Customer Reviews

German Light Cruisers 1939-45 (New Vanguard)

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Osprey's New Vanguard #84, German Light Cruisers 1939-1945, is another addition to Gordon Williamson's series on the various classes of German warships in the Second World War....and a sad tale it is. In this volume, Williamson covers the construction, career and fate of the Kriegsmarine's six light cruisers: the Emden; the three "K" class (Konigsberg, Koln, Karslshrue); the Nurnberg and the Leipzig. Unlike other famous units like the Bismarck and the Graf Spee, these ships achieved no fame in the Second World War and their existence was essentially superfluous after the first year of the war.

As in the other volumes in this series, Williamson provides a brief summary of the reduced state of the German Navy in the interwar period and the gradual introduction of new warship classes as German rearmament accelerated. Williamson provides details on each of the light cruisers, beginning with the Emden - the first major German warship built after the First World War (but obsolete before the next war). However, the main units in this type were the five modern cruisers built between 1929-1935. As Williamson notes, these ships were still influenced by naval agreements, limiting their size. The first six months of the war were a disaster for the German light cruiser force, with two sunk and two damaged; only one cruiser was operational by the summer of 1940. Thereafter, the remaining cruisers were mostly used as training ships and in extremis in the last days of the war, for naval gunfire support. Williamson concludes that the light cruisers were the least successful of all German warships, which is incontestable in that they never sank or even damaged a single Allied vessel.

The color plates in this volume depict the Emden, the Konigsberg sinking, the Leipzig, and a cutaway of the Nurnberg. Unfortunately, flaws in the plate of the sinking of the Konigsberg indicates that the author's research was less than thorough; a photograph of the sinking in Whitley's book about German cruisers (cited in the bibliography) shows significant differences. Williamson's narrative also includes a number of other easily avoided errors; for example, he says the Konigsberg was sunk by five 100 lb bombs - they were actually 500 lb bombs. His description of the salvaging of the Konigsberg is also inaccurate. He says the Karslshrue was sunk by two torpedoes, but other accounts say it was one. Didn't Williamson read the books he lists in his bibliography? Apparently, not.

As usual, Williamson's "technical data" is pretty skimpy, with no mention of the costs of these ships, armor protection, ammunition or fuel capacity, or engine specifics. Williamson claims that these light cruisers were too "flimsy" and structurally unsound for high seas operations and thus, were ill suited to major combat operations. However, if Williamson had made the effort to compare the German light cruisers to similar Allied warships, like the British "Leander" class, readers might have seen that these assertions of technical inferiority were not reliable. In virtually every major aspect, the "K" class compared favorably with the "Leander" class (and his class was very active in the Royal Navy in the Second World War). Instead of blaming phony technical disparities, Williamson should have looked more closely at doctrinal deficiencies in explaining the failure of Germany's light cruisers. The ships were built as "scouting cruisers" which was a legacy of the High Seas Fleet thinking of 1905-1916, but which had no place in the much smaller German Navy of 1939-1941. Without the possibility of major fleet actions, the German naval doctrine had no real place for light cruisers - too small for independent operations, too short-ranged to keep up with the major fleet units and too big to risk in coastal operations (two were torpedoed on a mine-laying sortie). It is also apparent that the German Naval High Command lacked the imagination to think of new uses for these warships and simply dumped them on the training command. The remaining units of this class could have been used against the Murmansk convoys, which passed fairly close to the Norwegian bases. Germany spent over $50 million - enough to have bought several flotillas of U-Boats - on a squadron of barnacle-collectors.