The Cruise Of The Raider Wolf

The Cruise of the Raider “Wolf” is not intended as another war book; it is the story of one of the strangest and greatest sea adventures of modern times. The Wolf has become a legendary figure—a name connected with strange happenings at sea; but to most people it is only a name. The actual cruise was a shadowy, mysterious affair; and for many reasons the history of the cruise has remained equally vague. Briefly, this raider slipped out of Germany in 1916, and for fifteen months roamed the seas of the world depending for fuel and food on the captures she made. Her very existence depended on these captures not becoming known. Ships encountering the Wolf therefore simply disappeared, their fate unknown. The raider roamed the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific oceans, even touched the Arctic and Antarctic seas. And she capped this unparalleled cruise by running the blockade back to Kiel. Incidentally, the Wolf was the only enemy warship to enter Australian or New Zealand waters. She mined the coasts of both these countries. After the raider’s return to Germany there was a world-wide blaze of publicity. The reception of the Wolf’s men in Berlin was one of the outstanding war events in the German capital. Then the Wolf disappeared from public notice as quickly as she became famous. One reason for this was that Captain Nerger, the raider’s commander, was not a publicity seeker and was not in particularly high favour in Germany. It was necessary to receive him with honour after he brought his ship back from such a cruise, but after that he was quietly moved to an obscure post and was heard of no more. The author was a prisoner aboard the raider for the last nine months of the cruise.

Exploits of one of the most successful German surface raiders in the Great War The SMS Wolf was a particularly successful surface commerce raider--or auxiliary cruiser--of the Imperial German Navy during the First World War. Originally the freighter Wachtfels, the Wolf's role was to harass the sea lanes primarily sinking merchant ships carrying materiel for the Allied powers. She was armed with guns, torpedoes and mines and supported by her own spotter aircraft. The concept of the surface raider squadron was an innovative one because these ships appeared to be innocent merchant vessels until they came in close contact with their targets. Some of the ships in the squadron, being sunk or interned, had comparatively short careers, but the SMS Wolf under her charismatic commander, Nerger, was responsible for sinking 35 merchant vessels and two warships amounting to a total of 110,000 tons, which made the crew celebrities to the German public. This unique Leonaur edition brings together three contrasting accounts of the remarkable war time voyages and adventures of the Wolf, including perspectives from the crews of her victims who spent time aboard her as prisoners of war, and includes many pictures, including several not present in the original edition. Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Excerpt from The Amazing Cruise of the German Raider "Wolf;" The Wolf, however, did disturb the peace of our home seas. Besides taking a considerable toll of our shipping by direct capture, evidenced by the cases of the Matunga. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

On November 30, 1916, an apparently ordinary freighter left harbor in Kiel, Germany, and would not touch land again for another fifteen months. It was the beginning of an astounding 64,000-mile voyage that was to take the ship around the world, leaving a trail of destruction and devastation in her wake. For this was no ordinary freighter—this was the Wolf, a disguised German warship. In this gripping account of an audacious and lethal World War I expedition, Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen depict the Wolf ’s assignment: to terrorize distant ports of the British Empire by laying minefields and sinking freighters, thus hastening Germany’s goal of starving her enemy into submission. Yet to maintain secrecy, she could never pull into port or use her radio, and to comply with the rules of sea warfare, her captain fastidiously tried to avoid killing civilians aboard the merchant ships he attacked, taking their crews and passengers prisoner before sinking the vessels. The Wolf thus became a huge floating prison, with more than 400 captives, including a number of women and children, from twenty-five different nations. Sexual affairs were kindled between the German crew and some female prisoners. A six-year-old American girl, captured while sailing across the Pacific with her parents, was adopted as a mascot by the Germans. Forced to survive on food and fuel plundered from other ships, facing death from scurvy, and hunted by the combined navies of five Allied nations, the Germans and their prisoners came to share a common bond. The will to survive transcended enmities of race, class, and nationality. It was to be one of the most daring clandestine naval missions of modern times. Under the command of Captain Karl Nerger, who conducted his deadly business with an admirable sense of chivalry, the Wolf traversed three of the world’s major oceans and destroyed more than thirty Allied vessels. We learn of the world through which the Wolf moved, with all its social divisions and xenophobia, its bravery and stoicism, its combination of old-world social mores and rapid technological change. The story of this epic voyage is a vivid real-life narrative and simultaneously a richly detailed picture of a world being profoundly transformed by war.

"Five Months on a German Raider" is the memoir of Englishman Frederic George Trayes following his capture and subsequent detention aboard a German naval vessel in 1917, during the First World War. Travelling to Mozambique with his wife on board a Japanese vessel, Trayes and the crew were astonished to see a mysterious vessel bearing down on them, and when it finally caught up with them their worst fears were confirmed when they spotted the German flag on the vessel...