Percy Herbert

During the Civil War a group of Union soldiers, a Confederate and a civilian escape the stockade using a hot-air balloon and end up on a strange Pacific island. During the US Civil War, Union POWs escape in a balloon and end up stranded on a South Pacific island, inhabited by giant plants and animals. They must use their ingenuity to survive the dangers, and to devise a way to return home. Sequel to '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'. —Stewart M. Clamen <clamen@cs.cmu.edu> In 1865, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, Union soldier POWs Captain Harding, Neb and Herbert escape in a balloon during a hurricane with a confederate prisoner, Sergeant Pencroft and civilian journalist, Spilett. The storm takes the balloon to a mysterious island near New Zealand in the South Pacific. Captain Harding proclaims himself leader of the group and they look for food. They discover that they are stranded on an island and soon are attacked by a giant crab that becomes their first meal. In the following days they build themselves shelter and find the island inhabited by other giant animals. One day they find two castaways on the beach: the aristocratic Lady Mary Fairchild and her sexy niece Elena. Later they find a trunk with weapons and a sextant and then they find the hut and journal of a man once marooned on the island by pirates. When pirates later return to the island, the castaways are surprised to be helped by Captain Nemo of the legendary submarine Nautilus. (Nemo -- notorious for his war against slavery -- was supposedly sunk and gone missing eight years earlier.) Finally, when a volcano threatens to obliterate their island, all must plan an escape. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil As the war between the States is coming to an end, an imprisoned Union captain, two other prisoners, a confederate soldier and a civilian newspaperman escape in a hot air balloon. Strong winds carry the across the country and out over the Pacific where they eventually land on what at first appears to be an uninhabited island. They are soon joined by two women, survivors of a pirate attack. While they manage to make a home for themselves, they have to deal with extraordinarily large animals including a giant crab and giant bees. The giant fauna is the result of experiments by Captain Nemo who has lived on the island aboard his crippled submarine, the Nautilus, for eight years. They also have to deal with an active volcano and time is short if they are to leave the island before it explodes. —garykmcd 1865. With the aid of Gideon Spilitt, a war correspondent for the New York Herald, three Union soldiers - Cyrus Harding, Herbert Brown, and Neb Nugent - are able to break out of a Libby, a military Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia, the four men who are able to escape using one of the Confederate's surveillance hot air balloons, they in the process necessarily taking along a Confederate soldier, Pencroft, as he knows how to operate the balloon. Despite Pencroft's knowledge, the balloon nonetheless crash lands in where they believe is somewhere in the South Pacific on a seemingly deserted volcanic island. Still considering themselves at war, Captain Harding, as the senior officer, feels he should take charge. While Brown, a self-admitted coward, and Nugent, a black man, willingly go along with his orders as their superior, Spilitt and Pencroft are more reluctant in their agreement, working cooperatively for their own survival outweighing whatever hesitation they have working under Harding. The five are soon joined on the island by two Brits, Lady Mary Fairchild and her pretty young adult niece Elena, the only two survivors of a shipwreck. While there is a bounty of food and water on the island to survive, they still work toward the goal of trying to get off the island back to civilization. While they learn quickly in their stay that they share the island with a number of supersized menacing animals which provide much wanted animal protein, that is if the animals don't kill them first, they face a looming more dangerous menace preventing them from staying on the island much longer, something well known to the hidden eighth on the island. —Huggo

A highly principled British colonel becomes obsessed with leading a band of P.O.W.s to build a bridge at the behest of their Japanese captors in World War II Burma.

In March of 1942, Royal Marine Captain Hugh Thompson reports for duty at the Portsmouth Marine Barracks. Later that day, Marine Acting Major Stringer reports for duty and introduces himself to Thompson. Stringer will command a special unit assigned to travel by canoe up the Gironde River in occupied France to Bordeaux and there to blow up several German supply ships in the docks. Forty-three men arrive to contend for places on the team. All are volunteers for hazardous service, the sort of man of which Thompson is openly skeptical. Stringer begins by interviewing the men, one at a time, asking, "Why did you volunteer for hazardous service?" He throws out many obvious rejects and then tests the rest by dropping them by parachute 300 miles north, dressed in German uniforms with neither money nor ID, and telling them to get back to barracks in 48 hours. Eight of the men make it back, and they are the final selection. Stringer now has his crew--but the friction between him and Thompson only grows, because Stringer's methods grate on Thompson's professional sensibilities. The appalling lack of discipline of the men irk Thompson even more, but Stringer insists on doing things "his" way. Then comes an exercise to attempt to penetrate the Thames--and not a man reaches his objective, and all of them get picked up within hours. Stringer humbles himself before Thompson, who delivers a bracing lecture on the meaning of command, leadership, and discipline. Stringer takes the hint and retrains his men far more rigorously, with promising results. The operation is approved, and when Stringer and Thompson receive their orders, Thompson suggests that they go get drunk. Alone in a dining room with a bottle of brandy between them, Thompson confesses that he had been disgraced in the Battle of Cambrai and lost his chance to make things up when the war ended. He tells Stringer that he has his chance to be a hero, and not to muff it. Their men take their own liberty in a local pub, and start a brawl with Royal Navy men during which one of them (Marine Ruddock) slips out unnoticed. He is missed the next morning. Thompson, thoroughly angry, confines the other men to barracks and goes after Ruddock personally. He sees for himself that Ruddock's wife is cheating on him, and then finds Ruddock in another pub and tells him to take fifteen minutes and "do a good job of it; that's an order." Ruddock, of course, obeys--and his fight with the "other man" takes place entirely off-screen, with Captain Thompson and a London "Bobby" looking on and agreeing, like gentlemen, to take no official action. Finally Stringer, Thompson, and their men board a Royal Navy submarine and set out for the mouth of the Gironde River. On the last night, a depth-charge attack causes Marine Lomas to injure himself fatally by bumping his head against a metal strut. Thompson pleads with Stringer to let him take Lomas' place rather than idle a canoe, and Stringer reluctantly agrees. The canoes are launched, and the men begin paddling toward the mouth of the Gironde. The heavy seas of the tide race swamp one of the canoes; its crew swim to shore and are captured by the Germans. The leading sergeant has his crewman shot dead at another point on the river; the sergeant takes his revenge by tossing a fast-detonating mine into a patrol boat so that the other three canoes can escape. A third canoe is about to be captured when its crew detonates its fast-detonating mine and blows up all the other mines that they carry. Now two canoes remain, manned by Stringer and Marine Clarke, and Thompson and Marine Ruddock. They reach Bordeaux and attach twelve limpet mines to the hulls of several ships. Thompson and Ruddock are captured by the Germans and interrogated, and tell them nothing. Eventually Thompson, Ruddock, and the original crew who had gotten swamped in the tide race, are shot by a firing squad. Stringer and Clarke are rescued by French fishermen and given disguises in which they start to make their way out of France--after having the chance to witness all those mines blowing up and sinking all those cargo ships. Thus Operation Cockleshell is a success, though at the cost of nine lives. As Stringer and Clarke walk up the road from Bordeaux, nine ghosts briefly join them.