearly fifty years, and he and his devoted wife Harriet watched with affection as their six children grew up.
The eldest, Jack, in his twenties, was already making a career in the Royal Navy, and had just returned from the Far East where he had witnessed the Japanese Navy’s destruction of the Russian fleet. There he met for the first time a young and likeable German naval officer Bruno von Eltz.
Georgina, Jack’s sister, also in her early twenties, already a rebel, falls for Bruno when he is later attached to the German Embassy in London, and falling under his spell betrays herself, her family, her fiancé and finally her country.
Jack is blamed for the treason and is outcast by his family. He becomes enmeshed with Helene, Bruno’s sister, nearly falling for her treacherous wiles as she offers him her body in return for the plans of Britain’s latest mighty ship the Dreadnought.
In their different ways, Georgina and Jack pay for their transgressions and the happiness of the Dawson family is split apart as war looms ever nearer.
As the war clouds gather, the triumphs and tragedies of the Dawson family entwine themselves with the fortunes of Bruno and Helene von Eltz, whose loyalties — strained and tested — lie with their duties to Germany.
Will the Dawson family survive this tumultuous time? Or will the days of wine and roses be forever gone?
2. The Titans
1914. Great Britain is at war with Germany.
The world waits with bated breath for the outcome of the meeting of the two greatest naval forces in the world: the German High Seas Fleet and the British Great Fleet.
Expectations run high in anticipation — no one can doubt that these are forces to be reckoned with…and are likely to decide the course of the war.
For the Dawson family, the Great War continues the fragmentation of a family already torn apart by scandal and disgrace, long before war was ever declared.
For the three Dawson brothers — Jack, Peter, and Giles — there has never been anything but the Navy.
Proud of their men but terrified of what might befall them, the Dawsons and the family’s matriarch can do nothing but sit at home and wait, dreading the day that the feared telegram might arrive.
For Jack Dawson, service in the Navy has become a tad complicated after being falsely drummed out of the service as a traitor.
Re-enlisting as an Ordinary Seaman under the name of Smith, Jack quickly rises in the ranks to Able Seaman and beyond — afraid lest someone find out his true identity, but determined to clear his name and regain his commission.
The rest of the Dawson clan, whether at home, at sea, or in far away lands, have no knowledge of Jack’s whereabouts — or even if he is still alive.
With so much else on the line, they can only forget him, and the scandal in which he was embroiled, and endeavour to restore the honour of the family name…and stay alive.
Their fondest hope is to forget the past and come through the war towards a kinder future.
Across the North Sea, Captain Bruno von Eltz finds himself increasingly frustrated by the limitations imposed on naval manoeuvers, and haunted by the memory of a transgression he and his sister committed.
With his sister in France, Bruno strives to focus all of his attention on the battles to come, seeking to bring about an end to British supremacy of the waves and find some kind of honour through which to redeem himself.
Their adventures take them from the icy waters of the South Atlantic to the sunlit dangers of the Eastern Mediterranean, from the mists and fogs of the North Sea to the lonely wastes of the North Atlantic.
Triumph and tragedy on the sea depend as much on the vagaries of Mother Nature as they do on the naval tactics of the world’s most fearsome powers. War is unpredictable…and rarely kind.
3. Resumption
December, 1937.
In the course of her war with China, the armies of Imperial Japan attack and sack the city of Nanking.
Caught up in the fighting are two young men, Lieutenant Jack Dawson of the Royal Navy, serving on board one of the British gunboats patrolling the Yangste-Kiang, and Lieutenant-Commander Hirada Tanawa, a pilot with the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Out of the bloodshed and the savage destruction of the city a friendship begins – one which is to have tragic consequences.
Resumption traces the course of this friendship down to 10 December 1941, when the two men find themselves at war with each other.
It tells of Jack Dawson — son of the World War I hero — and his unhappy marriage, his adventures and his love affairs…
And it tells of Hirada Tanawa’s visit to England in 1938, and his successful wooing of Rear-Admiral Giles Dawson’s eldest daughter Georgiana — Jack Dawsons’s cousin.
We witness the enthralling spiral of Georgiana’s marriage and life in Japan, which plummets from happiness to sheer misery as she is caught up in the trauma of a nation bent on war, against her own people.
4. The Last Battle
On 7th December 1941, Japan entered World War II by simultaneously attacking the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbour in the Hawaiian Islands, the Philippines and Malaya.
Appalled by the decision, Commander Hirada Tanawa of the Imperial Japanese Navy nevertheless carries out his orders with skill and daring, and leads the final assault on the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya which results in their being sunk on 10th December, even though he knows that his cousin-in-law Jack Dawson is serving on the Prince of Wales.
From then on, for four bitter years, the two friends are enemies as the grim drama of their lives is played to a finish, against a background of domestic turmoil.
Honouring naval codes and duty whilst knowing that each day could be their last, both men endure grave uncertainty but equally they are forced to make decisions they never imagined they would be faced with…
Back in England the political landscape is rapidly changing, loyalties are tested and frequent air raids have rendered daily life more transient than ever.
Divorce, racism, one mother’s nervous breakdown and another woman’s uninhibited lust leave behind a shattered legacy.
What does the future hold for lost lovers and families who feel betrayed?
How Jack and Tanawa attempt to cope with the traumas of their loved ones and at the same time fight the epic naval battles which set these years alight is the theme of this final chapter in Christopher Nicole’s fictional history of the modern Royal Navy.
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