The War With Hitler's Navy by Adrian Stewart

Author:Adrian Stewart [Stewart, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526710581
Google: UpigwgEACAAJ
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2018-01-15T00:44:18+00:00

Notes

1. A particularly potent example of this was the freighter Speybank, captured by Atlantis on 31 January 1941. She was at first kept by the raider as a supply ship but later sent to Bordeaux. The Germans renamed her Doggerbank and converted her for use as an auxiliary mine-layer and support vessel. After carrying out these duties in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, she entered the Pacific and went to Japan – by then a German ally – where she began a new occupation as a blockade-runner. During her previous career she had twice bluffed her way past inquisitive British warships but her disguise was perhaps too good. On 3 March 1943, near the Canary Islands, she was misidentified by U-43 which promptly sank her.

2. It is somewhat ironic that several of Hitler’s warships commemorated distinguished soldiers who had been loyal allies of Britain. Blücher, for instance, was named after the field marshal of the Napoleonic Wars who captured Paris in 1814 and completed the French defeat at Waterloo in the following year. Gneisenau was named after his chief of staff. Prinz Eugen recalled the Austrian commander-in-chief known to the British as Prince Eugene, friend and companion-in-arms of Churchill’s ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.

3. This is repeated in the anthology Freedom’s Battle: The War at Sea, edited by John Winton.

4. Kemp in an article for Purnell’s History of the Second World War entitled ‘The Chase of the Bismarck’; Macintyre in a booklet by him entitled Aircraft Carrier: The Majestic Weapon.

5. Iain Ballantyne in Killing the Bismarck reveals that there was one other survivor. Destroyer Cossack found a tabby cat, shaking with cold and his fur matted with oil, clinging to some wreckage. Rechristened ‘Herr Oscar’ (and later ‘Unsinkable Sam’), he survived the sinkings of Cossack by U-563 on 23 October 1941 and Ark Royal by U-81 on 13 November 1941, and died peacefully ten years after the end of the war.

Map IV: The Arctic Battleground.

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