Death off the Nordkapp

Through the dark Arctic night slipped a sleek, grey sea wolf, searching for the sheep of the sea. It was the 26,000-ton German battleship Scharnhorst, sniffing delicately with her intricate detector apparatus, pricking up her mechanical ears, hunting hungrily for a fat Allied convoy on the long haul to Murmansk with materiel for the Red Army.

Next morning the huntress was near her best stalking ground. That afternoon she made her strike and closed, somewhere above the Nordkapp (North Cape), on the uppermost tip of Norway. But she found a battle, not a slaughter. The convoy she fell in with was under escort of strong forces of the British Home Fleet. Then began a long, furious, desperate running fight, as the hostile ships turned and maneuvered, while big guns thundered and baleful orange flashes cut through the grey atmosphere. Darkness brought no respite; the killers closed in; some hours later the proud Scharnhorst took her death blow and went down.

"Heroic Battle." The British told their story in a clipped communique:

"This afternoon, Dec. 26, the German battleship Scharnhorst was brought to action by units of the Home Fleet under the command of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser.

. . . The Scharnhorst was sunk this evening off the North Cape."

D.N.B. followed an hour later with a Wagnerian news broadcast:

"In an engagement with superior heavy English naval units the battleship Scharnhorst, firing until her last round of ammunition was spent, sank after a heroic battle. . . . Considerable damage was inflicted on the convoy and the English escort units."

Neither side said a word of survivors (the Scharnhorst normally carried 1,461 men).

Costly Battle. The defeat virtually bankrupted the studied German policy of "the fleet in being"--a cautious hoarding of potential naval strength in safe Baltic or Norwegian bases, thus restricting the movements of Allied naval units nearly four times as strong, which had to be held near by to meet sudden sea raids. Allied tallies indicated that the Scharnhorst must have been the only German capital ship in fighting trim when she made her dash to the north. The fact that she was thrown away on a convoy-raiding mission was of itself a revealing indication of growing desperation, of strain under pressure, of failing submarine and air power which once made the Murmansk route a death alley for United Nations shipping.

Of the other major German warships, the 41,000-ton battleship Tirpitz (sister of the lost Bismarck) is still out of action from torpedo hits by British midget subs. The Scharnhorst's sister, Gneisenau; the so-called "pocket battleship" Admiral Scheer; the heavy cruisers Prinz Eugen and Admiral Hipper--all these have been damaged repeatedly by bombs and torpedoes, are of dubious fighting value. The pocket battleship Lutzow was torpedoed in 1941, but may be fit for service again. Despite the catchy description, she is no battleship, but an armored cruiser of around 12,000 tons. For the rest, aside from a few light cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats, the German Navy's sole remaining surface threat is the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, never yet in action, and last reported hiding out in the Baltic port of Stettin.

Seaman's Pay. But even the best carrier fights effectively only as the well-protected Sunday punch of a task force. Without her screen of heavily gunned protecting ships she is terribly vulnerable--a fact the British learned in 1940, when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau caught and sank the carrier Glorious with 1,200 British seamen. Admiral Fraser, onetime commander of the Glorious earned a special revenge when he brought the Scharnhorst to action.

For all Britons the sinking went far to cancel out an ignominious failure. On Feb. 12, 1942, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen slipped out of Brest, fought their way north through the English Channel under sea and air attack, gained the safety of their home ports and the chance to refit and sail once more.

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