ABSTRACT
At 10.45 p.m. on 11 February 1942 the Kriegsmarine battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, left the French port of Brest and managed to dash the length of the English Channel to the safety of Wilhelmshaven in the Baltic. Their breakout had been expected, but through a series of false assumptions and blunders the Royal Navy and the RAF failed to detect their departure. It was not until 11.09 a.m. on 12 February that their passage was spotted by a routine Spitfire patrol in the approach to the Dover Straits. An immediate intercept order was issued, but to compound the embarrassment the Royal Navy had no ships in the vicinity except for a squadron of motor torpedo boats (MTBs). They failed to penetrate the strong destroyer and E-boat escort around the cruisers. The RAF hastily ordered all available aircraft into the attack, but lost forty-two, including six Swordfish torpedo dive-bombers of the Fleet Air Arm, in vain attempts to arrest their progress. The Swordfish flight leader LieutenantCommander Eugene Esmonde, a veteran of the attack on the Bismarck, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his determined efforts to breach the superior Luftwaffe Me-109 and Fw-190 fighter screen. The only compensation for the RAF was that air-dropped mines laid off the Dutch coast succeeded in damaging the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst. The latter was holed and limped into Wilhelmshaven, after shipping 1,000 tons of water, with her port engine and turret gear inoperable. The Times leader of 14 February thundered: ‘nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power has happened in Home Waters since the 17th century’.2 It was a propaganda victory for the tiny Kriegsmarine, but it was a victory of evasion and ultimately underlined the reluctance of the German surface fleet to confront the Royal Navy following the sinking of the Bismarck in May 1941. The ‘Channel dash’ had been ordered by Hitler in an attempt to concentrate his surface fleet in the Baltic and Norwegian waters because he suspected that Churchill was planning landings in Norway to link up with the Soviet Union. Hitler had commenced his naval build-up a month earlier with the movement of Germany’s most powerful battleship, the Tirpitz, armed with eight 15-inch guns, from the Baltic to the Norwegian port of Trondheim. The relocation gave Hitler a potent counter to any Allied landings. It also raised a threat to convoys in the North Atlantic and forced the Royal Navy to maintain a substantial picket in the North Sea, thereby reducing the ships available for convoy escort duties in the Atlantic.
