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A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. Demosthenes (c. 384-322 B.C.)
I struggled in the beginning, I said I was going to write the truth so help me god. And I thought I was.
I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth - Henry Miller.
Whilst every effort has been made in my research into various topics, I must ask readers to bear in mind that the truth is presented as I found it. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy and facts. History is, and has always been, in the eyes of the writer. Therefore the history of a particular incident will only be as accurate as the "side" it was written by. My pages on Captain Walker and HMS Kite are drawn mainly from historical records but with eye witness reports thrown in which tend to clarify any historical anomalies that may be read by some readers and not by others. HMS Kite is the sum total of many emails and a meeting with Ray Holden who has done a lot to make these pages possible, as well as hours of work by me. My Motor Gun Boat page is 90% eye witness, 10% research. I tend to trust eye witness reports over those of any official body. Should you, the reader, find an anomaly by all means email me with your observations. However, I reserve the right to either amend or leave items as they are.
Where I have "borrowed" material from other sources, which is 99% of research anyway, I have endeavoured to list credits or post url's to that site as hyperlinks or on images etc. Again, should you find that you or someone else has not been given credit, please mail me with details. I am not infallible! I am often sent items of interest via email and, in most, cases, the information does not lead to any other site. I receive, for example, scans of photographs. I only have the senders word they belong to them. As the sender is usually a family member of a deceased sailor, I take them at their word. The same goes for information which they say is of something involving a father or grandfather. If I scoured the net every time I received such an item, I would never get anything online. Where I do find something online I endeavour to make contact with the site for permission to post. Quite a lot of the time, I never even receive a reply, so assume that the site is no more, or the originator has gone off to other things. Where I do receive a reply all suitable credits are portrayed on the page.
Please bear in mind that I do this as a hobby, I am not a "professional" historian, not did I graduate or whatever from university with any bits of paper. I do it for FUN!!! However, if I can help, I will. Many sites I originally obtained bits of information from have "disappeared" into cyberspace. Hence the need to keep information circulating.
My heartfelt thanks to all of those people who have contributed to my domain. I make no financial gain from such an undertaking as this, it is my hobby and purely for the satisfaction of finding out or creating something. I am not really interested in your "opinion" of a fact, as that would be just hearsay. If you can back up an argument with cold hard facts, eye witness etc, then I would be delighted to hear from you. If, on the other hand, you would find that my material has been of help, a donation towards the upkeep of this domain would be very gratefully received. I have had many many requests for help, hopefully I have been able to satisfy 90% of them. As I am a full time security officer, time is limited. Information shared is information saved - you may use information found on this site, that's what its here for, possibly a small donation via Pay Pal, its easy to use, secure, and will keep this expensive site going? I do not ask much, a couple of dollars here, a pound there? I may have to drastically cut the amount of info on my site, its too expensive to maintain in its current format.
August 2005: Since writing the above, I have compiled, and submitted a manuscript for publication. This has been accepted. The theme is a World War 2 naval one of death at sea. I contacted many people to reiterate their permissions to use some material of theirs. I already had permission to use it on this site and wanted to verify that it would be alright on paper. Many did not reply at all. Others, when I did some checking upon, found that their site had disappeared from the internet. And their emails had been returned as undeliverable. I can only assume that these sites no longer exist and acted accordingly although I did give credit where credit is due in the book. There is nothing in the book that I did not have permission to use. Those sites that have vanished no longer have anything copyright as they do not exist! My book was published but only available online and I have not made a penny from it.
Nov 05: My thanks to Perdiccas 320 who sent me an email informing me of this site: http://www.archive.org/ which I knew nothing about. Apparently all dead sites go here to lie in limbo. So, some of those missing sites are probably here too. Like all my pages, they are mainly built up by contributions and some research. I am not a historian, nor do I claim to be. This is purely for fun, AT MY OWN EXPENSE, and as long as I can afford to keep all these pages online, I shall.