The Battle of the Barents Sea is the Kardashians of naval conflicts, mattering not because it was important but because certain people (in this case, Hitler) decided to treat it as if it were important.

At the end of 1942, a British naval convoy, JW 51B, was headed for Russia, with an escort of a handful of destroyers and some smaller ships. The Germans spotted the convoy and sent a much stronger force -- the "pocket battleship" Lützow, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, and six destroyers -- to eliminate the convoy. But the Germans, who had been ordered by Hitler not to take any real risks, were extraordinarily cautious. The British destroyers bluffed them away from the convoy (although one of the destroyers was sunk, another badly damaged, and still others damaged to lesser degrees). Then two British cruisers showed up and damaged the Hipper. The Germans retreated, the convoy survived -- and Hitler exploded, ordering the destruction of Germany's surface fleet. He was finally talked out of it, but among the other casualties was German naval boss Admiral Raeder, who resigned rather than face more of Hitler's abuse. All this even though the Germans inflicted more damage than they took, and the whole fiasco was ultimately Hitler's fault anyway.

This book, published a dozen years after the war ended, is without doubt the best-known account of the battle, and it is certainly very detailed. If anything, too detailed; it's easy to get lost in all the zigs and zags the convoy took to try to avoid detection. Another curious effect of the book's popularity is that it was published in multiple editions, and the paginations were different, and sometimes they weren't updated, so that my copy actually has references to pages that are wrong and, in at least one case, to photos that aren't there! (My copy, which as this trait, is the edition with ISBN 0870216600; I was able to verify the mis-pagination by comparing against ISBN 1590131029 -- which, however, was mis-bound, so be very careful to check whichever copy you get!)

The book is particularly strong for the period leading up to the sailing of the convoy; it is also very good on the Onslow's first attack on the Germans (that resulted in horrid damage to the Onslow and left the commander of the destroyer flotilla, Captain Sherbrooke, permanently disfigured and with damaged vision) and on the unsuccessful attempts to save the destroyer Achates. It's not nearly so good for what came after the battle -- e.g. what happened to Sherbrooke after the war? And what happened to Admiral Kummetz, the German commander who so signally failed to take advantage of a tremendous opportunity?

Indeed, there isn't much perspective at all from the German side. This is very much a book describing things from the British standpoint. That's not entirely bad -- do any of us really want insight into how the Nazis thought? -- but it makes it harder to understand what is going on. We know what and why the British did, but for the Germans, we generally only know what.

Also, there is some weakness in the descriptions of what happened on the British ships other than the Onslow. I became interested in this battle because of a song about it, "The Kola Run," written by a sailor on the Obdurate. He apparently wrote it in a fit of pique because younger sailors didn't know what it was like in the old days. But this book doesn't really help us know what it was like to serve on the Obdurate either, so it's no help in checking "The Kola Run."

At least the conclusion, about how the battle influenced Hitler's behavior, seems quite strong. The Battle of the Barents Sea should have been no big deal, but it changed the course of the war because of the strange way Hitler viewed it. You may not learn all you want to know about the battle from this book, but you will probably learn all you want to know, and more, about how psychologically disordered the Führer was. ( )