Customer Reviews

The Battleship Bismarck

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I like this book first one I've seen with so many historical pictures of the ship. Well worth the money

This book is both a history and a photo album of the famous German battleship, and the photos are particularly useful in showing both the construction stages of the ship and for the many interior shots. That said, this book has a couple of problems. One is its age; it was originally published in 1975, and the authors appear not to have taken advantage of the information that appears in Ludovic Kennedy's "Pursuit," published the previous year. As a result, there are statements in this book, particularly concerning the Bismarck's chronology, that have been disproved by more recent discoveries. The other big problem is the translation, which appears to have been done very literally by someone with little knowledge of naval nomenclature. Thus, "Seekriegsleitung" gets translated as "sea-war-leadership," which may be a literal translation, but ignores the more generic term "naval operations," which is what this really means. This problem becomes particularly aggravating in trying to follow the time-line of events surrounding the destruction of the Hood and the Bismarck, which, as translated, make almost no sense. The diagrams, which are in German and are not translated, seem fairly accurate, although during the destruction of the Bismarck they appear to show the King George V firing torpedos at the Bismarck, when in fact the King George V had no torpedo tubes. It's also puzzling that the translator, according to the note at the end of the book, was unaware until 1989, with the publication of Robert Ballard's book on the discovery of the Bismarck, of the number of German sailors rescued after the sinking of the Bismarck. Even here, his figures are wrong--he states that 115 men were rescued by the British. In fact, British warships rescued 111 men (one later died and was buried at sea) while a German submarine and a German weather ship rescued the other five. A marginally useful book, although much of its information has been supersceded by more recent discoveries and research.