"Wielding the Dagger" The MarineKorps Flandern and the German War Effort, 1914-1918

Subjects:

• Military Studies » Military History
• History » World War I
• History » European History -- Modern/20th Century

Reviews:

• Little is remembered today about the 30 some-odd-thousand German naval ratings who served on destroyers and submarines, in coastal defence batteries, as airmen and infantry in Flanders from 1914 to 1918....The author presents its story as a case study in flowing narrative based largely on original German documents.
  —Stand To! April 2007
• [T]his is a convincing case study, based on extensive use of documents from the German archives, which deals with a small though by no means unimportant aspect of the German naval war against Britain.
  —War in History 2006
• Mark D. Karau's informative monograph on the MarineKorps Flandern examines the creation, organization, and operations of the imperial German navy's land, sea, and air units based along the Flanders coast in Belgium during World War I and their impact on German naval strategy and on the outcome of the war. This study als sheds light on the significance of Belgium in German plans and on the wartime relationship between the German navy and army....Karau's well-researched study is based on a plethora of relevant primary and secondary sources.
  —The American Historical Review February 2005
• Karau presents an excellent picture of this military organisation fighting to maintainitself within the overall German war effort on the Western Front and to carry out a complex mission in dangerous waters. Whether a more vigorous surface war, fought by destroyers and torpedoboats, would have made a critical difference either in the Channel or in bringing on a clash of the battlefleets is open to question, but this exploration of the challenges that faced Von Schroder is a fascinating aspect of the war in the West that complements the better-known struggle of the Royal Navy in these waters.
  —International Journal of Maritime History .
• Mark Karau's excellent monograph on the Naval Corps in Flanders provides an account of the German Navy's activities in that area in the First World War...."Wielding the Dagger" goes a long way to alleviate the relative obscurity of this theater of the war, which the Germans failed to develop as they might have. The book will appeal to a wide audience.
  —The Journal of Military History 2004

Table of Contents:

• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• Creation of the MarineKorps
• Building the Naval Bases and Fortifying the Coast
• The Creation of the Flanders Flotillas
• The Year of Transition
• Fall K: The MarineKorps and Dutch Neutrality
• The Decisive Year
• Endgame
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Maps and Figures
• Bibliography