Tirpitz: the True Story of Hunt to Sink Hitler's Last Battleship

She was the largest battleship Germany ever built, and for most of her three-year life she never left her fjord. Hidden in the far north of Norway, the German battleship Tirpitz tied down a quarter of Britain's Home Fleet without firing a shot in anger. Winston Churchill called her destruction "an event of the first magnitude." Getting there took four-man midget submarines squeezed through freezing water, a manned torpedo raid that ended in a firing squad, carrier strikes flown through smoke screens and flak, and finally a twelve-thousand-pound bomb designed by the engineer behind the Dambusters raid. Tirpitz tells the full story of the three-year hunt for Hitler's last battleship: the men who volunteered for missions with a low chance of survival, the Norwegian resistance agents who risked execution to report her position, and the nine minutes in November 1944 when she finally rolled over and sank into the cold water of Tromsø fjord. A work of narrative military history for readers who want the whole arc: the ship, the men who spent three years trying to kill her, and the men who served aboard her until the end.