19 Winklareth

Book Review: The Battle of the Denmark Strait: A critical analysis of the ‘Bismarck’’s singular triumph

by R. J. Winklareth, Casemate 2019, £14.99 (pb), 336 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index isbn 9781612007137

Derek Law

Mariner’s Mirror, Vol 105 (2019), Pages 489-490

Robert Winklareth is a mechanical engineer and professional technical analyst with particular expertise in military weapons systems. He first wrote about the battle of the Denmark Strait in 1998 in a book which received very mixed reviews and then produced this more definitive study in 2012. It is now reprinted in paperback some seven years on. There is a very substantial literature on the loss of HMS Hood in the battle, with literally dozens of monographs and studies within larger works, so the issue for a reviewer is whether and what this work adds to that huge existing body of work.

The book is a rather larger study than the title suggests. There is a substantial initial section on naval developments after the First World War, followed by another large section on the growth of the German navy and the move to war in 1939. Given the background of the author, it is perhaps unsurprising that this focuses on the facts and statistics of the various classes of ship. It then moves to a detailed examination of the preparatory moves for Operation rhine exercise and on to the battle itself. Almost half of the book is then devoted to events subsequent to the battle. The pursuit and sinking of Bismarck is well described, but the book then rather tails off with rather perfunctory accounts of the ultimate fate of the German supply ships and the major Royal Navy ships engaged in the action.

There is a substantial account of the first part of the German squadron’s deployment, which draws heavily on German official records. This focuses on issues of range, fuel capacity and refuelling options to analyse why decisions were made. But the author’s major contribution is in a literally blow by blow account of the action. He studies in detail the courses taken by the German ships. There is a comprehensive examination of the photographic evidence and the so-called ‘reversed photo theory’, which shows that many photographs of the action were wrongly printed. This is coupled with a minute by minute account of the gunfire from both sides, including the flight time of shells calculated to the nearest five seconds, and a review of the relative speed of the ships, which is used to build a very strong case for a revisionist view of the course taken by the German vessels. The book is very well illustrated. There is a huge number of photographs, author-produced maps and some rather self-indulgent black- and-white author sketches of everything from a reconnaissance Spitfire over the Norwegian fjords to the smoking, sinking wreck of the Bismarck.

The text is arguably packed with too many facts regarding ship measurements but it is a well written narrative description of this most famous battle and its outcome. It is a heavily technical work but manages very deliberately to avoid technical jargon, and displays great clarity in arguing the authors case. The bibliography is comprehensive – although it does not include Winklareth’s own first work on the subject – but is now somewhat dated given the volume of literature on the subject published in the last seven years.

In sum then, Winklareth offers some useful new perspectives on elements of the action, with a well-argued case for his theories. He persuasively offers fresh analysis of the evidence and gives an unusually detailed account of the battle, but while well worth reading, this cannot be seen as the definitive account.