Erich Raeder: Admiral of the Third Reich (review)

Keith Bird, currently Chancellor of Kentucky's Community and Technical College System, enjoys a richly earned reputation as an expert not only on the Reichsmarine and its officer corps, but on the historiography of all German navies in modern times. If he now offers the first professional biography of Erich Raeder since the Grand Admiral's own memoirs and subsequent death almost fifty years ago, one can rest assured the subject is in most competent hands.

Given the attention other German naval leaders such as Tirpitz or Dönitz have attracted, one must be grateful to Professor Bird for bringing back into the picture the old-school navalist without whose leadership the build-up of Germany's naval forces in the inter-war period and their performance between 1939 and 1945 would have been unthinkable or at least very different. Despite his considerable influence, Raeder lacked the grand appeal of his role model Tirpitz, nor did he ever rival the charismatic flair of his successor Dönitz. Moreover, he suffered from remarkable personal limitations, coming across as "aloof, uncomfortable in professional relationships, religious, authoritarian, puritanical, intolerant of individual initiative . . . , and extremely sensitive to criticism" (p. xxvi). Even as experienced a researcher as Bird can only offer a biography of the public figure Raeder, concentrating on his formative years in the Imperial Navy and his tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Reichsmarine and Kriegsmarine between 1928 and 1943, leaving readers to speculate vaguely on the Grand Admiral's private life, even on his years in Spandau, as a dimension and experience probably forever beyond the historian's grasp.

Raeder saw his mission in rebuilding Germany's fleet, infrastructure, and personnel morale after the traumata of Versailles and Scapa Flow in the form of creating a balanced, flexible force capable of projecting sea power beyond the confines of the Baltic and North Seas in consonance with the expanding aspirations of the later Weimar governments and Hitler's much bolder ambitions after 1933. The predictable yet irresolvable tension between the Third Reich's global dreams and what was realistically feasible to achieve with its meager naval forces turned Raeder and so many others into tragic figures whose genuine loyalty to the state, to Germany, and to their profession was easily manipulated by the brown regime for its sinister designs. Bird demonstrates that Raeder's political accommodation was ultimately akin to a sell-out, that the carefully nourished myth of his service's ideological neutrality grew ever more transparent as the war grew old, and that his cherished concept of a "mixed" or "integrated" fleet consisting of both capital ships and commerce raiders, especially U-boats, created nothing but slaughter on the high seas without gaining for Germany a decisive or even temporary strategic advantage. Even Raeder's largely successful effort to keep the German Navy morally decent in the conduct of its operations must strike observers as scant and perhaps irrelevant compensation for an overall failed mission.

Bird's book is an important corrective to the largely self-spun legend of professional brilliance and political abstinence long associated with Hitler's "other" Grand Admiral. Well researched, critical, as well as engagingly organized and presented, it deserves and should find a wide readership.