Four Random Books 5: Destroyers

Ludovic Kennedy’s Pursuit combines his first-hand experience aboard HMS Tartar with the loss of his father in Royal Navy service, giving the hunt for Bismarck a personal wartime perspective.

Kennedy’s account describes how the Admiralty Operations Room combined plots, reports, intelligence, and radio direction finding into the command picture for the pursuit of Bismarck.

Kennedy’s account of First Sea Lord Dudley Pound shows how ill health, institutional responsibility, and Churchill’s confidence met at the top of the Bismarck operation.

Donald MacIntyre’s Narvik study focuses on mistakes at the opening of war and warns against treating mature late-war capabilities as the starting point for the next conflict.

The Narvik account follows Roger Keyes’s lobbying for a Trondheim operation and the resulting tension with Lord Cork’s expeditionary command and Charles Forbes’s Home Fleet responsibilities.

Ron Cope’s Attack at Dawn gathers participants’ accounts of the First Battle of Narvik and makes the limits of fast-moving combat memory part of the book’s method.

The quoted officers’ discussion reconstructs a decision under uncertainty: enemy strength and damage were unknown, gunfire had stopped, and the destroyers had to weigh another attack against the torpedo danger.

Peter C. Smith’s history of the Royal Navy’s 1940 Mediterranean campaign follows Type 79 radar from development to its Malta trials. It also shows how warning value depended on the training of shore-based air defences.