We discovered afterwards that we’d been hit a couple of times; one shot went through the foremast and broke all the radio aerials, stopping our enemy reports in the middle. The Admiralty were reading them with a great deal of interest, saw our signals break off and feared the worst. We also got another one through the hull aft; it came in abaft of the main armoured belt and it came in under the quarter-deck, through the midshipmen’s berth and then went down through the unarmoured bit of the main deck there, through a baggage store at F deck and out through the other side, below the water line, without exploding. If it had burst inside the ship it would have done considerably more damage. As it was, we didn’t discover that until after the action, when the damage control parties opened up the watertight doors to see what was what, and when they got down there they were met with a wall of water, so they shut it fairly quickly. That was the end of the Norwegian campaign as far as we were concerned.’
After this the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took refuge in Brest in March 1941, having spent two months in the Atlantic where they had destroyed over 80,000 tons of Allied shipping. They had been blockaded there for nearly a year when Hitler decided to bring them, together with the cruiser Prinz Eugen, back to Germany through the English Channel. On the night of 11 February 1942 they slipped out of Brest and, because of a series of circumstances unfortunate for the British, succeeded in reaching their bases in Germany by the morning of the 13th. However, both battlecruisers had been damaged by mines, which put the Scharnhorst out of action for six months and the Gneisenau for the remainder of the war. Their Channel dash had been threatened, but not seriously impeded from the air.
Pilot Officer John Checketts, RNZAF, who went to Britain in September 1941 and was posted to a Hurricane Training Unit at Sutton Bridge, has memories of the brave but largely futile attacks made from the air:
‘Halfway through the course we were hastened to finish the training and we did so in a matter of three weeks. We were posted at the completion of the training to various squadrons throughout England. My posting was to Royal Air Force Squadron 485, which was manned by New Zealanders operating from Kenley, south of London.
An interesting battle during this first period on operations was the escape in February 1942 of the German ships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen from Brest through the English Channel to their home ports in Germany. The weather was extremely bad with snow, hail, rain, wind and fog. The Germans successfully evaded detection until they were seen by Group Captain Victor Beamish. They escaped detection until that time by virtue of a series of misadventures by the British intercepting people. The submarine which was to keep a guard on the Port of Brest had to go out to recharge its batteries in the evening, and the radar stations were successfully jammed by the Germans until quite late on the morning of the operation. Victor Beamish obeyed the rules and did not speak to warn the British organisations, but flew home and landed first, which let the Germans get up almost to Boulogne before any attempt was made to do anything about it.
John Milne Checketts
The British coastal guns had so far fired on the vessels without success, and I cannot remember the exact times, but it was round midday. The cloud base was 300 feet, the Navy sent up six Swordfish armed with torpedoes out to attack these vessels, and they were all shot down by the Germans without success. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
We were sent out into the area where these vessels were and made contact with them off Ostend, but we could do very little against them. We destroyed some German aircraft and attacked E-boats – successfully, I might say – and were applauded for our action. However, it was of little consequence as far as the vessels themselves were concerned. I was impressed with their size and their speed; they were immense ships and the British were caught wrong-footed and had little that they could put against the ships. There were mess-ups with torpedoes and torpedo-carrying aircraft, and bomber aircraft had little chance to bomb from such low level. The only success against them were actions by aircraft which had laid mines ahead of the ships. Scharnhorst was mined and lay idle for nearly half an hour, but was not intercepted. The British destroyers were severely handled by the Germans and the torpedo-bombers were not effective; it was a convincing victory for the German Navy and a sad day for Britain.’
Following upon the German offensive against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Arctic became the main route for the despatch of supplies to Russia, Britain’s new ally. The first convoy sailed in September 1941. By May 1942, with almost perpetual daylight and the rapid build-up of German naval and air strength in northern Norway, the convoy route had become very hazardous indeed. Not least was the risk from major units of the German Navy, including the battleship Tirpitz, attacking the convoys at a time when British capital ships could not be exposed to the overwhelming German air superiority in the region.
Lieutenant Commander Roger Hill, RN, in command of the ‘Hunt’ Class destroyer HMS Ledbury, was involved in some of the Russian convoys:
‘Our first Russian convoy was PQ15, which sailed from Iceland on 24 April 1942, and our job on this was to screen the tanker – I can’t remember the name – and we went and lay in a position called “Y”, so if there was a Fleet action and the destroyers needed fuel they would come there and fuel from the tanker, or the ones going to Russia would come and the ones coming back from Russia also. So we made a rectangle which was labelled “AUNTY”, and we just steamed round this to keep the tanker moving all the time, as it would be very easy for the Germans just to send a U-boat to pick her off. The whole Home Fleet came by – the battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers – a most tremendous sight. We had a system of identification where you had to signal certain letters. The battleship Duke of York signalled the wrong letter and later on in Scapa I was sent for by the Commander-in-Chief. The Captain of this huge ship, which seemed absolutely colossal to me, with its great big guns and enormous quarter-deck, said, “Oh we had a bit of a mix-up over the recognition, didn’t we?”
Roger Hill, Commanding Officer of HMS Ledbury, on his bridge.
I said, “That’s all right, sir, I knew you would know I wasn’t going to open fire,” and I thought he was going to choke, going to have apoplexy.
Then we went on another one, PQ 16, and then we came to 17, when for the first time we were in the close escort of the convoy. By this time (we know now) the enemy main code had been broken and the Admiralty would intercept the German signal when they ordered the Tirpitz to sail, if she was going to attack the convoy. She was lying in the fjords in the north of Norway and we never got this signal. However, Admiral Dudley Pound, who was the Head of the Navy, he got this fixed idea that the Tirpitz was coming out to attack us.
We had a mother and a father of an air attack; about 50 or 60 torpedo-bombers came scarcely over the top of the sea right over the top of the convoy. We shot one down, which was great, and I thought that they had made a brave attack, lots of ships firing at them, so I picked up the chaps we had shot down, despite the pom-pom’s crew saying, “Come on, sir, one short burst, one short burst.”
I said, “You can’t do that – you’d be had up for war crimes.”
Anyway, we picked them up and they were quite nice chaps and after this I know we were all very cheerful – only one ship had been torpedoed – and suddenly the Yeoman of Signals said to me, “My God, sir, the signalman in the Commodore’s ship has made a balls.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “They’ve got the signal up to scatter!”
So I said, “Oh Christ,” and it wasn’t the signalman. They had got the signal from the Admiralty: “You are about to be attacked by a vastly superior surface force – your duty is to avoid destruction and pick up survivors.” I’ve never known the Navy to