The common image of the battleship Tirpitz is of a lonely survivor trapped in a frozen world scared to venture to sea, and for much of her career this was true for Tirpitz. Winston Churchill’s crusade against the battleship he called ‘the beast’ would be a long one, such were the German defences put in place to keep Tirpitz safe from harm.

In this book Daniel Knowles recounts some very well-trodden territory as he describes the Z plan to create a fleet to rival the Royal Navy and the French fleets. The text goes into some detail about how the great battleship was designed and constructed. The author however gets into his stride when he looks at her career and the extraordinary measures and resources brought into play to remove the last of Hitler’s chess pieces from the game.

There are sections on the ill-fated Arctic Convoy PQ-17, the Raid on St. Nazaire, the X-Craft Raids, the Battle of North Cape and of course the successful Royal Air Force Lancaster bomber raid by Squadron 617 (known unofficially as the Dambusters) loaded with Tallboy bombs that finally sank her on 12 November 1944. The book is replete with an excellent selection of images, but sometimes the text is written quite academically – not too surprising as the author graduated from Northumbria University in 2016 with a dissertation on the changing perceptions of the wartime role of RAF Bomber Command.

Patrick Boniface