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  • The Tirpitz All Told
  • Phillip Parotti (bio)
The Hunt for Hitler’s Warship by Patrick Bishop (Regnery History, 2013. 426pages. Illustrated. $27.95)

Patrick Bishop, a graduate of Wimbledon College and Corpus Christi, Oxford, first established himself as a significant writer by serving nearly thirty years as a foreign correspondent for such papers as the Evening Standard, the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Telegraph. During that time he saw considerable action while covering major British engagements from the Falklands to Afghanistan and only withdrew from dangerous work when he determined that he was no longer nimble enough to keep up the pace. Thereafter Bishop turned his attention to writing military history and rapidly turned himself into one of the United Kingdom’s leading authors on the subject, delivering such critically acclaimed best sellers as Fighter Boys (2004), 3 Para (2006), the book for which he won the British Army’s Military Book of the Year award, Bomber Boys (2008), Ground Truth (2009), Wings (2012), and Target Tirpitz (2012), published in the United States as The Hunt for Hitler’s Warship (2013).

Bishop’s preparations for writing The Hunt for Hitler’s Warship, while steadily rewarding, proved both long and arduous. With books like Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, Bishop could focus much of his attention on raf records. The Hunt presented a more complex problem, requiring him to do meticulous research in the archives of the Royal Navy, the German Navy, the raf, and the [End Page xxvii] Allied and German governments. At the same time insofar as it was possible—considering that more than thirty operations were launched against the Tirpitz—he had to go through as much material as he could assemble from the papers, letters, and diaries of various participants; and then, finally, he had to interview an extensive list of survivors from the engagements he intended to review. One of the strengths of the book, one which readers will find gratifying, is the thoroughness with which Bishop realizes his aims.

No one ever mistook Hitler for a genius with regard to matters of naval strategy. As Bishop writes, “Naval matters played a subordinate role in Hitler’s military calculations; an attitude he did not bother to disguise. He was a soldier not a sailor.” His plan for invading Great Britain by means of Operation Sea Lion provided a case in point and demonstrated his almost total misunderstanding of naval warfare. But twice at least, once through nefarious calculation and once through timidity, Hitler managed to stumble into what proved for him to be good things at sea, and both had to do with the Tirpitz.

In the first instance, while the Royal Navy adhered to the terms of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement signed in 1935, Hitler cheated. As a result, while the latest British battleship, King George V, was built not to exceed the agreed 35,000 tons, the Kriegsmarine constructed both Tirpitz and her sister ship, Bismarck, to be 42,500-ton behemoths. Apart from size the German battleships were faster, could steam farther without refueling than their British counterparts, carried 15-inch rather than 14-inch guns, and were so well armored that, early in the war, British bombs simply bounced off their decks. In May 1941, when the Bismarck broke out of the Denmark Straits and sank the “mighty” Hood, the biggest ship in the British fleet—the ship went down in less than three minutes with the loss of 1,416 men—the enormous powers of destruction embodied in the German ships became shockingly apparent to everyone. Subsequently and with something bordering on consternation, the Admiralty ordered nearly every warship in the Atlantic to give chase, but it was only by means of a lucky torpedo dropped from an antiquated Swordfish biplane that the Bismarck’s rudder was jammed, allowing an array of Royal Navy vessels and planes to harry her until the battleships Rodney and King George V were able to close in and sink her. The threat that the Bismarck posed to Britain’s North Atlantic lifeline and the difficulty the Royal Navy experienced in putting her down made a deep and lasting impression on Churchill. The loss...

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