Michael Tamelander

..exciting and competent re-telling of the hunt, pursuit and final destruction of one of the mightiest battleships ever to put to sea. The authors did a great job of building up the tension and the heroism of the British and Allied sea-and-airmen involved is calmly and dispassionately portrayed in this fine account. After the shock of the loss of the Royal Navy's battleship Hood with virtually all hands, the attempts to shake off the pursuing pack and the desperate attacks flown by the show more Navy's venerable Swordfish torpedo bombers are nicely built up by the authors to the final denouement, as the Bismarck, crippled by a torpedo strike, is shelled into oblivion..
A couple of small criticisms; the authors don't bring much new information to the table and their style is at times a bit ponderous and leaden much like the great lumbering beasts they are writing about. This is not helped by the authors attempt to weigh up and evaluate the decision making process undertaken at each stage of the hunt by the various interested parties. On the German side they rely heavily of course on Mullenheim-Rechberg's memoir but don't appear to realise that an English translation was published. The authors are not native-speakers and sentence construction is predictably and unfortunately rather wooden in places, while this work has many typos and omissions. In short the text desperately needed copy editing. Recommended despite these shortcomings. show less

A gripping tale of heroism --and doom--on the high seas . . .
The sinking of the German battleship Bismarck--a masterpiece of engineering, well-armored with a main artillery of eight 15-inch guns--was one of the most dramatic events of World War II. She left the port of Gotenhafen for her first operation on the night of 18 May 1941, yet was almost immediately discovered by Norwegian resistance and Allied air reconnaissance. British battlecruiser Hood was quickly dispatched from Scapa Flow to show more intercept the Bismarck, together with new battleship Prince of Wales. They were ordered to find the ship quickly because, on their way from the USA, several large convoys were heading for Britain.

On 24 May, Bismarck was found off the coast of Greenland, but the ensuing battle was disaster.... show less

The story of the battleship Tirpitz—Bismarck’s sister ship—and the desperate Allied efforts to destroy it . . .

After the Royal Navy’s bloody high seas campaign to kill the mighty Bismarck, the Allies were left with an uncomfortable truth—the German behemoth had a twin sister. Slightly larger than her sibling, the Tirpitz was equally capable of destroying any other battleship afloat, as well as wreak havoc on Allied troop and supply convoys. For the next three and a half years the show more Allies launched a variety of attacks to remove Germany’s last serious surface threat.

The Germans, for their part, had learned not to pit their super battleships against the strength of the entire Home Fleet outside the range of protecting aircraft. Thus they kept Tirpitz hidden within fjords... show less

Mitt emellan Italien och Nordafrika ligger ön Malta. Dess strategiska läge i Medelhavet skulle leda till en av andra världskrigets största belägringar. I Malta. Kriget i Medelhavet 1940-1942 skriver Michael Tamelander om denna belägring. Boken handlar även om kriget runt försörjningslederna till Nordafrika och vilka effekter öns motstånd hade på den tyske generalfältmarskalken Rommels krigföring i Nordafrika.