Game of the Week, July 13-19

From July 13 through July 19, this week’s Game of the Week is Naval Campaigns: Kriegsmarine, featured at 25% off. Where its sister title Wolfpack focuses primarily on the submarine war, Kriegsmarine turns the spotlight toward the surface actions of the German navy in the Atlantic and adjacent waters. These are battles of raiders, convoy escorts, and heavy surface ships, fought under the pressures of weather, visibility, and limited information.

Kriegsmarine's scenario list spans several theaters, but three examples give a good sense of its scope: the River Plate, the Denmark Strait, and the North Cape. Together, they show the surface war as a series of very different tactical problems: commerce raiding, cruiser pursuit, convoy defense, and the rare but dramatic clash of capital ships.

The Battle of the Atlantic

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous campaign of the Second World War. It began in September 1939 and continued until Germany’s defeat in 1945. At its center was a simple strategic fact: Britain depended on the sea. Food, fuel, raw materials, troops, aircraft, vehicles, and munitions all had to move across the Atlantic or through connected sea routes. If Germany could sever those connections, Britain’s ability to remain in the war would be gravely weakened. 

The submarine war became the most famous part of that struggle. U-boats sank immense tonnage and forced the Allies to build a vast defensive system of convoys, escorts, aircraft, codebreaking, radar, and sonar. But the Battle of the Atlantic was never only a submarine campaign. In the first half of the war, especially, the Kriegsmarine also tried to use surface warships as commerce raiders. Their task was not to defeat the Royal Navy in a fleet battle. It was to break into the shipping lanes, scatter convoys, sink merchantmen, and force Britain to divert major forces to the hunt.

This offered an opportunity but also exposed Germany’s central weakness at sea. A single raider could cause alarm across an ocean, yet Germany had too few heavy ships to accept many losses. Britain, by contrast, had a global naval network, cruiser patrols, bases, carriers, battleships, and a strong intelligence apparatus. The Atlantic was vast, but once a German ship was sighted, shadowed, or forced toward a neutral port, the room for escape narrowed quickly.

The first famous example was the Admiral Graf Spee. In late 1939, the pocket battleship operated in the South Atlantic, attacking Allied merchant shipping and forcing the Royal Navy to search across enormous distances. On December 13, 1939, British cruisers under Commodore Henry Harwood intercepted her off the River Plate. The British force was weaker in firepower, but it attacked aggressively and damaged Graf Spee enough to send her into Montevideo. There, damage, diplomatic pressure, uncertainty, and British deception created a crisis for Captain Hans Langsdorff. Rather than face what he believed might be a stronger force waiting outside, he scuttled his ship. River Plate showed both sides of surface raiding: the danger a German warship could create, and the vulnerability of such a ship once cornered.

“Ich lasse mir doch nicht mein Schiff unter dem Arsch wegschießen. Feuererlaubnis!”

“I’m not going to have my ship shot out from under my arse. Permission to fire!”

–  Captain Ernst Lindemann, reportedly ordering Bismarck to open fire at the Denmark Strait after repeated requests from gunnery officer Adalbert Schneider, 24 May 1941.

The most famous sortie came in May 1941, when Bismarck and Prinz Eugen attempted to break into the Atlantic during Operation Rheinübung. Their purpose was commerce raiding, but the operation quickly became a fleet pursuit. At the Denmark Strait, Bismarck destroyed HMS Hood and damaged HMS Prince of Wales. It was a stunning tactical success and one of the most dramatic naval moments of the war. Yet Bismarck had also been damaged and could no longer continue the mission as intended. British forces pursued her relentlessly. Carrier aircraft crippled her steering, and on May 27 British battleships and cruisers closed in. Bismarck was sunk, demonstrating that a surface raider could win a battle and still lose the operation.

After Bismarck, the German surface threat shifted increasingly toward northern waters. Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, cruisers, and destroyers based in Norway threatened the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. These convoys faced some of the harshest conditions of the naval war: cold, darkness, storms, air attack, submarines, and the danger of German surface sorties. Tirpitz, in particular, became a strategic problem even when she did not sail. Her presence forced the Allies to allocate battleships, carriers, aircraft, and intelligence resources simply to contain the possibility of her intervention.

That threat reached its final major expression in the Arctic convoy battles. At the Barents Sea in December 1942, German heavy units failed to destroy convoy JW 51B despite a favorable opportunity, shaking confidence in the surface fleet. A year later, Scharnhorst sortied against convoy JW 55B and was intercepted by British forces at North Cape. In darkness and heavy seas, radar-directed gunnery and coordinated pursuit brought Scharnhorst to destruction. North Cape marked the effective end of the Kriegsmarine’s heavy surface threat against the Arctic convoys.

By 1944 and 1945, the balance had turned decisively against Germany. Allied shipbuilding, escort carriers, long-range aircraft, improved sensors, and operational experience transformed the Atlantic war. U-boats remained dangerous, but the great surface-raider phase had passed. German heavy ships were sunk, immobilized, bottled up, or reduced to defensive roles.

"Great as is our loss in the Hood, the Bismarck must be regarded as the most powerful, as she is the newest, battleship in the world"

– Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 27 May 1941

The Battle of the Atlantic was therefore not only a story of submarines and convoys. It was also a surface war of sudden contacts, breakout attempts, cruiser pursuits, Arctic interceptions, and high-risk sorties by ships Germany could scarcely afford to lose. Naval Campaigns: Kriegsmarine captures that side of the conflict: the tense moment when weather, visibility, command judgment, and naval firepower meet on a dark ocean.

What's in the game

• Kriegsmarine includes 58 Scenarios and 2 Campaigns – covering all sizes and situations, including a solo tutorial scenario plus specialized versions for both head-to-head play and vs. the computer AI.
  
• A range of maps covering a diverse range of surface and submarine conflicts in the Atlantic Ocean.
  
• The order of battle files cover the German and Allied forces that participated in the campaign, with additional formations included for hypothetical scenarios.
  
• Order-of-Battle, Campaign, Parameter Data, and Scenario Editors, which allow players to customize the game.
• Design notes covering the production of the game, campaign notes, and a bibliography listing the sources used by the design team to produce this simulation game.
  
• Kriegsmarine provides multiple play options, including play against the computer AI, LAN & Internet "live" play.

Bibliography and Videos

Here are some book and video recommendations to get a wider understanding of the Battle of the Atlantic (Clicking the cover bringes you the book page on Amazon)

Dimbleby, Jonathan. The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Grove, Eric, ed. German Capital Ships and Raiders in World War II. Volume I: From Graf Spee to Bismarck, 1939–1941. London: Frank Cass, 2002.

Kennedy, Ludovic. Pursuit: The Chase and Sinking of the Bismarck. London: Collins, 1974.

Konstam, Angus. Kriegsmarine Atlantic Command 1939–42: Naval Group West’s Surface Menace. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2025.

Pope, Dudley. The Battle of the River Plate. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988.

Screenshots

Below, you will find screenshots from the game, which will give you an impression of what to expect  There are two distinct interface variants available  (Clicking on an images opens it in full resolution)

We hope you enjoy this week’s Game of the Week: Naval Campaigns: Kriegsmarine  Like all WDS titles, it provides countless hours of rich historical gameplay at a very attractive price.