The Night Hunters - Interactive Ebook [EPUB version]

The Night Hunters: A true story of a stoker’s war at sea — Interactive Edition

Robert M Stoddart

Read the true story, then work out how we know it happened.

In July 1940, twenty-year-old William Stoddart left the tenement streets of Gorgie in Edinburgh and joined the Royal Navy. He became a stoker in Coastal Forces, the small, fast boats that went out at night. Deep in the engine rooms of motor launches and motor gun boats, he kept the engines running while his crews hunted enemy ships across the North Sea and the English Channel.

William served on five boats. He was there on the night commandos were landed on an enemy-held island, and he was out at sea on D-Day. His war took him all the way to Ceylon and Malaya, where he was there when Singapore was taken back in 1945.

His grandson, Robert M Stoddart, has rebuilt William’s war from his service record, Admiralty files, wartime accounts and family memories. This interactive edition lets young readers do more than read the story: they can take part in it.

What makes the interactive edition different:

• Mission games: after each of William’s recorded missions, a game puts the reader in the action.
• Quizzes along the way: challenging three-question quizzes after William’s training and after his time on each boat. They test what readers remember and ask what a Coastal Forces sailor might do in a tricky situation.
• Real or Reconstructed?: every chapter ends by sorting the story into what is documented fact, what is careful reconstruction and what is imagined.
• The Historian’s Toolkit: readers learn how historians rebuild a life from service records and Admiralty files, and try it for themselves.
• Archive film one tap away: links take readers straight to real wartime footage from the Imperial War Museums.
• Family photographs, illustrations, fact files, a glossary, a ranks guide and profiles of the boats and officers
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Endorsed by the Coastal Forces Heritage Trust, with a foreword by Lieutenant Graham Allison, Royal Navy (Retd).

50% of the profit from every copy goes to the Coastal Forces Heritage Trust, helping keep the stories of these men alive.

Listing details:

• Format: Interactive EPUB
• ISBN: 978-1-0655581-1-8
• Price: £5.99
• Publisher: Macklin Publishing
• Age range: 8–14

Which devices and apps it works on

This is an interactive EPUB 3 ebook. Each screen is laid out like a page of the paperback. The games, quizzes and tap-to-reveal features need a reading app that can run them.

Works fully with:

• Apple Books on iPad, iPhone and Mac. It’s free and already installed on most Apple devices, and an iPad gives the best experience.
• Thorium Reader on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. It’s free from thorium.edrlab.org.

Not supported:

• Kindle devices and the Kindle app. They can’t open EPUB files. “Send to Kindle” converts the file and strips out the interactive features.
• E-ink readers such as Kobo, Nook and PocketBook. They can’t run the games and quizzes and don’t show the page layout properly.
• Google Play Books and other Android reading apps, which don’t run the interactive features reliably.

How to open your ebook:

1. Download the EPUB file from your purchase link.
2. On an iPad, iPhone or Mac, tap or double-click the file and choose Open in Books. On a Windows or Linux computer, install Thorium Reader and open the file from inside it.
3. Tap any red PLAY strip, quiz or highlighted word to start.

The archive film links open in your device’s web browser, so you need an internet connection to watch them.