The Channel Dash (Operation Cerberus)

Late on the evening of 11 February 1942, at around 10.45 p.m. German time, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escorted by six destroyers, put out of the port of Brest in Brittany. The squadron was commanded by Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax, who flew his flag in Scharnhorst. Instead of going round the British Isles to the north, the ships took the shortest route: through the English Channel and the Strait of Dover, in broad daylight, a few dozen kilometres off the English coast. The Germans called the undertaking Operation Cerberus (Unternehmen Zerberus); the British called it the Channel Dash.

The British did not detect the squadron until late on the morning of 12 February, as it was approaching Dover. The attacks by aircraft, motor torpedo boats, destroyers and coastal batteries were late, uncoordinated and did not score a single hit. On the morning of 13 February Scharnhorst reached Wilhelmshaven, while Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen put into Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Elbe, from where they went on to Kiel. Wilhelmshaven was thus the destination of only one of the three ships. The only serious damage inflicted on the Germans came from mines laid earlier by British aircraft.

Ships trapped in Brest

Brest, captured by the Germans in June 1940, was meant to be a forward base for cruiser warfare in the Atlantic. On 22 March 1941 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau put in there after a two-month raid in which they had sunk or captured 22 ships. Further sorties were planned, and the commander of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, hoped that a powerful squadron would soon sail from Brest and, together with Bismarck, paralyse the convoys.

Things turned out otherwise. Brest lay within range of British bombers, and RAF Bomber Command made the ships one of its main targets. On 6 April 1941 a Bristol Beaufort torpedo bomber hit Gneisenau in the harbour, and a few days later the ship took four more bombs in dock. Scharnhorst, meanwhile, was undergoing a lengthy boiler overhaul. As a result neither could take part in Operation Rheinübung, which ended in May with the sinking of Bismarck. Prinz Eugen, detached from the battleship before her last battle, reached Brest on 1 June 1941 and was likewise stuck in port. In July bombs hit both her and Scharnhorst, which had been moved briefly to La Pallice. By the end of 1941 the RAF had dropped thousands of tons of bombs on the ships and the port. Later raids produced only occasional light hits, but the ships spent most of their time under repair, and their crews could not train at sea.

After the loss of Bismarck, Adolf Hitler reserved to himself the approval of every sortie by heavy ships. In the autumn of 1941 he also grew increasingly afraid of a British landing in Norway. The Vågsøy raid in December strengthened that conviction; he reportedly called Norway the “zone of destiny” in this war. He concluded that the ships at Brest were more needed in Norwegian waters, where the battleship Tirpitz already lay, than in a French port where sooner or later they would be destroyed from the air.

Hitler’s decision

The naval command preferred the route round the British Isles through the Denmark Strait, and Raeder considered a passage through the Channel impracticable. Hitler thought otherwise. At a conference at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on 12 January 1942 Ciliax presented the plan: the ships would leave Brest at night, so as to remain undetected for as long as possible, and pass the narrowest point of the Channel, the Strait of Dover, by day under fighter cover. The British, he believed, would rather expect the reverse: a passage of the strait under cover of darkness. According to the German record of the conference, Hitler compared the situation of the ships at Brest to that of a cancer patient who is doomed without an operation, whereas an operation, however drastic, at least offers hope; the passage through the Channel was to be that operation. Raeder agreed to the plan on condition that the final decision be taken by Hitler himself, and so it was.

Preparations were carried out in secret. For several weeks five minesweeping flotillas cleared a channel by night through the Channel and the southern North Sea and marked it with buoys. Destroyers were moved to Brest, and torpedo boats and E-boats were assembled in the Channel ports. Rumours of a voyage to the South Atlantic were spread in the town, and tropical helmets were ostentatiously loaded onto the ships. The ships were to sail four days before the new moon, so that the night would be as dark as possible.

Air cover, code-named Donnerkeil (“Thunderbolt”), was prepared by the new General of Fighters, Colonel Adolf Galland. The Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, Hans Jeschonnek, was unwilling to guarantee success or to reinforce the fighters in the west, so Galland, together with the staff of Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, gathered some 250 fighters from JG 1, JG 2 and JG 26 and from flying schools. At least 16 aircraft were to circle over the ships at all times, some of them low over the water, beneath the British radar beams. Reliefs arrived every half hour, and in practice even earlier, so that at times there were twice as many over the squadron. A Luftwaffe liaison officer sailed aboard Scharnhorst. General Wolfgang Martini, who was responsible for signals, had for several days been gradually intensifying the jamming of British coastal radar, so that the operators would put the interference down to atmospheric conditions.

The Fuller plan and a chain of failures

The British were not caught entirely by surprise. Since April 1941 there had been a joint navy and RAF plan, code-named Fuller, for the event of the Brest ships making a dash up the Channel. It was the responsibility of the Flag Officer Dover, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay. Messages enciphered on the Enigma machine and read at Bletchley Park, aerial photographs and agents’ reports showed that the Germans were sweeping a route through the Channel and bringing destroyers to Brest. On 2 February the Admiralty assessed that the ships would attempt the Channel passage, and the head of RAF Coastal Command, Air Chief Marshal Philip Joubert de la Ferté, warned that it could happen at any time after 10 February.

The plan, however, assumed that the Germans would leave Brest by day and pass through the strait at night. The forces assigned to stop them were modest. The main ships of the Home Fleet lay at Scapa Flow, watching Tirpitz. Ramsay had motor torpedo boats at Dover and Ramsgate and six Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers of No. 825 Squadron of the Fleet Air Arm, moved to Manston in Kent. The squadron was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, the same man who in May 1941 had led the Swordfish attack on Bismarck from the carrier Victorious. On the east coast six old destroyers from Harwich and Sheerness stood ready. Most of Coastal Command’s Beauforts had been sent to the Middle East, and the rest were scattered across airfields from Cornwall to Scotland. Bomber Command, without the Admiralty’s knowledge, had stood down half the bombers assigned to the plan.

On the evening of 11 February a British air raid on Brest delayed the German departure but detected nothing. The British submarine HMS Sealion, which had been watching the harbour exit, had left a few hours earlier to recharge her batteries. A French agent was unable to send his report because of German jamming. A Hudson patrol aircraft with ship-detecting radar circling off Brest saw nothing, and on the second patrol line, between Ushant (PL) and the Breton coast, the aircraft returned to base with a radar fault and no replacement was sent. The third patrol, between Cherbourg and Boulogne, was called off before dawn because fog was forecast over the airfields. The German squadron thus steamed through the whole night and for several hours after dawn at nearly 30 knots, undetected.

12 February: through the strait

In the morning further flotillas of torpedo boats and E-boats joined the squadron, and fighters appeared over the ships. From the morning British radar registered circling aircraft and heavy jamming, but for a long time nobody put these signals together. At around 10.40 a.m. British time two experienced fighter pilots from Kenley, Victor Beamish and Finlay Boyd, who had gone hunting over the French coast, came across the great ships surrounded by destroyers and E-boats by chance. As they were keeping radio silence, they did not report it until they had landed. Only at around 11.25 a.m. was it announced that the German squadron was entering the Strait of Dover.

At 12.19 p.m. the guns of the South Foreland coastal battery near Dover opened fire. With visibility of a few miles they aimed by radar, which showed the ships but not the shell splashes. Thirty-three 9.2-inch (234 mm) shells were fired, and all missed; according to German sources the ships had by then passed the closest point and the shells were falling well astern. Five motor torpedo boats from Dover were unable to break through the screen of German E-boats and fired their torpedoes from long range, to no effect.

At around 12.20 p.m. Esmonde’s six Swordfish took off from Manston. Of the fighter squadrons that were to escort them, only one, No. 72 Squadron RAF, turned up in time, and it was soon tied up in combat with German Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Focke-Wulf Fw 190s. The slow biplanes, flying low over the water, went in alone, through a barrage of fire from the destroyers and attacking fighters. Esmonde’s aircraft, already damaged, was shot down before it could drop its torpedo. The other two of the first flight released their torpedoes and ditched, while the second flight disappeared into cloud and smoke and did not return. All the torpedoes missed. Of the eighteen airmen, five survived. Esmonde was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, gazetted on 3 March 1942. Ramsay later wrote that the attack of the six Swordfish was one of the finest examples of self-sacrifice in the war, and on the German side too the courage of crews flying to certain death was remembered.

Afternoon and night

At 2.31 p.m. British time, off the mouth of the Scheldt, Scharnhorst struck a mine and stopped. Ciliax transferred with his staff to a destroyer, and the other ships carried on. In the low cloud British aircraft failed to find the immobilised battleship; after about half an hour she got under way again at around 25 knots. Scharnhorst’s navigator recalled after the war those minutes without way as the worst moments of the whole operation.

Further attacks followed in the afternoon. Beauforts from various airfields arrived singly or in small groups. Some of them failed to receive their orders because these were sent by voice on a frequency to which one of the groups was not listening; others circled over Manston waiting for fighters, which in turn were waiting for them. The torpedoes eventually dropped by a dozen or so aircraft missed. Bomber Command sent three waves, 242 bombers in all, but with cloud down to 200 metres only 39 crews saw the ships long enough to drop their bombs at all; none hit, and 15 bombers failed to return. Captain Charles Pizey’s five old destroyers, which took a short cut through a German minefield, attacked at around 3.45 p.m. British time from a range of 3–4 kilometres. The torpedoes again missed, and HMS Worcester, hit by Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, was badly damaged and lost several dozen men.

In the evening, near the island of Terschelling, Gneisenau struck a mine but was able to continue after half an hour. Later, in the same area, Scharnhorst struck a second mine: both engine rooms stopped, the ship took on about a thousand tons of water and limped into Wilhelmshaven on the morning of 13 February. Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen reached Brunsbüttel and then went through the Kiel Canal to Kiel. The mines that stopped Scharnhorst and damaged Gneisenau had been laid in the preceding days by Bomber Command along the route identified from Enigma messages. The British learned of this from further decrypted messages but kept it secret so as not to betray the source.

Losses

According to figures cited by British historians, the RAF flew some 675 sorties that day (398 by fighters, 242 by bombers and 35 by Coastal Command aircraft) and lost around 40 aircraft, not counting the Fleet Air Arm Swordfish. Aboard Worcester 27 sailors were killed or died of wounds. The Germans lost, according to various sources, between 17 and 22 aircraft and a small patrol vessel, while several torpedo boats and destroyers were lightly damaged. On the large ships there were practically no casualties from enemy fire.

Humiliation and inquiry

In Britain the news was received with indignation, all the more so because it came in the week when Singapore was collapsing. The Times wrote in a leading article that Vice Admiral Ciliax “has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia failed” – the commander of the Spanish Armada of 1588 – and that nothing more mortifying to the pride of British sea power had happened since the seventeenth century. Winston Churchill set up a board of inquiry chaired by Mr Justice Alfred Bucknill. Its report blamed Coastal Command above all for failing to order a dawn reconnaissance when the night patrols had failed, and criticised the disregard of the radar jamming and the use of Bomber Command for tasks for which it was not trained. The report was kept secret until 1946; some historians regard it as lenient, since it put the blame on equipment failures rather than on poor organisation. What it chiefly exposed was the lack of unified command: the navy and Coastal, Bomber and Fighter Commands each acted separately, without common communications.

A tactical victory, a strategic retreat

For the Germans the operation was a display of efficient cooperation between navy and air force of a kind the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe rarely achieved afterwards. The Kriegsmarine itself, however, judged it a tactical victory and a strategic defeat. The British official historian Stephen Roskill later agreed with the Germans: Hitler had exchanged a real threat to the Atlantic convoys for the defence of Norway against a landing that never came. Once the heavy ships had left Brest, only U-boats sailed from France into the Atlantic.

The consequences were soon evident. On the night of 26–27 February 1942 British bombs hit Gneisenau in dock at Kiel; a magazine explosion wrecked her forward turret. The battleship never went to sea again, and the reconstruction that was begun was abandoned. On 23 February a British submarine torpedoed Prinz Eugen off the Norwegian coast; after repairs the cruiser fought only in the Baltic. Scharnhorst, after several months of repairs, moved to Norway in 1943 and was sunk on 26 December 1943 in the Battle of the North Cape while trying to attack an Arctic convoy. At the end of March 1942 British commandos in the St Nazaire raid destroyed the only dry dock on the French coast capable of taking Tirpitz, which made a return of German heavy ships to the Atlantic still more remote.

For the Germans, then, the Channel Dash was a spectacular rescue of three ships that faced slow destruction at Brest; for the British it was a painful lesson. It showed how little isolated air attacks on a heavily escorted squadron achieved, and how badly Britain lacked modern torpedo aircraft and cooperation between the services. For the course of the war in the Atlantic, however, what mattered more was that the German surface fleet had withdrawn from that ocean for good.