50 Years Ago: Battle at North Cape

Four German capital ships fought in World War II. Three went down with colors flying. The Bismarck, sunk in May 1941, was the first. Two-and-a-half years later, the Scharnhorst became the second.

Laid down in 1935 and commissioned in 1939, the Scharnhorst and her sister ship, the Gneisenau, were the first capital ships built in Germany since World War I. They measured 754 feet from stem to stern and displaced 34,841 tons standard load. These dimensions were typical of battleships of their day, but with a top speed of 32 knots, they were considerably faster than foreign contemporaries, and, with a main battery of 11-inch guns, less powerfully armed. Because of their relatively modest firepower, British sources often refer to these vessels as battlecruisers. No larger guns bad been available during the ships’ construc­tion, and, although the Kriegsmarine intended to refit them with 15-inch guns at a later date, the outbreak of war in September 1939 forestalled the conversion.

At that time, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder believed that he could use his navy’s handful of big ships as surface raiders to second its submarines’ war on trade. The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, operating in company, broke out of German waters twice in the winter of 1939­40, but they accomplished little. The only victim of their first sortie was an armed merchant cruiser whose contact reports sent them hurrying home. Their second outing proved altogether unproductive.

In spring 1940 the commitment of the German surface fleet to support the invasion of Norway temporarily sus­pended Atlantic operations. The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau covered the landing at Narvik in March, and in June they achieved a remarkable success off the same port, sinking the British fleet carrier Glorious and her escorts, the destroyers Acasta and Ardent. The “ugly sis­ters”—as the Royal Navy referred to them—did not have everything their way, however. A torpedo from the Ar­dent sent the Scharnhorst into the dockyard for months.

By year’s end, the sisters were ready to return to the Atlantic, and on 22 January 1941 they set out on what be­came their most profitable cruise. When they entered port at Brest in German-occupied France two months later, the raiders had accounted for 22 merchant vessels totaling 116,000 tons. Raeder planned for them to sortie from Brest later that spring to unite with the newly commissioned Bismarck and Tirpitz in a four-battleship task force that would scour the North Atlantic. This ambitious project soon unraveled. The Scharnhorst's engines had to be over­hauled; the Gneisenau was damaged by a British air raid; and the Tirpitz's working-up exercises fell behind schedule. Rather than delay the operation, Raeder sent the Bismarck to sea in company of the cruiser Prinz Eugen, with fatal results.

The loss of the Bismarck notwithstanding, Raeder in­tended to continue the surface campaign. At the begin­ning of June, the Prinz Eugen joined the sisters at Brest, an excellent base for Atlantic excursions. In July, British bombs put the Scharnhorst and the Prinz out of action until Raeder no longer dictated the deployment of Ger­many’s surface assets. Around the turn of the year 1941­42, Adolf Hitler became obsessed with the idea that the Allies were planning to invade Norway—a prospect that, in fact, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill favored strongly. To help guard against this eventuality, the Fiihrer—never reluctant to impose his inspirations on his service chiefs—ordered major fleet units shifted to the Norwegian fjords. The movement from German waters began in January 1942, and in February the Brest squadron returned home after a daring, daylight passage through the English Channel. Yet the success of the Channel Dash was not unalloyed. Off the Dutch coast the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau struck mines that seriously damaged the former; less than two weeks later, British bombers dis­abled the latter. The Gneisenau never became operational again. The ugly sisters had been parted.

In March 1943 the Scharnhorst, her repairs completed, joined the surface action group centered around the Tir­pitz at Altenfjord in northern Norway. Both ships had re­cently escaped being retired by Fiihrer-Order. Since their original deployment to defend Norway, the German ves­sels based there had acquired the additional mission of in­terdicting Allied convoys to northern Russia. The latest of these operations, in December 1942, had ended ig- nominously when six British destroyers and two light cruisers frustrated an attack by the heavy cruisers

'NGRam collection, national maritime museum

Liitzow and Hipper and six destroyers on Convoy JW51B. Enraged by their failure, Hitler resolved to decommission every vessel bigger than a destroyer. In mid-January 1943, after a vain attempt to persuade him to reconsider, Raeder resigned the command he had held for 14 years. He was succeeded by Admiral Karl Donitz, formerly Comman­der, U-Boats, whom Hitler assumed would agree to scrap­ping the big ships. The unanticipated opposition Donitz raised led him to abandon the idea, but in so doing Hitler made clear that he expected the units in Norway to pro­duce results.

Results were not immediately obtainable. Following the Scharnhorst's arrival at Altenfjord, the British suspended convoys for the summer. The Allied base at Spitsbergen, which they shelled in September, was the only target the battleships found for their guns. On 1 November, con­voy operations resumed. After allowing five convoys to pass unmolested except by submarines in hopes of lulling the British into a sense of security, Donitz promised Hitler he would strike at the sixth. This proved to be Convoy JW55B, 18 eastbound merchantmen sighted by a Luft­waffe plane on 22 December. The Tirpitz having been crippled by midget submarines, the Scharnhorst was the only major combatant available. At 1415 on 25 Decem­ber, Donitz ordered her to sortie. Christmas trees upon Which the previous evening candles had glowed were thrown overboard, and at 1900 the battleship and the five vessels of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla stood to sea.

Substituting for the battle group commander, absent on medical leave, was the Flag Officer, Destroyers, Rear Ad­miral Erich Bey. Naval Group North calculated that he should be in position to attack JW55B at dawn—approx­imately 1000—on 26 December. Mindful of the humiliat­ing outcome of the convoy battle a year earlier, Donitz sent a signal exhorting Bey to "Exploit the tactical situation skillfully and daringly. Action must not end with partial success.” On the other hand, he stipulated that the Scharn­horst should withdraw upon encountering heavy units.

Unknown to Bey, three British formations in addition to Convoy JW55B—a westbound convoy returning from Russia, and two covering forces—were converging on the Ocean area the Scharnhorst was about to enter. Ap­proaching from the east was Force 1, consisting of the heavy cruiser Norfolk and the light cruisers Belfast and Sheffield, under Vice Admiral R. L. Burnett; and from the West, Force 2, composed of the battleship Duke of York, the light cruiser Jamaica and four destroyers, under Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet. Worse yet, Fraser knew from Ultra in­telligence that the Scharn­horst had probably sortied.

At 0700 on 26 Decem­ber, having reached the area in which he expected to find the convoy, Bey deployed his destroyers in a scout­ing formation steering southwest, with the Scharnhorst following some miles astern. An hour and 20 minutes later, he turned north without notifying the destroyers, and contact was broken, never to be regained. The Scharnhorst would fight her last battle alone.

It began at 0924, when starshells from Force 1 took the Scharnhorst by surprise. Incorrectly assuming that, like the Kriegsmarine, the Royal Navy possessed radar-search receivers, Bey had refrained from using the battleship’s radar. A half-hour’s inconclusive action ended when the Scharnhorst turned away to the south. Burnett did not pur­sue, convinced that the raider would try to work around him to get at the convoy from the north. He was right, and a second engagement between the Scharnhorst and Force 1 took place from 1221 to 1247. This time the Ger­mans believed that their opponents included a capital ship, and when Bey broke off the action it was with the aim of returning to base.

By grim coincidence, the course steered by the Scharn­horst, shadowed by Force 1, was suited ideally for an in­terception by Force 2. The Duke of York opened fire at 1647, and by 1713 both the Scharnhorst's forward turrets had been knocked out. Nevertheless, her superior speed enabled the German ship to draw steadily away from her pursuers. By 1820 Fraser had resigned himself to her es­cape. At that moment, however, a British shell demolished one of the Scharnhorst’s boiler rooms, temporarily slow­ing her to 8 knots and giving Fraser’s destroyers the op­portunity to put at least four torpedoes into her. The Duke of York, the Jamaica, and the Belfast then closed in for the kill. Admiral Bey made his final signal at 1900: “We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Fiihrer, long live Germany.” At 1945 the smoldering ruin of the Scharn­horst capsized slowly. Her secondary batteries had con­tinued firing as late as 1937. Of the 1,968 men who had been on board, British ships picked up only 36.

For further reading: Heinrich Bredemeier, in collaboration with Kurt Caesar Hoff­mann and Helmuth Giessler, Schlachtschiff Scharnhorst, 2nd revised and enlarged edition (Herford, Germany: Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, [1975)); Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, Der Seekrieg: The German Navy's Story, 1939-1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1957); Martin Stephen, ed. Eric Grove, Sea Battles in Close Up: World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988).

Dr. Sweetman is a military and naval historian.