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Title details for A Sailor of Austria by John Biggins - Available

A Sailor of Austria

by John Biggins
ebook
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"A retro techno-adventure story that falls somewhere between Tom Clancy and Patrick O'Brian... top notch military fiction with a literary flair." (Publishers Weekly) In the spring of 1915, a young Austro-Czech naval lieutenant Ottokar Prohaska finds himself posted to the minuscule Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Submarine Service in the Adriatic port of Pola. In some trepidation at first, because he has no experience whatever of submarines, his fears are soon set at rest when he discovers that nobody else has either: least of all his superiors. There follow three and a half years of desperate World War One adventures fighting for the House of Habsburg aboard primitive, ill-equipped vessels, contending not just with exploding lavatories and the transport of Libyan racing camels but with a crew drawn from a dozen different nationalities-and a decaying imperial bureaucracy which often seems to be even more of an enemy than the British, the French, the Italians and the sea itself. After surmounting all this to become - accidentally - Austria Hungary's leading U-boat commander and a holder of its highest military decoration, the closing months of 1918 see him and his crew returning aboard a damaged boat from the shores of Palestine, only to find that the homeland they have fought for so doggedly over the previous four years is now in the final stages of collapse, and that they are effectively stateless persons; sailors without a navy returning to a country which no longer has a coastline
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Series: The Otto Prohaska Publisher: McBooks Press Edition: First

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781590134696
  • Release date: October 9, 2009

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781590134696
  • File size: 1363 KB
  • Release date: October 9, 2009
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OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Fiction Historical Fiction

Languages

English

"A retro techno-adventure story that falls somewhere between Tom Clancy and Patrick O'Brian... top notch military fiction with a literary flair." (Publishers Weekly) In the spring of 1915, a young Austro-Czech naval lieutenant Ottokar Prohaska finds himself posted to the minuscule Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Submarine Service in the Adriatic port of Pola. In some trepidation at first, because he has no experience whatever of submarines, his fears are soon set at rest when he discovers that nobody else has either: least of all his superiors. There follow three and a half years of desperate World War One adventures fighting for the House of Habsburg aboard primitive, ill-equipped vessels, contending not just with exploding lavatories and the transport of Libyan racing camels but with a crew drawn from a dozen different nationalities-and a decaying imperial bureaucracy which often seems to be even more of an enemy than the British, the French, the Italians and the sea itself. After surmounting all this to become - accidentally - Austria Hungary's leading U-boat commander and a holder of its highest military decoration, the closing months of 1918 see him and his crew returning aboard a damaged boat from the shores of Palestine, only to find that the homeland they have fought for so doggedly over the previous four years is now in the final stages of collapse, and that they are effectively stateless persons; sailors without a navy returning to a country which no longer has a coastline
Expand title description text
Fiction Historical Fiction
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