The Wolf: A classic adventure story of how one ship took on the navies of the world in the First World War: The True Story of an Epic Voyage of Destruction in WW1 [Paperback]

Guilliatt and Hohnen have done a solid job of combining official reports, eye witness accounts and fragments from previously unpublished private memoirs into a fairly good read on the voyage of the Wolf - one of the most successful German commerce raiders of WW1.

In essence the book has sufficient detail to please the casually interested general reader as well as a hobby military historian, however the writing certainly skews in the direction to please the former. That means lots of personal accounts, a fairly comprehensive presentation of events surrounding the era in the 'hunting grounds' of the Wolf, etc. It certainly makes for a good read and I cannot say I found it dry or boring at any point. I can also understand how someone more interested in the military history aspects of the story could see some of the descriptions as superfluous.

The book, while mostly focused on the 'story' aspect, does provide drawings of the Wolf, two maps of the mission (a global one and a more detailed one for the period spent around Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands) and a selection of photographs from the mission. This makes it easy to follow the progress and while many of the difficulties of the mission can be seen from the writing, I can imagine that some readers could prefer a summary of these and an analysis of what could have been handled differently. As it is, one knows what was done and what challenges were faced but needs to look further / elsewhere to get an analysis of the case.

Overall a very good, enjoyable and informative read.

Not the usual military book i would read,but the cover looked good!and the review sounded ok.I'm now 3/4s through and can't put it down.Very interesting and different,an amazing voyage.

While I was doing research in the University of Washington's main library, I found one section the stacks very depressing. In it were thousands of books written about a war that is now, for all practical purposes, forgotten. The nearby section on the Second World War was well used by faculty and students, while that on the First gathered dust.

That experience eventually led me to write a book describing why the Second World War was, in many ways a sequel to the First. The issues left unresolved at the end of the First became the causes of the Second. And for my source, I chose the writings of G. K. Chesterton, one of the few to see the connection at the time and warn that, if those issues were not resolved, "Wars more and more horrible" would follow. In 1932, just before Hitler took power in Germany, Chesterton went one step further, warning that the next war would begin over a border dispute between Germany and Poland, precisely what happened in 1939.

At that time, the First World War was called the Great War. By great, they didn't mean wonderful. Great referred to its enormous size, scope and the sheer number of those who died in its trenches. This book isn't about the trenches. It's about an almost forgotten portion of a war that's itself rapidly being forgotten.

Knowing that a British blockade would block German access to the open seas, Kaiser's Germany adopted a bold tactic. In addition to submarines, which in that day had a limited range, they prepared a few merchant raiders that could range at will over the Seven Seas, hopefully sowing confusion in the minds of their foes and diverting warships to hunting down the raiders. This raiders were well-adapted to their times. They'd supply themselves with coal and food from stocks aboard the ships they captured and later sank. That's why the raider in this tale, the Wolf, is able to stay at sea for fifteen months and 64,000 miles, and even return, battered and dilapidated, back to Germany. In a era when ship radios were just coming into use and one without long-range search aircraft, they were able to prevent word about what they were doing from getting out.

Interestingly, in the end the Wolf sowed very little confusion in Allied shipping circles. As the authors note, the raider was so stealthy in its attacks and so consistent at keeping all those it captured on board as prisoners, that Allied leaders, while suspecting that a German raider was in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, were never forced to divert shipping and bring in warships to deal with the threat. The damage the Wolf did lay solely in the few ships it captured or that were sank by the mines it sowed in the dark of night near major ports and shipping channels. If the Wolf had drawn attention to itself, it would have been quickly hunted down and sank. The stealthiness of the Wolf spared its life but limited its influence on the war.

If you like understanding obscure bits of forgotten history, this book is for you. It's well written and covers both sides of a story that took place inside the hulls of one ship. It tells of the crew who wanted Germany to win the war and of a increasingly crowded group of prisoners who greatest hope was to get home to friends and family who'd come to believe that they'd died at sea.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II

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