Georg Ritter von Trapp. To the Last Salute. Campbell and Robert C. Lendt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xxvii + 192 pp. $21.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-4667-6.

Reviewed by Andrew Donson (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Published on H-German (June, 2007)

For those who always wondered why, in The Sound of Music, Captain von Trapp of land-locked Austria was ordered to serve as an officer in Hitler's navy, this translation of his 1935 memoir is instructive: during the First World War von Trapp was a triumphant Austro-Hungarian submarine commander who sank Allied steamers and warships in the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas. Most readers will be fascinated by this memoir's handful of descriptions of the multi-ethnic crews who worked together in the primitive, claustrophobic vessels that reeked of unwashed men, diesel fumes, and rancid schnitzel. But for critical historians, the book is ultimately a run-of-the-mill war hagiography by a naval officer who lamented the loss after 1918 of all that was noble, particularly a German-dominated empire with a coastline.[1]

Von Trapp inherited his title from his father, a naval commander knighted by Emperor Franz Joseph, and was promoted to the rank of captain for his role in suppressing the Chinese during 1900 Boxer Rebellion.[2] In 1908 he oversaw the design and construction of Austria's first submarines and commanded one of these rickety vessels when it sank the Léon Gambetta, France's largest cruiser, in 1915. During the war, von Trapp also commanded a French submarine captured in the Central Powers' defense nets. Altogether he sank an estimated 60,000 or more tons of Allied cargo. He was undoubtedly a masterful tactician and strategist, and his skill, benevolence, and grace under pressure earned him enormous respect from his crews. He was the most decorated Austrian submarine commander during the First World War, and because of his prodigious achievements in submarine warfare, he received knighthood and its accompanying title Ritter.

Most of the memoir recounts how he sank Allied steamers and escaped depth charges from foxgloves, the British anti-submarine boats. He emphasizes his chivalry in expressions of remorse about not being able to rescue the thousands of sailors whose ships he sank. Occasionally, he describes the sweltering, suffocating conditions within the tiny submarines--at one point he was so hot that he commanded an attack naked. The seamless cooperation of polyglot crews of Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Czech, and Polish speakers in such cramped quarters testified to his remarkable leadership in an empire whose land regiments were segregated and whose basic social and political fabric was crumbling in the face of nationalist upheaval. In the last chapters, von Trapp presents himself as the kindly patrician who in October 1918 could still hold the German-dominated imperial order together even when the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Karl I, could not.

The cachet of the von Trapp name promises to make this book a commercial success. Few of those readers will be professional historians, however. Except for those interested in submarine tactics, scholars will find little new in this memoir beyond its very brief descriptions of the multi-ethnic crews.

Notes

[1]. The book was originally published as Bis zum letzten Flaggenschuss (Salzburg: A. Pustet, 1935).

[2]. William Anderson, The World of the Trapp Family (Davison: Anderson Publications, 1998), 11-18.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Andrew Donson. Review of von Trapp, Georg Ritter, To the Last Salute. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13349

Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.