The book co-written with Richard Guilliant tells the story of the German vessel secretly sent to inflict maximum destruction on Allied shipping in the southern oceans.

Mr Hohnen said the ship caused havoc across three oceans, captured over 400 men, women and children and launched the only direct attacks on Australia and New Zealand by Germany during the First World War.

“It was an assignment so secret that she could never pull in to port or transmit any radio signal.

He said surviving on fuel and food plundered from other ships, the Wolf became a world in miniature as crew and prisoners crowded together in an improbable survival story.

“Here was a boat built for 350 that ended up with over 800 on board.

He said the book was drawn from eyewitness accounts, declassified government documents and unpublished diaries and had taken five years of research.

Mr Hohnen whose great-uncle Alexander Ross Ainsworth was one of the 400 prisoners on The Wolf said the project began as a family history story.

“I’d been the family historian for years and the family kept saying, you haven’t produced anything yet and the idea of researching the Wolf came to me when I drove up to Broom and stopped to view the monument to the sinking of the ‘Sydney’.

“It set me to thinking about stories I had heard in my childhood from my fathers mother about a very successful raider of the First World War SMS Wolf which had captured her younger brother’s ship Matunga while she was en route from Brisbane to Rabaul, New Guinea.”

He said between August 1917 and March 1918 the family believed Ross had died at sea before eventually being informed that he was a prisoner of war in Germany.

“I often pondered how my great-uncle survived those long months in the Hell Hole and later in a German prison camp.”

Mr Hohnen said there was much serendipity about the project once he started to piece the story together.

He said any book requiring five years of research owed its existence to a great many more people than its authors and this one was no exception.

“We are deeply indebted to a multitude of far flung assistants who helped us amass the details of this story, often for little or no personal reward.

He said profound gratitude went to those descendants of crew and prisoners who gave access to private family archives.

The Wolf has been released in America and will also be released in England on July 18.

It was released in Australia today and will be officially launched on July 15 at Glebe Books in Sydney.