Hitler's Naval War
Place_Pub: Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974. Hardcover. 400, illus., endpaper illus., maps, appendices, bibliography, index, some darkening to text, some wear to DJ edges. The author was formerly an intelligence officer in Hitler's Navy. The book contains revelations about the conflict of strategic ideas, both within the German Admiralty and between its head and Hitler; about the failure of the Navy under Raeder and the Luftwaffe under Goering to cooperate; and about the feuds between the Naval staff on shore and the Fleet Commanders at sea. Strange as it may seem, no reliable and yet popular history of the German Navy during the Second World War has appeared since the German war records were returned from London and became available to German historians and journalists. With such records now to hand, this book can report the highlights and decisive phases of the war at sea from the German point of view. Germany's defeat at sea was the one which irretrievably lost her the war. Efforts to suppress or forget our mistakes, though originally understandable, have succeeded only in cloaking personalities in a veil of "taboo'' quite contrary to German naval tradition. Erich Raeder, architect of the fleet that in 1939 had to be sent out to fight a war that it did not expect, once pronounced: "The deeds of the German Navy must be subjected to the full light of day." More