Scharnhorst

Scharnhorst and her sister Gneisenau were the first capital ships built for Hitler's Kriegsmarine, laid down as Germany cast off the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. Conceived as fast, powerful warships to break out into the Atlantic and savage British trade, they marked Germany's return to the front rank of naval powers.

Built at Wilhelmshaven and commissioned in 1939, Scharnhorst was a beautiful and modern ship — long, low and fast, with a graceful 'Atlantic bow' added after her original design proved too wet at the bows. Together with Gneisenau she formed a powerful raiding squadron, and from the war's first months the two ships became a constant menace haunting the northern sea lanes.

Scharnhorst was a curious compromise. She was the size of a battleship and as heavily armoured as one, with an excellent protective scheme that made her extremely hard to sink — yet she carried a relatively light main battery of nine 283mm (11-inch) guns in three triple turrets, smaller than the 14- or 15-inch guns of her British opponents. The intention was always to up-gun her later to 380mm, but the war came first and the heavier guns were never fitted.

Where she excelled was speed. Her powerful machinery drove her at over 31 knots, fast enough to run down merchant ships and, just as importantly, to escape from the heavier, slower British battleships that hunted her. This combination of speed and toughness made Scharnhorst a near-ideal commerce raider — able to strike hard and then vanish into the vastness of the ocean.

Scharnhorst's first great success came off Norway in June 1940. On 8 June she and Gneisenau surprised the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, caught with no aircraft ranged for her own defence, and sank her by gunfire along with her two escorting destroyers — one of the very few carriers ever destroyed by the guns of a surface ship.

It was not entirely one-sided. As she went down, the destroyer HMS Acasta fired a defiant spread of torpedoes and landed one on Scharnhorst, killing 48 of her crew and sending the raider limping to Trondheim and then home for months of repairs. The action cost the Royal Navy over 1,500 lives, but it also proved that even a doomed escort could hurt a capital ship.

Her greatest raiding triumph came in early 1941. Under Admiral Günther Lütjens, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau broke out into the Atlantic for Operation Berlin, a two-month cruise against the convoy routes that sank or captured some 22 Allied merchant ships — around 115,000 tons.

It was the high-water mark of German surface raiding, and also its limit. Twice the sisters found convoys escorted by British battleships and were ordered to turn away rather than risk action, a discipline that preserved the ships but underlined how the tightening Royal Navy screen was closing the Atlantic to heavy raiders. The cruise ended at Brest, on the occupied French coast.

At Brest, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were trapped under constant British air attack. Rather than lose them slowly, Hitler ordered a breathtaking gamble: the ships would steam up the English Channel in broad daylight, under the very noses of the British, to reach the safety of German waters.

In February 1942, Operation Cerberus — the famous 'Channel Dash' — caught the British completely by surprise. Despite frantic air and sea attacks, the German squadron raced through the Strait of Dover and reached home, an audacious success that humiliated the Royal Navy in its home waters. Yet it was a strategic retreat: the raiders had abandoned the Atlantic for good.

Scharnhorst's final chapter came in the Arctic. Based in Norway, she was a standing threat to the Arctic convoys carrying supplies to the Soviet Union. On 26 December 1943, she sortied to attack a convoy and was instead drawn into a trap by the British Home Fleet, led by the battleship HMS Duke of York.

In the freezing darkness and mountainous seas off the North Cape, radar-directed British gunfire crippled Scharnhorst's speed, and she was overwhelmed by shellfire and torpedoes. She went down fighting, taking almost her entire crew of nearly 1,900 men with her — only 36 survived. The Battle of the North Cape was the last gun duel between battleships in European waters, and it ended the career of Germany's most successful surface raider.

Scharnhorst was one of the most effective and admired warships of the German navy — fast, tough and handsome, and a genuine danger to Allied shipping for the first years of the war. In the Atlantic raids and the Channel Dash she showed just how much a well-handled fast battleship could achieve against a stronger enemy.

But her career also charted the decline of the surface raider. Hunted from the Atlantic, bottled up in port, and finally cornered and sunk in the Arctic dark, Scharnhorst fell victim to British radar, air power and numbers — at the North Cape she was tracked and engaged by an enemy she could not see. Her loss ended German surface raiding for good: the capability had been made obsolete not by a better battleship, but by detection.

• Alf R. Jacobsen, Scharnhorst (Sutton) — the sinking at North Cape.
• Angus Konstam, The Battle of North Cape (Pen & Sword).
• Fritz-Otto Busch, The Drama of the Scharnhorst.
• William H. Garzke & Robert O. Dulin, Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II (Naval Institute Press).