Tentacles and Torpedoes: The German Kraken Fleet During WW2

From the author of "Scales and Chrome: Aerial Dragon Combat In the Second Great War" comes, "Torpedoes and Tentacles: The German Kraken Fleet in World War II."

"Feeling the tide of the war turning once the British beat back the Axis dragons in the Battle of Britain, and with air superiority slipping away in the face of the wildly successful Allied dragon breeding program, the Third Reich turned to an unholy alliance with a race of creatures long believed to be legend. 

Nazi scientists, finally finding some success in their mining the realms of the occult for superweapons, not only managed to find the mythic behemoths of the deep, but also communicate with them well enough to enter into a Faustian bargain. 

And so, with the resurrection of the ancient practice of chaining virgins to seaside cliffs as a sacrifice to the Kraken, the Nazis ensured the aid of the sea creatures in terrorizing Allied shipping lanes and sending many an Allied convoy to the depths. But unlike in ancient times, when the virgin sacrifices were quickly devoured, these young German women were allowed, for a while, to serve as the Kraken's "captain" and crew, until such time as the creature's appetites could no longer be denied. Living in airtight metallic quarters fused with the Krakens' monstrous flesh, life for these Krakenschiffers was often nasty, brutish, and short, each day a delicate dance of patiently enduring the creatures' baser appetites while attempting to relay orders from Naval Command and direct the creatures' bloodlust against appropriate Allied targets, knowing all the while that the tiniest slight would often be enough to hasten their ignominious doom.

Thus, with a steady stream of sacrifices needed to maintain the Krakens' aid, and with an increasingly suspicious public uneasy at the need for so many of their daughters to leave on such long tours at sea, German propaganda artists became instrumental in the maintenance of German naval superiority. Portraying the Krakenschiffers as fearless (and nubile) defenders of the Fatherland, at the helm of monstrously powerful creatures that would make their enemies quail in fear, these master artists even managed the impressive feat of ensuring that a significant minority of Kraken sacrifices were volunteers."