Cruiser Warfare - WW1 German Style

"I love the smell of new books in the morning....they smell of....new books!"

For a variety of reasons it has been a fairly busy couple of weeks - mainly to do with my efforts to secure a new job for when my existing contract comes to an end on Friday of next week. So far I have had little success but there are a few possibilities on the horizon and so I am sure that something will turn up in due course. In the meantime though it has mean lots of phone calls, interviews with agencies and hundreds of emails!

I have not been entirely idle though on the shopping front and so a couple of choice items have crossed the threshold prior to my enforced economy drive. I will detail one of these in a later post but for the time being I was delighted to get home this evening to the book illustrated above - Battle on the Seven Seas: German Cruiser Battles 1914 - 1918 by Gary Staff (ISBN 978-1-84884-182-6) and published by Pen and Sword.

The major German cruiser actions of WW1 need little introduction but the beauty of this book is not only that they are all under one cover but also the author makes much use of German sources for the accounts. His descriptions of the various actions of the Goeben in the Black Sea gives some telling evidence of the state of the Turkish Navy and highlights in very clear detail the problems faced by the Germans. Aside from the usual Coronel, Falklands, Emden and Konigsberg stories there are also accounts of the action off Ostergarn in 1915.

I had planned to visit the Navwar shop last weekend with the view to acquiring a selection of 1/3000th scale cruisers in order to replicate the actions mentioned and to set up some mini campaigns based around the old naval standby of 'Hunting the Raider'. Sadly this may have to postponed for a while but I still have sufficient models to cover the Black Sea if nothing else - and I have just about added the rules for dreadnoughts to MoBaS!