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Erich Raeder: Admiral of the Third Reich. By Keith W. Bird. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2006. ISBN 1-55750-047-9. Photographs. Notes. Note on bibliography and sources. Index. Pp. xxvi, 282. $34.95.
Keith Bird, currently Chancellor of Kentucky's Community and Technical College System, enjoys a richly earned reputation as an expert not only on the Reichsmarine and its officer corps, but on the historiography of all German navies in modern times. If he now offers the first professional biography of Erich Raeder since the Grand Admiral's own memoirs and subsequent death almost fifty years ago, one can rest assured the subject is in most competent hands.
Given the attention other German naval leaders such as Tirpitz or Dönitz have attracted, one must be grateful to Professor Bird for bringing back into the picture the old-school navalist without whose leadership the...