Free Republic

THE telegram sent by Margaret Morrison was brief but expressive in its anguish. "Keith missing presumed lost. Don't worry about me. I have his children." The next communication she received, however, was not one of sympathy from her family back home in Australia but a moving letter from her husband in an extraordinary expression of love, devotion and duty from beyond the grave. The letter was opened by the young widow as she mourned the death of Keith Morrison, a hero of one of the most valiant but least recognised actions of World War II. Morrison had been a lieutenant-commander...

At the height of the war in the Atlantic, Lt-Cdr Keith Morrison wrote a last letter to his wife and went to face a heroic death. Sixty-five years later, the newly discovered document sheds fresh light on a remarkable man caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Nigel Blundell pieces his story together, while we reprint the long-lost letterThe 37 freighters and tankers of Convoy HX84 were seven days out of Halifax, Nova Scotia - halfway home but still in mid-Atlantic - when the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was sighted on the horizon. The convoy's sole escort, an ancient converted cargo ship...