Read By: Michael Page

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.

Download File Size:286.08 MB

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