The Death of the Tirpitz

The Death of the Tirpitz, by naval historian Ludovic Kennedy, is a gripping account of one of the dramatic Allied victories of World War II - the sinking of the German battleship. Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord on 11 November 1944. Employing documents only recently released, this is the first book to reveal how essential were the "Ultra" signals - German intelligence messages swiftly decrypted by a top-secret team of British code breakers - to Allied surprise attacks on the ship.The Tirpitz, the Bismarck's sister ship, was the largest, fastest, and most powerful battleship in the entire Nazi naval force when Hitler assigned her to Norway, directly in the path of vital British convoys carrying war supplies to Russia. The battleship's continual threat as a fleet in being was fearsome; heavily defended in her remote harbor anchorage at Altenfjord, the Tirpitz was considered inaccessible to air attack. And so began several courageous, suspenseful attempts to sink her.First the British tried an ingenious scheme employing a two-man underwater "chariot" with a detachable time bomb that had to be affixed directly to the ship's hull. It failed. Next came Operation Source, a brilliantly executed, daring mission made up of six midget submarines - the famed "X-craft" - equipped with underwater explosives. After a harrowing journey to the head of the harbor, skirting German mines, cutting through nets, and bypassing patrol boats, one crew managed to sneak up close enough to do major damage before being captured. But the Tirpitz remained afloat. Only when the Royal British Air Force dropped the six-ton bomb known as "Tallboy" did the battleship go down. Using many rare photographs, maps, plans, and actual reproductions of the decoded Ultra signals, as well as interviews with former officers and crews on both sides, Ludovic Kennedy vividly recounts the short, unsuccessful career of the Tirpitz: her commissioning, her captain and crew, her few skirmishes and long inactivity, and her ultimate destruction. The Death of the Tirpitz is a major summation of the Tirpitz's strategic history and one in which Kennedy has documented an important turning point for the outcome of the war.