The author of The Tirpitz (1954) adds another chapter to the history of sea warfare in World War II in this story of the nine German merchant raiders, converted freighters, that scoured many seas and scored many ships in the years 1940-1943. Between them, they sank 130 vessels -- 850,000 tons. Mr. Woodward looks back to the First World War for tactics applied again in the Second, then heads into a history of the action seen by each ship. He feels that methods of operation and their results deserve study, since Russia, in building her surface Navy, is basing it on fast ocean-going raiders. The sinking of the Sydney by the much smaller Karmoran pointed up the danger of coming too close to a ship not certainly identified. Rogge, captain of the Atlantis, claime in his war diary that the most important job of the raider was to keep the enemy occupied and to force it into wasteful convoy formation. Straightforward recap for the naval preserve.