Big Guns in the Atlantic - Germany's battleships and cruisers raid the convoys, 1939-41

BIG GUNS IN THE ATLANTIC - Germany's battleships and cruisers raid the convoys, 1939-41 Angus Konstam PB £13.99 The German Chancellor Adolf Hitler never grasped the importance of the naval war throughout World War Two. He was blinkered to thinking in terms of land warfare and therefore the naval campaign to starve Great Britain out of the war faltered from the very beginning. To compound this issue the great Plan Z to create a naval power to rival the French and Britain in the European waters needed another five to ten years to complete with 1949 being the projected completion date. September 1939 saw the start of World War Two and with it the cancellation of Plan Z with the Kriegsmarine seriously deficient in many key areas, but Hitler didn’t understand the maritime environment, yet continually derided his Admirals for failing to achieve his desired aims with inferior numbers of vessels than the war demanded. For a brief period at the start of the war, the Kriegsmarine’s heavy gun armed battleships, battlecruisers and heavy cruisers were sent out to destroy British commercial shipping travelling into the British Isles from all corners of the globe. The Kriegsmarine, with limited numbers of heavy warships in commission, suffered significant morale sapping losses and to counter this the German Admirals shifted the focus of the war from heavy gun armed vessels to submarines to prosecute the Battle of the Atlantic. This slimline book from respected publishers Osprey tells the story of how the Kriegsmarine shifted its focus from heavy warships to submarines but shows the folly of using heavy surface warships in solo sorties against superior forces. The Battle of the River Plate and the traumatic loss of the prized battleship Bismarck in May 1941 are testimony to this policy. That being said however, the Germans did have several successful missions such as 1940s sorties made by the Admiral Scheer and her sister ship Admiral Hipper. Two other sisters, Scharnhorst and Gneisnau, also accounted for the destruction of 22 Allied merchantmen in the space of two months. Perhaps buoyed by these successes the Nazi leadership expected more results. Fiercely sycophantic to the allure of Adolf Hitler, Admiral Lutjens ordered the deployment of Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in what would be the bitterest pill to swallow for the Kriegsmarine. This book covers the topic with reasonable detail, although some of the details are in error, such as several times the directions are wrong with Bismarck’s position being listed as 1300 west of Halifax which would have placed her in the middle of America’s Great Lakes and also states that Bismarck was sunk on 29 May 1941, two days later than she actually was. These small errors aside, the book is a good attempt to cover the early stages of the naval campaign of World War Two.