This solidly researched, cogently written and argued volume is a major addition to the historiography of the German military in World War II. As the author notes, the study “is neither army history nor naval history. It analyzes both the army's and navy's strategic goals, and how they played out in the Baltic theater” during 1944 and 1945 (p. xxii). Most standard military histories of the war's final months maintain that the nearly one million German soldiers cut off in coastal regions of Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Germany from land contact with the rest of the Eastern Front resulted from the fact that Hitler never permitted Germany's forces to retreat. Other studies assert that Hitler fought to the war's bitter end intending eventually to win it with Germany's so-called miracle weapons, primarily rockets and jet aircraft.

But in this fascinating study by Howard Grier, a professor at Erskine College in South Carolina, we learn that Hitler had another, often overlooked, “miracle weapon” at the war's end. This was the Führer's “last hope”—a new, highly advanced submarine, the Type XXI, with which Admiral Karl Dönitz, the naval commander in chief from 1943 on, planned to regain the initiative in the Battle of the Atlantic. The new U-boat was an offensive weapon with war-winning potential, a true submarine whose speed and ability to remain underwater indefinitely would render contemporary Allied anti-submarine tactics ineffective. With a fleet of the new U-boats, Dönitz intended to starve Britain into surrender and end the shipment of American troops and supplies to Europe. But before they could be launched, after mid-1944 only from Norway, the new submarines had to undergo trials and their crews had to be trained; for geographic reasons, this could be done solely in the eastern Baltic Sea.

To demonstrate this German naval strategy and its role in shaping the war on land on the northern sector of the Eastern Front, Grier analyzes military operations in that theater from the end of 1943 to Germany's surrender in May 1945. By December 1943, Hitler considered withdrawing Army Group North from the Leningrad area. A month later, a Soviet offensive freed Leningrad completely from German bombardment. Throughout 1944, as the Red Army drove Army Group North back to the west, Dönitz pressed Hitler and the military increasingly for the defense of the Baltic coast in the interest of naval strategy. By mid-October, Army Group North, with more than half a million troops, had been isolated in Latvia, in the Courland peninsula, cut off from land contact with the Reich. German naval strategists then sought to influence Army Group Center's defense of the Baltic coast in eastern Germany. Grier observes also how, by 1944, German views of the wartime value of both Finland and Sweden to Germany extended beyond providing the Reich with raw materials to helping to provide it with domination of the Baltic.

From the start of the Russian campaign in 1941, the German navy pressed for the control of the Baltic to carry out submarine testing and training. Once the army failed to capture Leningrad, the navy complained repeatedly about the army's inaction in the Baltic theater. The navy sought at all costs to keep the Soviet Baltic fleet from breaking out of the Gulf of Finland and therefore endangering Germany's importing of Swedish iron ore and Estonian shale oil, shipping of troops and supplies in the Baltic, and training of U-boat crews.

Of special interest is Grier's discussion of three principal Nazi military leaders—Dönitz; General Heinz Guderian, the army chief of staff after July 1944; and Field Marshal Ferdinand Schönerer, commander of Army Group North from July 1944 to January 1945. Despite Guderian's urging of Hitler in fall 1944 to evacuate the large German force isolated in the Courland portion of Latvia, the Führer, influenced by Dönitz and the navy, left the troops there, fending off a series of Red Army attacks until the German surrender in May 1945.

In an excellent final chapter, Grier examines Hitler's relationship to Dönitz and the navy. About the admiral, whose memoirs are suspect and for whom no satisfactory biography exists, the author concludes, “Few military officers demonstrated their devotion to Nazi ideology and their loyalty and unquestioning obedience to Hitler as eagerly as did Dönitz, particularly in the final months of the war” (p. 192). Between February 1943 and April 1945, Dönitz saw Hitler on 119 days. According to Grier, “ample evidence” points to Dönitz's anti-Semitism, and although after the war the former admiral “would claim to have known nothing about the murder of the Jews … the extent of his knowledge of the Holocaust is uncertain” (p. 194).

But beyond Dönitz's absolute loyalty to Hitler, why did the latter listen to his naval commander and adopt the Baltic strategy? Because, unlike the proposals of other German commanders that aimed mainly at postponing defeat, the strategy seemed to offer Hitler an opportunity to win the war. More than anyone else in the Nazi regime in 1944 and 1945, Dönitz represented and supported Hitler's principal military plan—that of Durchhalt, holding out at all costs and long enough for Germany to turn defeat into victory. Grier's careful analysis of Dönitz and his relationship to Hitler helps significantly to explain why Hitler selected the admiral as his successor.

In the end, Allied bombing of production factories and shortages of labor delayed the production of the new submarines promised by Dönitz. Moreover, the first Type XXIs launched had technological deficiencies and malfunctions. Of the sixty-two Type XXIs produced by January 1945, only one started on a cruise on April 30. The production of another smaller submarine, the Type XXIII, suffered similar problems and results. The author has supported his study with extensive research in the principal naval and other military archives as well as in the relevant memoir and secondary literature.