Gneisenau

Convoy PQ 17: A Story of Unprecedented Arctic Disaster

By Keith Milton

First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound stopped tapping his pencil on the oaken desk and slowly leaned backward in the oversized leather chair. Read more

Gneisenau

Operation Catapult: Churchill’s Desperate Measure

By Brooke C. Stoddard

Steaming through the summer Mediterranean night, the world having gone sour in two awful months, British Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville read the message just sent to him from London: “You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British Admiral has ever been faced with, but we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.” Read more

Gneisenau

The Battles of Narvik & The Norwegian Campaign

by Thomas Haymes

The German mountain troops were dug into their shallow, frozen foxholes waiting for the enemy ski troops to appear across the horizon. Read more

Gneisenau

German U-Boats: Scapa Flow Shock

By Jon Latimer

World War II had been in progress for six weeks when on the evening of October 12, 1939, the German submarine U-47 surfaced off the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. Read more

Gneisenau

The Soviet Winter Offensive: From the Vistula to the Oder

By Henrik Lunde The Situation in the East, Summer 1944

The area between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathian Mountains had been relatively quiet since the end of Operation Bagration late in the summer of 1944. Read more

Gneisenau

Sinking the Bismarck Myth

By Mark Carlson

In 1960 Twentieth Century Fox released the film Sink the Bismarck! Based on C.S. Forrester’s bestselling book The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck, the documentary-style film tells a gripping and reasonably factual account of the most famous sea chase in history. Read more

Gneisenau

KMS Scharnhorst: A Truly Cursed Warship from Nazi Germany?

By Kelly Bell

Because the victorious Allies had destroyed Imperial Germany’s fleet after World War I, Adolf Hitler had no choice but to construct a new navy after he came to power. Read more

Gneisenau

Gallantry on the High Seas: Merchant Ship Sacrifices in the Atlantic

By Robert Barr Smith

Throughout World War II, the British Admiralty’s deepest concern was the all-important shipping lanes that supplied their island fortress. Read more

Gneisenau

The German Cruiser Königsberg

By Michael E. Haskew

When the German invasion of Norway was set in motion on April 9, 1940, much of the planning for the event had been done on a shoestring. Read more