Robinson's focused on Germany's "auxiliary cruisers," merchant ships or freighters that were re-fitted to be combat capable, then sent out under the colors and flags of other nations to prey on shipping. Robinson notes early in the book that, according to the Hague Convention, this was entirely aboveboard, so long as the ships raised the Kriegsmarine flag and removed all false insignia before they started firing. They could have the guns ready to fire before then, but as long as they didn't pull the trigger, it was totally cool.
There are four vessels Robinson focuses on: Orion, Pinguin, Komet (which reached the Pacific through Arctic Sea with help from a Soviet icebreaker) and the Kormoran. They operated in this role only through 1941, primarily in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, though some of the ships saw action in the South Atlantic and around the Antarctic. The Pinguin captured basically an entire fleet of Norwegian whaling vessels in the span of a couple of months. Great for the whales, probably not so great for Norway.
Although Robinson emphasizes that the goal of the raiders was not simply to sink or capture as many ships as possible. Rather, the point was to make it too hazardous for freighters and other merchant ships to travel alone, and to restrict the routes they could take. A convoy can only travel at the speed of its slowest member, so forcing more shipping into convoys, along more circuitous routes that hug friendly coastlines, reduces the amount of shipping that reaches Britain.
Which doesn't mean the raider ships don't want to do direct damage. Robinson tends to move chronologically, shifting between ships in each chapter. He uses remarks from the various captains' logs and memoirs, or articles and letters of the crews, as well as the comments of some of the prisoners from captured ships. Generally speaking, the raiders seem to have treated prisoners fairly well. Better than the blockade runners the prisoners were sometimes transferred to for transport back to Germany.
The comments also provide a sense of the captains' personalities and expectations. The captains of the Orion and Pinguin both clearly expected this to be like the raider activity in the First World War, where they could raise their flag and command a ship to stop engines and not transmit a warning, and everything would be orderly. Instead they find that a lot of these ships try to escape, broadcasting warnings about raiders and firing back (inaccurately) with whatever guns they were loaded with. (Norwegian and Greek ships seem to still, on the whole, surrender quietly, while British ships, unsurprisingly, do not.)
In contrast, Komet's Captain Eyssen didn't waste any time with that sort of "gentlemanly warfare." He raises his flag and fires some shots and tells the ship to surrender or it'll be sunk. If it doesn't surrender, it gets sunk. Period. Of course, Eyssen comes off as generally over-agressive and high on his own supply, usually at the wrong time. He gets it in his head to not only sink all the Dutch supply ships picking up phosphate at Nauru (OK), but, since the island has no defense, to shell the factory and the port as well, basically trashing the place. Except he disguised his ship as a Japanese vessel, and Japan got a lot of phosphate from Nauru, so he kind of pissed off one of Germany's allies. Later, he decided to sink some ships near the Galapagos Islands, which were within the "Pan-American Neutrality Zone", which pissed off the U.S. at a time when we were still not "officially" at war with Germany.
Robinson includes a lot of maps showing the route a given ship traveled over a certain period of time, with markers indicating places where they captured or sank a particular ship, or laid out a minefield. There are several times where ships lay mines, mostly around Australia or New Zealand, and while they don't sink many ships, once their presence is known, those countries' navies have devote some of their limited warships to dealing with that, rather than protecting convoys from U-boats and battleships. Which doesn't go so well for a couple of the raiders when they run into cruisers, but that's the risk of trying to draw your enemy's attention. Sometimes you get actually do get their attention.
'Wehyer had to first rendezvous with the Regensburg in the Marshall Islands to refueled before heading to the Carolines. After passing Santa Cruz, Wehyer decided to disguise the Orion as the Japanese freighter Maebasi Maru and the crew painted characters on the hull copied from a Kodak advertisement produced in Yokohama.'
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