Free Article: Tirpitz
The Life and Death of Germany's Last Great Battleship
Referred to by Winston Churchill as ‘the Beast’, the Tirpitz was Nazi Germany’s last great battleship and was one of the largest and heaviest battleships ever constructed for a European navy.
Sister ship to the infamous Bismarck, the Tirpitz may be referred to as ‘the Lonely Queen of the North’.
Laid down in 1936 and commissioned in 1941, the Tirpitz spent most of her operational life lurking as a fleet in being amongst the fjords of Norway. Such was the threat posed to the sea lanes, and with that the Allied war effort, and so obsessed was Churchill and the Admiralty with her destruction, twenty-four operations ranging from conventional attacks to the foolhardy and ridiculous were undertaken against her. Indeed such was the threat posed by the Tirpitz that the mere thought that she was at sea could cause untold destruction as in the case of convoy PQ-17.
Following the loss of the Scharnhorst at the battle of North Cape on Boxing Day 1943, Tirpitz was left as the sole heavy unit of the Kriegsmarine in northern waters.
In late 1944 the task of sinking the Tirpitz was passed from from the Royal Navy to the Royal Air Force (RAF). Following two prior operations, on 12 November 1944 the Tirpitz was finally sunk by the Lancasters of 617 Squadron, ‘the Dambusters’ and 9 Squadron with Tallboy bombs designed by inventor Barnes Wallis.
Tirpitz: The Life and Death of German’s Last Great Battleship charts the story of the life and death of the warship dubbed by Churchill as ‘the Beast’.
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