Neutral Shores: Ireland and the Battle of the Atlantic

by Mark McShane

This is the story of how neutral Ireland offered a lifeline to hundreds of survivors from the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War. Many merchant navy ships during the war were attacked and sunk, and their surviving crews left adrift on the hostile Atlantic Ocean in a desperate struggle for survival. For the fortunate ones sanctuary was found along Ireland's rugged Atlantic shores, where the local people took these men from the sea into their homes and cared for them without any consideration of their nationality or allegiances to any of the belligerent nations.

354 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2012

About the author

Mark McShane [b.1930 - 2013] was an Australian author of satire, suspense novels, and crime fiction. Born in Sydney to a family with Gypsy roots, he traveled the world for the first three decades of his life. In 1960, he settled on the island of Mallorca, in the Mediterranean, and decided to write fiction.

His first novel, The Straight and the Crooked, appeared that year but it was his third effort, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, for which he is best known. The story of a strange pair of kidnappers it was made into a well regarded film in 1964 and has been adapted as an opera. His most well known characters are the eccentric Detective Sergeant Norman Pink, and Appleton Porter, an unlikely spy whose often comic adventures McShane chronicled under the pseudonym Marc Lovell.

Reviews

[JD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book following the stories of rescued and/or shipwrecked seamen who then were landed on the shores of neutral Ireland during the Second World War. Though most of these stories those involved are from Allied and neutral merchantmen, the last two stories are about Kriegsmarine sailors after they were sunk in the Battle of the Biscay and the loss of U 206. Interesting reading and well worth a read.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book captures, beautifully, the horrors endured by sailors (and civilians) in fragile lifeboats after being thrown into the wild atlantic following torpedo attacks. It also captures some of the humanitarian efforts by u-boat captains to minimise casualties. But most of all it captures the wonderful efforts of Irish communities to rescue and look after fellow human beings irrespective of the country they came from.