Word: doenitz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...being sunk; Allied shipbuilding was just beginning to hold its own. The balance was close, and there were factors weighing heavily in Nazi Germany's favor. What Adolf Hitler could not do by land to stop the Allies' march toward Europe's borders, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, CINC of the German Navy, was working hard to do by sea in the Atlantic moat where the first defense of Europe...
...Weapon. Grand Admiral Doenitz had not been CINC for long. Only three months ago he replaced Erich Raeder as the head of Hitler's Navy, and the shift in command was a tip-off on the Nazis' future strategy. For Karl Doenitz was a submariner from away back. A submariner he remained, in personal command of the U-boat fleet...
...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...