The Frustrated Raider: The Story of the German Cruiser Cormoran in World War I - Hardcover

An adventure tale of World War I, a microcosm of the naval war in the Pacific and of Germany’s dream of empire, Cor­moran’s story is one of narrow escapes, heroic action, and human tragedy.

The events leading up to Cormoran’s ap­pearance at Guam at the beginning of World War I and her internment and scuttling near the end of the war are here told by Charles Burdick, a noted military historian, who has pieced together the unpublished details of the gallant ship’s last voyage and supplied the back­ground of Germany’s aspirations in the Pacific, against which Cormoran’s story unfolds.

Relatively slow, with a high fuel con­sumption rate, light armament, and no armor she was scarcely a formidable naval unit. Balked at every turn by lim­ited range and the specter of the enemy’s superior forces, Cormoran never strikes the reader as a dangerous threat to allied shipping in the confused early days of the First World War. Rather, she is herself prey, running, hiding, Captain Zuckschwerdt using every stratagem to preserve his command. Finally, in the last year of the war Cormoran achieved her only distinction. After long years of internment at Guam by a neutral Amer­ican government, never having fired her guns in anger, she was scuttled by her own crew in the first hostilities between Americans and Germans, her officers and men the first prisoners taken by American forces.

Although Cormoran has not left any grandiose events for Mars’s chronicles, her story is one of the few surviving ac­counts of World War I, and it gives us insight into the German dimensions of that war and furnishes us a historical vignette of the human drama of naval exploits.