HOPES OF VICTORY

Hopes of Victory tells a true story and a sweeping saga of a family at war. It is a moving odyssey of the Chapman and O’Sullivan families. It goes back during the time of King Arthur in the Dark Ages up to the end of the Knights Templar order in the late 13th century. The swashbuckling ancestor in Captain de Croix, who harassed English shipping around 1600 A.D., to John Chapman, the first Englishman to lay a claim on Southern African shores, to Thomas Reinholds who landed in Virginia, America, in 1620 and James Chapman, a hunter and explorer in Africa between 1848 and 1863.

During World War I, one son was sent to Turkey and is captured while two sons are sent to France with only one returning, badly injured and with a shattered soul. In 1939, a new war begins and Britain finds herself alone and adrift amid stormy seas threatening to engulf her. With German bombers raining death and destruction on London’s populace, Stanley William Chapman scours the rubble to pull Nazi victims to safety, with many dying in his arms. After his uncle is killed, he vows vengeance upon all Nazis and joins the navy. With his brother Ernest, who is serving on HMS Arethusa and his other sibling Jimmy in the 8th Army, Chapman heads off into the wild Atlantic on HMS Sweetbriar to face the wrath of German U-boats and the ocean itself.