Scharnhorst: The Battleship That Sailed into a Trap

26 December 1943, ten to five in the afternoon, off the top of Norway. The sun hasn't come up all day, and it won't for weeks. The most feared warship in the Arctic is hunting a convoy in the dark, and she thinks nobody knows where she is.

They do.

This is the night the hunter became the hunted. Codebreakers who read her orders within hours. A warning from a flying boat that was edited on its way to the admiral. Radar, the lantern that saw in the dark. A shell that flew for half a minute and came down in a boiler room. A Norwegian destroyer whose crew were fighting off the coast of their own occupied home. And nearly two thousand men, who had had Christmas decorations up the day before.

0:00 26 December 1943, ten to five
0:51 The convoys to Russia
1:36 Christmas Day
2:07 Admiral Bey sails
2:57 The trap is set
4:01 Found in the dark
4:42 The warning that never arrived
5:13 Noon: the only light of the day
5:58 The trap springs
6:38 The chase
8:24 The end of the Scharnhorst
9:22 Thirty-six
9:55 Where she lies

When I quote the people who were there, those are their own words, as they were reported: Admiral Bruce Fraser's, from his despatch and his words to his officers that night; Admiral Erich Bey's last signal; Captain Fritz Hintze's order to his men, as his survivors remembered it. Everything else is mine.

If you want to stand where it was decided, Belfast is still afloat on the Thames in London. You can stand on her deck.

Next time: an emperor starts digging a canal through Greece. Somebody else finishes the job, eighteen hundred years later.

I'll keep the lantern lit.
Vera