An important perspective of the German U-Boat service and WWII. The author was a U-Boat commander in WWI and Grand Admiral in WWII. – Recommended Reading.
NAME: Ten Years and Twenty Days, The Memoirs of Karl Doenitz FILE: R3141 AUTHOR: Reich Fuhrer, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz PUBLISHER: frontline books, Pen & Sword BINDING: soft back PRICE: £19.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: WWII, World War II, World War 2, World War Two, Second World War, Battle of the Atlantic, U-Boats, convoys, Royal Navy, wolf packs, sinkings, death toll, Hitler's successor, merchant ships, North Atlantic, Norwegian Campaign, war crimes, War Crime Trials ISBN: 1-84832-644-0 PAGES: 520 IMAGE: B3141.jpg BUYNOW: tinyurl.com/u9de66x DESCRIPTION: An important perspective of the German U-Boat service and WWII. The author was a U-Boat commander in WWI and Grand Admiral in WWII. – Recommended Reading. This comprehensive personal view of the conduct of war at sea during WWII is a most important source of information for professionals and enthusiasts of naval history. It is a memoir and therefore includes some personal aspects that may not be agreed by others as the true facts, but it is well structured and the only view from the top of the U-Boat service. There is a Preface by Jack P Mallmann and an Introduction and Preface by Jurgen Rohwer that are helpful in bringing the reader into the body of the memoirs. It must be remembered that Doenitz was not only a career naval officer with experience of submarine warfare during WWI and senior command experience during WWII, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and the NSDP who saw a Nazi destiny for Germany as ruler of the World. He was also chosen as the next Reich's Fuhrer by Adolf Hitler, taking that position on Hitler's death by suicide. When he was placed on Trial at Nuremberg for War Crimes, it was a very subjective prosecution. It rested largely on his unconditional warfare orders to his U-Boat commanders that resulted in survivors being machine gunned in their lifeboats by surfaced U-Boats that had sunk their ships. In fairness to Doenitz, a normal criminal trial is likely to have dismissed the charges because his orders were given to deny support to survivors, after a U-Boat had linked up the lifeboats from a ship that it had sunk and towed them towards safety when it and the lifeboats were attacked by an American bomber. His orders were that U-Boat skippers should not risk their boats and crews in assisting survivors. That was interpreted by some skippers to go a stage further and kill survivors. In his memoirs, Doenitz gives a reasonably objective account of the war at sea that is unique because he commanded the U-Boat service without break through that period. It is a readable account that provides fine detail in an easy to understand manner and for that alone must result in this book being in the top selection of valuable memoirs of war.