[4] Most of Ireland's international trade was carried on British Flagged vessels;[5] with the outbreak of the war, most of these were no longer available.

There they were refuelled and took on a British export to Spain or Portugal; often coal for the Lisbon electric power station.

On 2 April 1941 a British convoy was attacked by German bombers, two miles south of Tuskar Rock.

A burning oil tanker, without survivors, and a crippled collier, the Wild Rose of Liverpool, were found.

[13] On 23 October 1943, 130 miles (210 km) south of Ireland, on passage from Port Talbot to Lisbon with a cargo of coal,[14][note 4] the Kerlogue was circled by an RAAF Sunderland flying boat.

Donohue had spent eight hours in a lifeboat mid-Atlantic when the German U-607 torpedoed the SS Irish Oak.

On 29 December 1943, following repairs in Cork, the Kerlogue was 360 miles (580 km) south of Fastnet Rock, on passage from Lisbon to Dublin with a cargo of oranges, when she was circled by a German long range reconnaissance aircraft signalling "SOS" and heading southeast.

The cruisers HMS Glasgow and Enterprise, as part of Operation Stonewall, with their 6-inch (152 mm) guns sank the German ships while beyond their range of fire (more than ten miles)[note 7][19] The Kerlogue spent ten hours plucking survivors from the water.

Many of his colleagues and friends and many people from Wexford and around the coast paid the ultimate price in serving this nation by losing their lives.

Yet, these brave, perhaps foolhardy, men crossed the Atlantic, went to the Mediterranean and North African coast and kept Ireland supplied with vital provisions.

One of the proudest possessions I have is a decoration awarded to him and other members of the crew for rescuing German sailors in the Bay of Biscay in December 1943, when they hauled hundreds of young men from the water ... ... " [22] The Kerlogue was sold to Norway in 1957 and was wrecked off Tromsø in 1960.

On 27 May 1994 the German Navy expressed its thanks in a ceremony at the National Maritime Museum of Ireland attended by President Mary Robinson.

Some sketches of the rescue, (reproduced on this page) drawn while in the Curragh were presented and remain on display with other artefacts.

Bolger's novel is part historical fiction and part coming-of-age tale in charting the maiden voyage of a fictional fourteen-year-old Wexford boy, Jack Roche, who gets a job as a cabin boy on the Kerlogue in December 1943, on the eve of this treacherous wartime journey to Portugal.

Jack has lost his seafaring father on board the Kyleclare, sunk by a U-boat on this same route, and goes to sea to support his family.

His innate decency makes him join in this dangerous rescue of members of a navy whom he passionately hates for having killed his father.

He comes to see the terrified German survivors not as part of a vicious murder machine but as shivering, wounded individuals, some little older than him, caught in a war that is not of their own making.