Word: donitz
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...island by cutting its lifelines to the west. Britain needed to import by sea nearly a million tons of supplies every week -- food and fuel as well as weapons. For this it required the services of some 3,000 merchant ships, and in this summer of 1940, Admiral Karl Donitz's submarine fleet not only acquired access to the Atlantic at the captured French naval base in Lorient but also started a lethal new tactic known as wolf packs. Instead of one lone U-boat sniping at an Allied convoy, three or more subs would attack simultaneously from different directions...
There had never been any period of "phony war" during what came to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Though Donitz's undersea fleet was small -- his 56 U-boats in 1939 included only 22 large oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without warning but also seeded Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship...
Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, 80, who is well remembered for his short-lived stint as Chief of State in Germany after Adolf Hitler's death, is not happy about his place in history. Interviewed in the German magazine Die Welt, the semi-deaf "Big Lion" of the Nazi war fleet talked about what he considers his real accomplishments: "I was able to prevent 1,850,000 German soldiers from falling into Russian hands. Historians even claim 3,000,000 were saved. My position would be different were I not considered the political successor of Hitler...
Before committing suicide in his Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler made a will naming as his successor one of his most ruthless military associates: Grand Admiral of the German Fleet Karl Dönitz. Known as der Löwe (the Lion), Donitz had masterminded the submarine campaign that destroyed about 15 million tons of Allied and neutral shipping, with a loss of tens of thousands of Allied lives in World War II. "Kill and keep on killing," jug-eared, ice-blue-eyed Dönitz had exhorted his U-boat captains. "Remember, no survivors. Humanity is a weakness...
Generals Keitel and Stumpff and Admiral Friedeburg were helping Grand Admiral Donitz perform the formalities of surrender and perpetuate the German myth (see above...