Peter Padfield

Peter L. N. Padfield (born 1932) is a British author, biographer, historian, and journalist who specializes in naval history and in the Second World War period. His early journalism appeared under the name P. L. N. Padfield. As well as his non-fiction work, he has also published four novels.

Born in British India, Padfield attended a well-known boarding school for boys, Christ's Hospital, then trained for a naval career as a Royal Naval Reserve cadet on HMS Worcester. He then became a navigating officer with the P&O shipping company. In 1957 he was paid off from P&O's London to Australia ocean liner Strathmore, after being accepted as one of the crew of Mayflower II, a replica of the original Mayflower, and sailed in her on her maiden voyage from Plymouth, Devon, to New York City. On his escape from a junior officer's life with P&O, Padfield later commented that "Cargo boats, public schools, and prisons have a great deal in common". After New York, he returned to sea in the Pacific, including a visit to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, where he panned for gold, then wrote The Sea is a Magic Carpet, published as a book in 1959, an account of his adventures.

Padfield settled in England and established a career in journalism. In his second book, The Titanic and the Californian, he defended the reputation of Captain Lord, the master of the Californian who since 1912 had been widely blamed for the death of hundreds of passengers on the Titanic. He concluded that in the Board of Trade Inquiry chaired by Lord Mersey there had been "crazy deductions, distortions, prejudice, and occasional bone-headed obstinacy of witnesses and the court", and the huge success of this enabled him to begin writing books full-time. Next came several works on naval history, including The Great Naval Race (1976), a study of the rivalry between Britain and Germany in the early 20th century, which led to biographies of three leading Nazis, Karl Dönitz,Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Hess. In 2003 he won the Mountbatten Maritime Prize for his Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom.

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