Following the hammering she’d taken from a Japanese convoy - as told in The Weak Link - H.M.A.S. Wind Rode was sent to Perth for repairs. But as it turned out, the top brass decided that Wind Rode had run her course and Lieutenant Commander Peter Bentley was given orders to sail her to Sydney, where she would be broken up and decommissioned.
It was as if the old girl knew her fate, because on the voyage everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was crazy, Bentley knew, but it was as if Wind Rode was doing all she could to delay the inevitable. And when her engines finally gave out in the middle of an area crawling with Jap submarines and destroyers, he realized that she had chosen her watery grave, and that Wind Rode intended to go down fighting …