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Kriegsmarine: The Illustrated History of the German Navy in WWII

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IN A NUTSHELL: INTRINSICALLY CAPTIVATING TOPIC NEEDS TEXT TO MATCH PHOTOS

WHAT IT IS?

Kriegsmarine: The Illustrated History of the German Navy in WWII,

by Robert Jackson, is organized into chapters which deal with a class or classes of vessel. Good illustrations are well integrated into a somewhat lackluster text. There are also a number of errors, most probably due to editing throughout the text. These errors come in several different flavors: Dates of events, such as the launch date of the Tirpitz, strategic spelling, such as 'flnak' when flank was obviously meant, and arithmetic, such as '88mm' guns being notated as '4.46 inches' rather than '3.46'. This type of error abounds and makes it very distracting to read.

READABLE FORM AND EASY ORGANIZATION

Of all the major powers in WWII Germany had the weakest navy. Consider this, America lost more tonnage of battleships at Pearl Harbor than Germany had with the Bismarck and the other three battleships. What America lost at Pearl harbor was less than 1/4th of the battleship fleet.

Germany officially had only four battleships for WWII. The two pre-dreadnoughts were actually just used as gun platforms or ice breakers. The Deutschland "pocket battleships" were just armored cruisers, not even equal to a British Battlecruiser.

Germany tried to make a carrier for WWII, the Graf Zeppelin. Various reports say the Luftwaffe didn't support the ship. Perhaps that was true but in 1941 the Germans had nearly 48 aircraft ready for the carrier. The Kreigsmarine did nothing with Zeppelin in WWII.

The book actually covers the subjects of the heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and small combat ships quite well. I was delightfully surprised to find out the German torpedo boats were just as dangerous to the British forces as both the German destroyers and the very effective S-boats.

The book also tells of the problems with the operations of the German Navy. The biggest problem is the German Navy has naval sailing lines that must move around Britian. That means if a ship has to sail to France it must sail around the British isles. The loss of Bismarck, many supply ships, and the eventual stopping of the German surface fleet against Britian can be traced to this geographical fact of life.

Most people will not comprehend the small effort Germany made in their surface fleet. Example, the USA produced more Fletcher class destroyers than Germany had produced S-boats. Germany made less new destroyers than the USA produced fleet carriers.

There are lots of good photos. However, there are no weapon tables, no drawings of ships, and its all general information. If a reader wanted to find out the general layouts of the ships then they would be better off going to the excellent Squadron Signal publications and finding out about the various ships in those books.

All in all I'll give a C grade to this book. It has less than 300 pages and you can read it in a night or two. There are lots of pictures, nice if you're into models but when a half page is given to a picture of an RAF bomber making a run on Tirpitz then you wish some more information was given on the subject of the German Navy.