Building the Kaiser's Navy PDF Download

Author: Gary E. Weir
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
His considerable talents as a politician, shipbuilder, strategist, propagandist and manager were to a great degree responsible for the High Seas Fleet encountered by the Royal Navy at Jutland. Ironically, von Tirpitz never commanded the navy he built. Weir does not fail to delineate the shortcomings of his naval system, which was responsible for the fact that those in charge of the fleet's operations played little part in its creation. Von Tirpitz's system also resulted in a disregard of the significance of U-boat potential and a lack of geographic, strategic, and operational considerations. Nevertheless, his profound influence in the navy persisted through the Weimar Republic and into the Third Reich, in the policies of Admiral Erich Raeder, veteran of Jutland.

Author: Aidan Dodson
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
ISBN: 1473881552
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This illustrated study of the German Imperial Navy presents a ship-by-ship history from the dreadnaught era through WWI. The battleships of the Third Reich have been written about exhaustively, but there is little in English devoted to their predecessors of the Second Reich. In The Kaiser’s Battlefleet, Aidan Dodson fills this significant gap in German naval history by covering these capital ships and studying the full span of battleship development during this period. Kaiser’s Battlefleet presents a chronological narrative that features technical details, construction schedules and the ultimate fates of each ship tabulated throughout. With a broad synthesis of German archival research, Dodson provides fresh data and corrects significant errors found in standard English-language texts. Heavily illustrated with line work and photographs drawn from German sources, this study will appeal to historians of WWI German as well as battleship modelmakers.

Author: Gordon Williamson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780965729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
As was the case in World War II, one of the greatest threats to Britain during World War I was the German U-boat menace. This book traces the development of the U-boat threat from the Brandtaucher, designed by Wilhelm Bauer, the father of the German submarine arm, in 1850, through to the commissioning of Germany's first U-boat to go into service, the U-1, in 1906. It then covers the main types of World War I U-boat, detailing the operational history of the U-boat service in depth, with a particular focus on the campaigns in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, as well as the slow build up of anti-submarine measures by the allies.

Author: Patrick J. Kelly
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253001757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
“A first-rate biography of this grand admiral who is better known for his political skills than his naval ones.” —US Naval Insitute Proceedings Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930) was the principal force behind the rise of the German Imperial Navy prior to World War I, challenging Great Britain’s command of the seas. As State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office from 1897 to 1916, Tirpitz wielded great power and influence over the national agenda during that crucial period. By the time he had risen to high office, Tirpitz was well equipped to use his position as a platform from which to dominate German defense policy. Though he was cool to the potential of the U-boat, he enthusiastically supported a torpedo boat branch of the navy and began an ambitious building program for battleships and battle cruisers. Based on exhaustive archival research, including new material from family papers, Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy is the first extended study in English of this germinal figure in the growth of the modern navy. “Well written and based on new sources . . . allows the reader deep insights into the life of a man who played a very important role at the turn of the last century and who, like almost nobody else, shaped German policy.” —International Journal of Maritime History “An invaluable reference work on Tirpitz, the Imperial German Navy, and on politics in Wilhelmine Germany.” —The Northern Mariner

Author: Holger Herwig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317703669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Originally published in 1980 ‘Luxury’ Fleet (the phrase was Winston Churchill’s) was the first history of the Imperial German navy from 1888 to 1918. After tracing the historical background to German naval ambitions, the first two sections of the book analyse Admiral Tirpitz’s programme of building a battle fleet strong enough to engage the Royal Navy in the North Sea. The author shows the fleet in its European setting and describes the warships and the attitudes of the officer corps and seamen. The final section of the book discusses the tactical deployment of the German fleet during the First World War, both in home waters and overseas; and it weighs the balance between those who supported fleet actions in preference to those who favoured cruiser and submarine warfare.

Author: Frederick Taylor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
"Excellent . . . Mr. Taylor tells the history of the Weimar inflation as the life-and-death struggle of the first German democracy . . . This is a dramatic story, well told." --The Wall Street Journal

Author: Rif Winfield
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
ISBN: 147383743X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1164

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Book Description
The publication of this book sees the completion of a monumental work listing the technical details and career histories of every significant British warship between 1603 and 1863. Following three earlier volumes, this one carries forward the story from the post-Napoleonic War reorganisation of the Royal Navy's rating system to the end of sail as the principal mode of propulsion. Although apparently well documented, this is a period of great complexity in the procurement and naval architecture of ships. The introduction of steam radically altered the design of vessels under construction and was later retro-fitted to others, while many 'names' lived a ghostly existence on the Navy List: ships ordered but not started, and in some cases having their intended draughts altered more than once before being cancelled entirely.This book meticulously sorts out and clarifies these confusions a major contribution in itself but for the first time it also provides outline service histories for an era that is largely neglected. Like its companion volumes, the book is organised by Rate, classification and class, with significant technical and building data, followed by a concise summary of the careers of each ship in every class. With its unique depth of information, this is a work of the utmost importance to every naval historian and general reader interested in the navy of the sailing era and the formative years of the steam navy that supplanted it.

Author: Michael Epkenhans
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1612340725
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930), who joined the Prussian Navy in 1865 as a midshipman, was chiefly responsible for rapidly developing and enlarging the German Navy, especially the High Seas Fleet, from 1897 until the years immediately prior to the First World War. Epkenhans uses newly discovered documents to provide a fresh treatment of this important naval leader. In 1897, Tirpitz became the Secretary of State of the Imperial Navy Department. In four major building acts of 1898, 1900, 1908, and 1912, and, in working closely with Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tirpitz expanded the Imperial Navy from a small coastal force into a major blue-water navy. Great Britain, reacting with alarm to this challenge to its overseas trade and naval supremacy, accelerated the naval arms race by launching a revolutionary type of battleship, the Dreadnought, in 1906 and entering into strategic alliances with France and Russia. By the start of the First World War in 1914, the British Royal Navy still held a sizable advantage in capital ships over Germany, so that only one notable fleet action, Jutland in 1916, took place during the war. Tirpitz, who had become the German Navy commander with the outbreak of the war, thereafter became a staunch advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare. This policy did not differentiate between neutral and belligerent shipping and proved so controversial with the neutral United States that Germany was forced to retract it, albeit only temporarily. In the meantime, Tirpitz tendered his resignation to the Kaiser, who surprisingly accepted it. Tirpitz remained a minor figure thereafter, later serving the right-wing Fatherland Party as a deputy in the Reichstag.

Author: Robert K. Massie
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307819930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1076

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Book Description
A gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century’s first great arms race, from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert K. Massie With the biographer’s rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittery figures: the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz; the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow; Britain’s greatest twentieth-century foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionized the British navy and brought forth the first true battleship, the H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting. Praise for Dreadnought “Dreadnought is history in the grand manner, as most people prefer it: how people shaped, or were shaped by, events.”—Time “A classic [that] covers superbly a whole era . . . engrossing in its glittering gallery of characters.”—Chicago Sun-Times “[Told] on a grand scale . . . Massie [is] a master of historical portraiture and anecdotage.”—The Wall Street Journal “Brilliant on everything he writes about ships and the sea. It is Massie’s eye for detail that makes his nautical set pieces so marvelously evocative.”—Los Angeles Times

Author: Jeremy Stocker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000198626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This book describes and analyses two iconic figures in twentieth-century naval history: the German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and the Russian Admiral Sergei Gorshkov. It examines the men, what they thought and wrote about seapower, the fleets they created and the strategic consequences of what they did. More broadly, it draws on the respective histories of the post-1897 Imperial German Navy and the post-1956 Soviet Navy to examine the continental bid for large-scale seapower. The work argues that both individuals built navies that did not, and could not, fulfil the objectives for which they were created. Drawing on the legacies of both men, the book also develops some wider ideas about the creation of large navies by continental states, with cautionary lessons for today’s emerging powers, India and China. Both admirals have received book-length biographies, but this is the first attempt at a comparative study and the first to draw broader strategic lessons from their respective attempts as continental navalists to challenge maritime states. This book will be of much interest to students of naval history, strategic studies and International Relations.