Menace

Ref: 5066

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Price: £9.00

sadly, flyingbooks is now closed.

{detailed description}This is the first book on the Tirpitz to draw on the rich store of 'Ultra' signals, the German top secret coded naval signals that were decrypted by the famous code-breakers of Bletchley Park and are only now being released to the Public Records Office. The transcripts of these intercepted signals put the story of the Tirpitz in a fascinating new perspective, not only in revealing how they helped the British to locate Tirpitz and attack her, but also how faulty appreciation of them led to the disastrous scattering of Convoy PQ 17 in the false belief that Tirpitz was about to attack it.
The Tirpitz and her sister-ship Bismarck were the largest and fastest European battleships every built. They were also the last. After a brief operation in the Atlantic the Bismarck was destroyed by British forces, and Hitler, worried that Tirpitz would suffer a similar fate, determined that she should be stationed out of harm's way, in a strategic position in the Norwegian fjords. There she acted as a fleet-in-being, presenting a continuing threat to the
convoys carrying vital British war supplies to northern Russia which ran a gauntlet on every voyage.
With his considerable narrative gifts Ludovic Kennedy describes the devastating effects of the presence of this menace in the Norwegian fjords and the many heroic and ingenious attempts to sink her. The book is lavishly illustrated with numerous photographs.

Not strictly speaking an aviation title but does contain chapters on the Fleet Air Arm attacks and also 617 Dambusters raids.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Ludovic Kennedy
published by Sidgwick and Jackson 1979 1st edn. 176pp profusely illustrated, index 19x26
{condition}near fine, inc. d/j
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