The X-Craft Raid
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971. presumed second printing. Hardcover. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8 inches. x, [6], 170, [4] pages. Maps. Illustrations. DJ worn, stained and soiled. Includes Preface; The Challenge; The Challenge Met; The Passage; The Attack; Aftermath; and Index. Includes 11 illustrations between pages 142 and 143, as well as two Black and White maps (Attack on the Tirpitz, and Tirpitz Berth). An account of a secret World War II mission unparalleled in the annals of the sea. Thomas Gallagher's account of the gallant and almost unbelievable expedition of British midget submarines to attack and disable the German battleship Tirpitz is one of the great stories to come out of World War II. The Tirpitz was the mightiest naval vessel in all of Europe. When the Germans slipped her into the fjords of occupied Norway in January 1942, she became an overwhelming menace to Allied shipping. Her presence made it impossible for British battleships and aircraft carriers needed in the Pacific to get there. All attempts to destroy her had failed. Churchill and many others felt that she was one of the two or three most crucial problems of the war. Churchill demanded a new weapon. The result was the British X-craft, or midget submarine, and a secret mission against the battleship that was a thousand times the X-craft's size. Gallagher gives the story an unremitting tension, and his material remains fascinating down to the postscripts. This book is at once a mystery and a social document. Readers will be impressed with this coldly surgical dissection of human frailty and the breakdown of human values when leadership fails in a crisis. More