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The Search: The true story of a D-Day survivor, an unlikely friendship, and a lost shipwreck off Normandy
When archaeologist John Henry Phillips volunteered with a charity that took D-Day veterans back to Normandy, due to an administrative error he found himself without a hotel room and reliant on the generosity of one of the veterans who had a spare bed. That veteran was Patrick Thomas - and it was an encounter that would change both their lives forever.
Patrick's landing craft, LCH 185, had led the first wave into Sword Beach on D-Day, and stayed off Normandy until the 25th June when an acoustic mine sent it to the seabed along with most of the crew. His story transfixed John, and the resulting search for the shipwreck was to consume him.
Jumping back and forwards in time, between vivid descriptions of the final days on board LCH 185 and John's thrilling search to find the shipwreck, The Search is an emotional story of a devastating time in history, an unlikely, life-changing friendship and a quest to honour a wartime home and family lost over seventy-five years ago.
Patrick's landing craft, LCH 185, had led the first wave into Sword Beach on D-Day, and stayed off Normandy until the 25th June when an acoustic mine sent it to the seabed along with most of the crew. His story transfixed John, and the resulting search for the shipwreck was to consume him.
Jumping back and forwards in time, between vivid descriptions of the final days on board LCH 185 and John's thrilling search to find the shipwreck, The Search is an emotional story of a devastating time in history, an unlikely, life-changing friendship and a quest to honour a wartime home and family lost over seventy-five years ago.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published June 2, 2022
10 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 16, 2022
A fabulous book that I’m so excited to have read and conclude! John has written about his inspirational adventure with World War Two Veteran Patrick, searching for a vessel sunk under the English Channel…
If you’re a fan of history, archaeology and heartwarming real stories, this is the book for you!
Seriously it’s fantastic!! I keep coming to the end of the modern chapters, wanting to know more and wanting them to continue, then reading the history chapters with exactly the same thought, not wanting them to end! Like I keep thinking, I want more DDay information, no I want more excavation!
Please do write more about this important part of history and Jack’s war too! Incredible!!
If you’re a fan of history, archaeology and heartwarming real stories, this is the book for you!
Seriously it’s fantastic!! I keep coming to the end of the modern chapters, wanting to know more and wanting them to continue, then reading the history chapters with exactly the same thought, not wanting them to end! Like I keep thinking, I want more DDay information, no I want more excavation!
Please do write more about this important part of history and Jack’s war too! Incredible!!
September 18, 2023
I enjoy reading history, continually learning more and more from days gone by. I saw this book about the search for a boat sunk off the beaches of Normandy in 1944. I normally plow through a book but this one had me reading it over a couple weeks.
I found many years ago, the book, “In Harms Way” about the sinking and story of the USS Indianapolis. It gave such detail to what actually happened and I passed my copy around to others. This is a part of WWII that I’m not as familiar with. I had read “Omaha Beach” maybe 10 years ago about where the US landed during D-Day but nothing on Britains specific roles at Normandy.
This book, “The Search”, talks about the British piece of the Normandy invasion and the search for one particular wreck years later. It goes into great detail the types of ships, manpower, armaments, and coordination required that day. I found the details interesting but it’s a LOT of specifics.
The book is an easy read and moves along but is full of emotion and tears. It tells of a relationship between a young man and the last surviving member of a specific British ship and their hope to find the ship and memorialize it in some way, to tell its story.
The author, this young man, has tremendous feelings and cries throughout with the last couple of chapters being full of his mental struggles, trying to move on after this undertaking. At times, I felt it could have ended a bit earlier or perhaps edited down a bit.
Regardless it’s another written piece of true history about that multifaceted war. I’m glad I read it, learned things I didn’t know, and it did inspire me to research further, always a sign of a good book.
I found many years ago, the book, “In Harms Way” about the sinking and story of the USS Indianapolis. It gave such detail to what actually happened and I passed my copy around to others. This is a part of WWII that I’m not as familiar with. I had read “Omaha Beach” maybe 10 years ago about where the US landed during D-Day but nothing on Britains specific roles at Normandy.
This book, “The Search”, talks about the British piece of the Normandy invasion and the search for one particular wreck years later. It goes into great detail the types of ships, manpower, armaments, and coordination required that day. I found the details interesting but it’s a LOT of specifics.
The book is an easy read and moves along but is full of emotion and tears. It tells of a relationship between a young man and the last surviving member of a specific British ship and their hope to find the ship and memorialize it in some way, to tell its story.
The author, this young man, has tremendous feelings and cries throughout with the last couple of chapters being full of his mental struggles, trying to move on after this undertaking. At times, I felt it could have ended a bit earlier or perhaps edited down a bit.
Regardless it’s another written piece of true history about that multifaceted war. I’m glad I read it, learned things I didn’t know, and it did inspire me to research further, always a sign of a good book.
May 30, 2022
Packing a lot more emotion than many entries on history shelves, this attempt to 'reunite' a D-Day survivor with the wreck of his landing craft is a wonderful pick to show the power of closure.
To see my full review, please click on http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/T...
To see my full review, please click on http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/T...
October 15, 2023
There are no stories in archaeology. It’s the nature of the science. Rather than a continuous story it produces a series of snapshots through time, like a strobe light illuminating single pages of the past: a series of frozen tableaux stretching into the past.
As a writer writing about archaeology, this lack of stories is a problem I’ve struggled with. But John Henry Phillips confronts the problem head on, and brings two compelling stories into the heart of his new book. In this, he’s helped by this being the archaeology of the relatively recent past: the D-Day landings.
At a D-Day commemoration, Phillips found himself sharing a hotel room with D-Day veteran Patrick Thomas. The two men, a veteran in his 90s and the the 20something archaeologist, struck up a friendship and Phillips, acting from the heart and certainly not the head, vows to find the wreck of the landing craft that Thomas had been crewing, sunk by a mine off the coast of Normandy. Thomas was one of the few survivors. The promise was reckless for a number of reasons. The location of the sinking was not known. There was no reason to believe the boat had survived on the seabed. And, most obviously, Phillips had never done any marine archaeology before; in fact, he had never done any diving before.
The book interweaves the present-day archaeological search with the events leading up to and beyond D-Day. Both men, Philips and Thomas, are young in these accounts. The sailor becomes one of the crew of the landing craft, forging the sorts of bonds that men at war make. The archaeologist faces the burden of Thomas’s hopes, and the final settling of the guilt burdens that men of his generation carried silently after the war. And running as a thread between these stories is the archaeology: the difficult, painstaking and downright dangerous task of marine archaeology.
The three threads make for a thrilling narrative and Phillips emphatically proves that, yes, sometimes archaeology can have a story, particularly if cast into the hands of a masterful storyteller. In a final twist, [spoiler ahead] the book shows dramatically how archaeological dreams can collide with historical reality when the wreck that Phillips has found and dived proves not to have been Thomas’s landing craft after all.
The Search is a book that brings the reader into the heart of archaeology, to that place where it meets people and the lives they lived and died, and illuminates them all.
As a writer writing about archaeology, this lack of stories is a problem I’ve struggled with. But John Henry Phillips confronts the problem head on, and brings two compelling stories into the heart of his new book. In this, he’s helped by this being the archaeology of the relatively recent past: the D-Day landings.
At a D-Day commemoration, Phillips found himself sharing a hotel room with D-Day veteran Patrick Thomas. The two men, a veteran in his 90s and the the 20something archaeologist, struck up a friendship and Phillips, acting from the heart and certainly not the head, vows to find the wreck of the landing craft that Thomas had been crewing, sunk by a mine off the coast of Normandy. Thomas was one of the few survivors. The promise was reckless for a number of reasons. The location of the sinking was not known. There was no reason to believe the boat had survived on the seabed. And, most obviously, Phillips had never done any marine archaeology before; in fact, he had never done any diving before.
The book interweaves the present-day archaeological search with the events leading up to and beyond D-Day. Both men, Philips and Thomas, are young in these accounts. The sailor becomes one of the crew of the landing craft, forging the sorts of bonds that men at war make. The archaeologist faces the burden of Thomas’s hopes, and the final settling of the guilt burdens that men of his generation carried silently after the war. And running as a thread between these stories is the archaeology: the difficult, painstaking and downright dangerous task of marine archaeology.
The three threads make for a thrilling narrative and Phillips emphatically proves that, yes, sometimes archaeology can have a story, particularly if cast into the hands of a masterful storyteller. In a final twist, [spoiler ahead] the book shows dramatically how archaeological dreams can collide with historical reality when the wreck that Phillips has found and dived proves not to have been Thomas’s landing craft after all.
The Search is a book that brings the reader into the heart of archaeology, to that place where it meets people and the lives they lived and died, and illuminates them all.
April 5, 2024
'Military history' isn't a genre I read much (apart from an interest in war graves) and I came to this book via a circuitous route, ultimately simply because the author wrote the book... my initial awareness of him was for reasons of his minority cultural heritage, which don't feature in the book at all (unless in a very subtle and implicit way).
So I might easily have missed this cracking tale, which could be expressed as a bit of volunteering with WWII veteran trips getting seriously out of hand. The title sets out the stall so we know that this is a great Quest and will or won't he find the wreck of a vessel which went down in the English Channel shortly after D Day... and will he or won't he manage it whilst Patrick Thomas, survivor now in his 90s, remains alive? Sometimes that gets a bit lumpy, as does the angst about various aspects of the process and I'd be interested to see how that plays out in the documentary film (I hadn't appreciated from reading the book that there had already been a film made).
There are multiple interesting strands - yes, he's obsessed with the business of finding the wreck and getting a memorial in time for a big anniversary, but he's also living his life as a newly graduated archaeologist. He needs to use a variety of skills... some that he has to acquire, such as diving, and diving in challenging waters at that, and that's all well told. There are also musings on what drives the search and what the various parties hope to get from it - for the author it is as much about already missed opportunities as seizing this particular day. Inevitably the book has something to say about grief, the passage of time, remembrance and gratitude... and also connections and the lack of them. Patrick thinks he carries the burden of remembering his friend alone, not realising that others do too.
So I might easily have missed this cracking tale, which could be expressed as a bit of volunteering with WWII veteran trips getting seriously out of hand. The title sets out the stall so we know that this is a great Quest and will or won't he find the wreck of a vessel which went down in the English Channel shortly after D Day... and will he or won't he manage it whilst Patrick Thomas, survivor now in his 90s, remains alive? Sometimes that gets a bit lumpy, as does the angst about various aspects of the process and I'd be interested to see how that plays out in the documentary film (I hadn't appreciated from reading the book that there had already been a film made).
There are multiple interesting strands - yes, he's obsessed with the business of finding the wreck and getting a memorial in time for a big anniversary, but he's also living his life as a newly graduated archaeologist. He needs to use a variety of skills... some that he has to acquire, such as diving, and diving in challenging waters at that, and that's all well told. There are also musings on what drives the search and what the various parties hope to get from it - for the author it is as much about already missed opportunities as seizing this particular day. Inevitably the book has something to say about grief, the passage of time, remembrance and gratitude... and also connections and the lack of them. Patrick thinks he carries the burden of remembering his friend alone, not realising that others do too.
June 9, 2025
An inspirational book on the unlikely friendship between a young man under the age of 30 and an older man over the age of 90 that fought in WWII at Normandy. These two people form a bond and the author (who is the 29 year old) makes a vow to help find the ship that the veteran was on over 75 years ago in WWII as long as getting the man and the crew a memorial. Whether or not the student, an archeologist, with no diving experience, can find the ship is the story of this book. It gets a little repetitive at the end or the last third of the book with the author milking in some emotional moments, but otherwise a very well-written book. Perfect book for me to read during anniversary of D-Day.
December 22, 2023
A beautifully written account of the young authors search for a landing craft sunk during WW2 and his unexpected friendship with a surviving veteran. Meticulously researched and deeply moving. An outstanding tribute to this devastating period in history.
January 5, 2025
Wonderful story !
Everytime I will be in Lion sur Mer, I will think about Patrick and his comrades.
Everytime I will be in Lion sur Mer, I will think about Patrick and his comrades.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews