…was taken in HMS Wellington, home of the Wellington Trust, at her moorings on the Thames Embankment – the Victoria Embankment, in fact – opposite London’s Temple underground station. On board the students find themselves touching history – on these very decks the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest campaign by far in the Second World War, was fought and with enormous Allied effort, brought to victory. Not without terrible cost on both sides. Among the Allies’ Merchant Navy officers and men. Among the convoy escorts, shepherded by ships just like Wellington, with her coming through at last: British, Canadian and American, and Free seamen of all nations facing down Nazism. Without ships like ‘Wellington’, Hitler’s U-boats would have strangled our country and starved it to death; and we would now be a crushed, Gestapo-tormented satellite of the degraded and evil Third Reich.