Admiral Thunderbolt: The Spectacular Career of Peter Wessel, Norway's Greatest Sea Hero

by Col. Hans Christian Adamson

Overview

“A Sea Cadet in 1711 and a Vice Admiral in 1718, young Wessel barged into battle against his Swedish foes wherever he found them, often in direct violation of orders issued by timid souls in the Admiralty. But Frederik IV, King of Denmark-Norway, loved a winner. He gave his youthful fighting cock promotion after promotion, over scores of officers of senior vintage. The result was that Peter had almost as many enemies among officers in the Danish-Norwegian Navy as he had in that of Sweden.

“So great were his battle conquests and his services to the nation that Captain Wessel, soon after his twenty-fifth birthday, was given a Patent of Nobility and the name Tordenskjold. Roughly translated, this means (Torden) The Thunderbolt that Strikes and (Skjold) The Shield that Defends. In actions on land and sea, Tordenskjold lifted his nom de guerre to deathless and stratospheric heights.

“While this book is based on historical events and peopled by real persons, it is by no means a definitive history. The Great Northern War, which ran from 1709 to 1719, sucked Denmark-Norway, Russia, Poland, and England into conflict against the then mighty Sweden. Its pattern is too complicated for compression into a one-volume book dedicated to pinpointing the career of a single participant. For that matter, the historical facts, folklore, and legends that have been built up over the centuries around Vice Admiral Peter Tordenskjold are so voluminous that, in themselves, they could cover quite a spread of bookshelf! The problem has not been what to put into this book, but what to leave out and still do justice to its subject.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787203914
Publisher:	Normanby Press
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	361
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Hans Christian Adamson (July 20, 1890 - September 11, 1968) was a Danish-born American writer, who, along with Eddie Rickenbacker, survived adrift for 24 days in the Pacific Ocean in 1942.

In October 1942, Eddie Rickenbacker was sent on a tour of air bases in the Pacific Theater of Operations. After visiting several air and sea bases in Hawaii, Rickenbacker was provided an older B-17D Flying Fortress (s/n 40-3089) as transportation to the South Pacific. The bomber strayed hundreds of miles off course while on its way to a refueling stop on Canton Island and was forced to ditch in a remote and little-traveled part of the Central Pacific Ocean.

For 24 days, Rickenbacker, his friend and business partner Hans Christian Adamson (then an Army Captain), and the rest of the crewmen drifted in life rafts at sea. Rickenbacker was still suffering somewhat from his earlier airplane crash, and Capt. Adamson sustained serious injuries during the ditching. The other crewmen in the B-17 were hurt to varying degrees. The crewmen’s food supply ran out after three days. They lived on sporadic rain water and food such as seagulls.

A U.S. Navy patrol OS2U-3 Kingfisher float-plane spotted and rescued the survivors on November 13, off the coast of Nukufetau in Tuvalu. All were suffering from hyperthermia, sunburn, dehydration, and near-starvation.

After retiring from the US Air Force as a full colonel, Adamson wrote a number of radio drama scripts and books, including Eddie Rickenbacker (1946), Hellcats of the Sea (1955) with Charles Lockwood) and Rebellion in Missouri, 1861: Nathaniel Lyon and His Army of the West (1961).

He died in 1968 at the age of 78.