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Old 9th November 2017, 16:53
Junker-J Junker-J is offline
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Re: 'Geleitzug PQ17' Gunter Karweina

From the book description:

The factual report describes this murderous naval battle from the point of view of American, German,
English and Soviet participants.


An amazon review:

Günter Karweina's factual report on the fate of the Allied convoy PQ 17 is therefore inconspicuous. But the narrow band has it all.
The author reconstructs the "history of the greatest convoy battle of the last war" (p. 6) - including all participating nations - in an exemplary way.
Of the 35 cargo ships that made up the convoy that ran from Iceland to the Soviet Union at the end of June 1942, only eleven steamers arrived at the Arkhangelsk destination.
The rest has fallen victim to the German Luftwaffe and German U-boats. Karweina sees his book as "the first special work on PQ 17 that can make a certain claim to completeness" (p. 167).
The author tries - not least on the basis of reports of eyewitness accounts published for the first time (see, for example, pp. 52ff.) - to correct "errors" contained in "the previously published portrayals of this convoy battle" (see pp. 167ff.).
At the center of his analysis is the answer to the question of how the tragic decision of the British Admiralty came to dissolve the convoy (see page 79).
Karweina shows in detail the mistakes made by the British when assessing the danger to the convoy caused by German overwater forces (see especially pp. 78ff.).
But the Germans, too, according to the author, have been seriously misjudging the actual situation on the high seas in their deployment planning. In addition, despite their success, they were the victims of fatal mishaps (see, eg, pp. 55, 63 and 115f.).
Karweina sums it up: "But it was not only the British Admiralty who led the operations in the far-off Barents Sea off the green table - the Germans did the same -
and that led to an almost ghostly shadow boxing" (p. A 'shadow boxing', of course, has cost the lives of many people. Or, as Karweina puts it:
"For the fleets, it was only in the shadow boxing, but for the freighters of PQ 17 it became a massascan for days in the Barents Sea" (p. The naval historian describes these merciless conflicts in the Arctic in great detail.
The research Karweinas finally lead to a summary of his findings (pp. 164ff.), Which seems very convincing. For completeness, it should be mentioned that the "Admiral Scheer" was not a "battleship" (page 131),
but a heavy cruiser or formerly ironclad. Günter Karweina has presented with his convoy report a work that approaches exemplary in its complex topic and comes to plausible conclusions.


I hope I could help.

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