GATEWAY TO HELL HMS Rose had a history of tragedy. The old sailors, who could remember her past, said that she was jinxed and ought never sail again. But in the last days of 1940, as the phoney war drew to an end, Britain needed every ship she could lay her hands on, to challenge the might of Hitler's Kriegsmarine. So it was that Lieutenant-Commander John Lamb found himself commanding the old destroyer Rose , with a crew of misfits and troublemakers, and set sail across the dark and icy seas in a desperate race to prevent the German invasion of Norway.