On her kidney, her kidney, was a bird’s eye view of Sydney! ..
BPF song, ‘The Much Tattooed Lady’

Hobbs was thirty years a Fleet Air Arm aviator and for many years ran the Fleet Air Arm museum. It would be difficult to find anyone better qualified to write up the high noon of Britain’s naval air power, the Fleet Air Arm’s Annus Mirabilis 1944-5 when the Royal Navy fielded, far-flung off the coast of the Japanese Empire, the largest fighting fleet it has ever put to sea.

By the end of 1944 the Royal Navy had expanded to a total strength of 800,000 including Royal Marines (about 10%) and WRNS. If discharges and casualties are included, that means that close on a million people had worn those uniforms in World War II. The hugely successful management of such an expansion says something remarkable about the pre-war Officers and senior ratings including the many recalled to service from civilian life, and particularly about the Dartmouth process - Admiral Twiss, released from Japanese confinement as a Lieutenant, when asked how it was, is supposed to have remarked to the effect that after Dartmouth it wasn’t so bad. By 1945 the thousands of wartime reinforcements had produced Commanding Officers of ships, submarines and particularly Fleet Air Arm squadrons; the Branch had suffered appalling attrition through the early carrier losses and in combat and accidents. By the end of the war 14 out of the 31 FAA squadrons in the BPF were commanded by RNVRs. 15 COs were RN ‘Air’ Branch and only two were career naval officers.
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The RN only took about two thousand National Servicemen per year but was oceans more popular as a choice than the Army; this meant the RN could pick and choose. We should remember that ‘Join the Navy and See the World’ was a pretty fair boast in the days before the Boeing 707, even if what some of the RN NS saw was Korea, through a Firefly’s gunsight.

Two of my (regular) contemporaries - one eventually a Commander, the other a Captain - started as National Servicemen. One of my recent neighbours had spent his NS time in an Admiralty ’fishing vessel’ in the Baltic scribbling down Russian. But about 500 a year were brought in as Stokers, which was a 1950s shortage category.

In 1955 Perris had just failed his first year as an electrical engineering student. This meant two things. One, a brown envelope calling him up as his deferment had lapsed; two, his entry qualifications for further education mean that he was possibly commissionable.

He has now published his experiences, a polished version of a work written for his own amusement some years ago. He takes us through basic training (including ploughing an Interview Board for a commission) and on into the Reserve Fleet and an aircraft carrier from which he escaped into submarines (thus missing the Suez adventure), before emerging two years older, perhaps wiser, but no richer having invested enthusiastically in the drinks trade at home, in the Baltic and in the Mediterranean.
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“If ever the hour of real danger should come to England, the Royal Marines will be found the country's sheet-anchor.”

“Royal Marines, on your heads, BOUNCE!” Old naval saying!

Royal is, by his role, usually first in when there is some rumpus going on. Less well known is that in dangerous situations he is commonly last out, as at Gallipoli, Norway, Crete, Palestine and Aden (for instance). Three RM pilots flew in the Battle of Britain; Royal gets everywhere, hence his badge of the great globe itself. This book sets out the story of the Royal Marines’ near three and a half centuries of service and then works through to what they are doing today. In a sense it is hagiographic, but only because it is near impossible to find anything negative to say about them. Even the mutiny in the 6th Battalion was caused by Government, not by anything within the RM - men who had enlisted to fight one war, which had been won, were sent off to fight another (in Russia) that they had not signed up for.

This book consists basically of a series of essays threading through time, by RM officers who know their subject (including several by Major General Julian Thompson), occasionally linked by editorial, and lavishly illustrated. The editor has been cruelly constrained as to space and I fear many good entries have had to be thrown over the side to the sharks. Some will wish something they related to had a more comprehensive treatment; for example, 42 and 44 (RM) Commandos’ role in Burma only gets a single paragraph - no room there for the wounded Marine staked out in blazing sunlight as bait with three Japanese machine guns trained on him. The post war selection is silently informed by S-T’s own service in nearly every trouble spot on offer.

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