Cruiser Read Online Free PDF Page A

Socialist German Workers’ Party – the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – attained supreme, untrammelled power in 1933. 3 His poisoned mind a ferment of hatred, for six years the Führer tightened the bonds that bent the German people to his will. As he planned the rape of Europe, orchestrating a program of re-armament at first secretly and then more boldly, Britain and France stood weakly by on the treacherous sands of appeasement.
    The army was the apple of his eye. Hitler had been gassed in the trenches, had twice won the Iron Cross for bravery and, by 1918, had risen to the rank of lance-corporal. Eventually, he would come to believe he had an intuitive mastery of grand military strategy far superior to that of the aristocratic armyofficer class he despised. The instruments of his thrust for world domination would be the new panzer tanks, field guns and modern infantry weapons that began to roll from the armaments factories at an astonishing rate. General military conscription was introduced in 1935, and that same year, the First World War fighter ace Hermann Goering, now an ardent Nazi and one of Hitler’s closest henchmen, announced the formation of an air force, the Luftwaffe, in defiance of Versailles. For years, hand-picked young men had been taking flying lessons in what the world was told were civil-aviation schools and sporting clubs. It would not be a great leap for them to mount the cockpits of the advanced fighter and bomber aircraft already moving along the production lines of the great aircraft factories.
    Like that other European tyrant before him, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler never grasped either the possibilities or the limitations of war at sea and would not listen to those who did. But his navy, now known as the Kriegsmarine, also burned to cleanse the stain of 1918. The Kriegsmarine Commander-in-Chief, Generaladmiral Erich Raeder, viewed the Nazis with silent distaste, but he had been chief of staff in the battlecruiser fleet at Jutland and had old scores to settle. And a young Kapitän zur See (captain) named Karl Dönitz, who had commanded a U-boat in the First World War and been taken prisoner by the British, began to agitate for the building of a submarine fleet designed to cripple the maritime trade that was Britain’s lifeline.
    Again in 1935, Germany and Britain signed a naval treaty in London. The German negotiators demanded that the Kriegsmarine should be allowed to grow to a strength of 35 per cent of the Royal Navy, a figure at first rejected by the British but then suddenly accepted in a diplomatic backdown on the extraordinary grounds that any figure was better than no figure at all. More astonishing still, Germany obtained the right to parity in submarines. It was as if Britain’s politicians, admirals and diplomats had learned nothing from Germansuccesses with U-boats in the First World War. Nazi bluff won the day. With the ink still wet on the treaty signatures, the Kriegsmarine admirals forged ahead with Plan Z, a blueprint for the rapid construction of a modern navy balanced between powerful surface vessels and a large U-boat fleet.
    Three large diesel-powered cruisers had already been launched: Deutschland , 4 Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee , each of 12,000 tons and with a main armament of six 11-inch guns – ships far bigger and more powerful than any British cruiser. When it heard about them, the Royal Navy called them pocket battleships – a name that stuck. Their mission would be to roam the world’s oceans, attacking enemy commerce wherever it might be found. But they were just the beginning. Again, German shipyards echoed to the roar of naval construction. The keels for two powerful new battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau , were laid down in the same year of the Anglo-German Agreement, and the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz were moving from the drawing board to the slipway. At 41,000 tons each, the battleships