After serving in the Home Guard and experiencing bombing in the blitz in London, Cornelius Snelling was conscripted into the Royal Navy in 1942 and carried out his basic training on HMS Ganges at Shotley. From his port division, Chatham, he was assigned his first posting, as a Bosun’s mate, to a newly commissioned ship docked at Glasgow, HMS Wild Goose, a Black Swan-class sloop. HMS Wild Goose specialised in anti-submarine patrols in the North Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay and Snelling took part in some of the ship's most notable actions, including the renowned "six in one trip" in 1943, which saw HMS Wild Goose, alongside other Bird-class sloops, sink six German U-boats in a single patrol. Snelling’s final journey aboard HMS Wild Goose was participating in an Arctic convoy to Murmansk and he describes the extreme conditions. In 1944, Snelling transferred to HMS Tyler, an American-built frigate on loan to the Royal Navy. HMS Tyler conducted patrol and escort missions in the North Atlantic and the English Channel, where it also escorted landing craft and supply ships during the D-Day invasion of the Normandy beaches. Snelling's service concluded in October 1945 when he steamed with HMS Tyler back to the United States, where the ship was returned to the US Navy.

Although Ted Verbiest had “a lovely war” in South Africa, he initially describes the chaos of recruitment and defending the beach at Littlehampton against a rumoured German invasion. More darkly, he recalls diving for cover with a WREN when German aircraft killed 32 people at RNAS Ford (18^th August 1940). He then spent a year in Scotland, where one of his mates shot at a parachute, only to discover it was a parachute mine – fortunately, he missed. In Cape Town, his squadron built a new airfield so they could uncrate aircraft and prepare them for operations in the South Atlantic or Indian Ocean. He married a WREN in the airfield church, memorably spending his honeymoon on Table Mountain. Back in England, his squadron took over airfields as the Americans vacated, but they were cross to find they had been smashed up. Although he was duty Petty Officer on VE Day, his abiding memory is seeing a naked drunk man upside down in a dustbin.