Life and work
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Born on 3 April 1932 in Calcutta, in the Bengal Presidency of British India,[1] Padfield attended a 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,[2] 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.[3][4] On leaving a junior officer's life with P&O, Padfield later commented that "Cargo boats, public schools, and prisons have a great deal in common".[5] 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.[6]
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.[7] 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",[8] and the huge success of this enabled him to begin writing books full-time.[6] 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,[9] Heinrich Himmler,[10] and Rudolf Hess.[11] In 2003 he won the Mountbatten Maritime Prize for his Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom.[12][13]
Padfield's most recent historical work was Hess, Hitler and Churchill (2013), in which he explores the mystery of Rudolf Hess's flight to Britain in 1941. He developed the theory that it may have been part of a significant German peace offer and suggested that Hess was carrying documents with detailed proposals from Hitler. These would have meant an armistice between Germany and Britain, which would stand neutral in a planned German war against the Soviet Union, in return for which Germany was willing to withdraw its armed forces from Western Europe.[14][15]
