Re-read? Re-buy, surely!

Ok, actual advice: depends how much they remember from v1 and how much they know about the war in general going in, I suppose. There are a few references in #AdvanceBritannia to the things in #BritainatBay but the two volumes are intended to be free standing.

Every family needs a bare minimum of two copies of #BritainatBay + a brace of #AdvanceBritannia to boot

For those men who did get to the lifeboats, subsequent survival chances varied greatly depending on weather, sea state, proximity to land and other ships, and whether their radio operator had had a chance to signal a dis-tress call before the ship foundered. In the well-trafficked North Atlantic, half of crews were rescued within an hour of their vessel being sunk, two-thirds within one day. But one in five was adrift for more than a week. Survival chances were excellent in the first forty-eight hours but then gradually declined, and fell precipitously after fifteen days. There were some extraordinary exceptions to this. Two of the original seven survivors of the SS Anglo Saxon lived through a seventy-day, 2,800-mile lifeboat voyage in the summer of 1940. Weather conditions mattered a great deal to survival chances. If the sea temperature was below 5° C, there was a one-in-four chance of dying of hypothermia and exposure before you could be rescued.

The SS Anglo-Saxon jolly boat, on display at IWM London.

Reading a bit more of @alanallport.bsky.social's #BritainAtBay about the Battle of the Atlantic. The story of SS Anglo Saxon always gives me pause, not least because the Anglo Saxon jolly boat - survivor of a 70-day oceanic voyage - is on display at #IWMLondon.