Word: doenitz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...last, lay in the slender, lonely little craft effectively typed "torpedo carriers." When he took the supreme command, he pledged: "The entire German Navy will henceforth be put into the service of inexorable U-boat warfare." From his headquarters somewhere in Axis Europe last week, Doenitz wielded a potent weapon...
Although his first interest and his chief strength was in submarines, Grand Admiral Doenitz also had a surface fleet which he might use to lend his spring campaign additional punch: the 40,000-plus-ton battleship Tirpitz, the 26,000-ton Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, a screen of lighter ships including two pocket battleships, the Admiral Scheer and Lützow, two 10,000-ton cruisers of the heavily armed Admiral Hipper class, and perhaps ten destroyers...
They were a powerful trump in Doenitz' hand; for, even when inactive, they immobilized the greater part of Britain's Home Fleet, plus some U.S. vessels which could have been in action elsewhere...
...Weapon's Master. After World War I ended, Doenitz made himself a specialist in submarine warfare. By 1930, he was convinced that Hitler and the Nazis would have the strength to break the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which forbade U-boats to Germany, and he attached himself to them...
...began to forge his weapon. Part by part, in dispersed and hidden shops, he and his men built a few U-boats and cached them in packing crates under the noses of Allied investigators. To train his first recruits, Doenitz established an institute which he blandly named "school for defense against submarines." When, in June 1935, Hitler's naval treaty with the British released the Reich from some of the Versailles restrictions, Doenitz was ready. By October his first flotilla was afloat. He was still bound to keep his visible U-boat fleet within limits, but by expanding...