On 26 December 1943, the German battleship Scharnhorst sailed to attack an Arctic convoy and never came home. The Battle of North Cape was the last time British and German battleships fought each other, and it ended in total polar darkness with the fastest heavy ship in the Kriegsmarine hunted down and sunk beneath the Barents Sea.
This is the full story of the sinking of the Scharnhorst, the German raider that had outrun the Royal Navy for four years, slipped up the English Channel in broad daylight, and was finally run down by HMS Duke of York and Admiral Bruce Fraser on the day after Christmas 1943. Her great advantage was speed. She was faster than any British battleship that could sink her. So how do you catch a ship that is faster than you, on a night so dark that no one can see her? The answer was not a better ship or braver men. It was radar, codebreaking, and a single shell fired at extreme range.
We follow the whole running battle: the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union and the German threat lurking in the Norwegian fjords, Rear-Admiral Erich Bey’s final sortie, the morning cruiser action that blinded the Scharnhorst, Admiral Fraser’s radar-directed ambush in the dark, the destroyer torpedo attacks, and the loss of 1,968 men, of whom only 36 survived. This is naval history told as it happened, with the enemy treated as a worthy opponent and every figure drawn from the record.
TOPICS COVERED
→ The Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union and the German surface threat from occupied Norway
→ The battleship Scharnhorst, her design, her speed, and her record of escapes including the 1942 Channel Dash
→ Operation Ostfront and Rear-Admiral Erich Bey’s sortie on Christmas Day 1943
→ How British codebreaking at Bletchley Park turned convoy JW 55B into a trap
→ Vice-Admiral Robert Burnett, the cruisers Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield, and the radar hit that destroyed Scharnhorst’s own radar
→ Admiral Bruce Fraser, HMS Duke of York, and the radar-directed night action
→ The decisive 14-inch shell, the destroyer torpedo attacks, and the Norwegian destroyer Stord
→ Why only 36 of 1,968 men survived, and what the Battle of North Cape meant for the end of the battleship age
MAJOR RESEARCH SOURCES
→ Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser’s official despatch on the sinking of the Scharnhorst, Supplement to the London Gazette
→ Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea 1939 to 1945, the British official history
→ Wilhelm Godde’s survivor testimony, recounted in United States Naval Institute Proceedings
→ Gordon Williamson, German Battleships 1939 to 45, and M. J. Whitley, German Capital Ships of World War Two
→ Imperial War Museum, HMS Belfast and the Battle of North Cape
FURTHER READING
→ Angus Konstam, The Battle of North Cape: The Death Ride of the Scharnhorst, 1943
→ John Winton, Death of the Scharnhorst
→ Alf R. Jacobsen, Scharnhorst, by the writer who helped locate the wreck in 2000
→ Fritz-Otto Busch, The Drama of the Scharnhorst, a German survivor’s account
Forgotten Naval History brings back the lost ships, the forgotten crews, and the desperate last stands of the war at sea. Subscribe for more, and if your father, grandfather or great-uncle served in the Royal Navy, the Arctic convoys, or the Kriegsmarine, leave their name and their ship in the comments. It is how the memory survives.
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Credit to : Forgotten Naval History