The German Empire had suffered a bitter defeat at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, with tremendous war reparations and obvious limitations to its martial culture. The Reichsmarine, after the self-sinking of the best of its surface fleet at Scapa Flow, could only keep a handful of obsolete ships, and the new ones were not to exceed ten thousand tons of displacement.
With Hitler's rise to power they began to design ships with a greater displacement. On January 25, 1934, the construction of one with a possible projection of a fast battleship was commissioned, following in the wake of the French Dunkerque class, which would later be named Scharnhorst, named after a well-known Prussian general from the Napoleonic era. .
Initially, the Germans indicated to the British that it would be a new Deutschland-class pocket battleship, although after the 1935 Naval Pact, signed with them, it was assigned a displacement of 26,000 tons and a speed of 27 knots, figures that they weren't real either. The approximately 143 million Reichsmark that she cost was to pay off years later.
The hull was launched on October 3, 1936. In the fateful year of 1939 the ship was commissioned and conducted its first sea trials. The Second World War had not yet broken out, but the political horizon predicted the worst.
The Third Reich's revamped high-seas fleet, called the Kriegsmarine, was under development, and Scharnhorst was one of its spearheads (along with her sister ship, Gneisenau). The new design had a length of 235.4 meters and a maximum displacement of 37,822 tons, armed with nine 28 cm diameter SK C/34 guns as the main threat in three triple turrets and a further twelve 15 cm diameter guns, plus fourteen 10.5 cm as a secondary deterrent, combined with six torpedo tubes, three Arado Ar 196 seaplanes and twenty-six anti-aircraft guns.
Adding an armored waist between 330 mm and 170 mm, depending on the areas, and a maximum speed of 31.65 knots, the naval concept was closer to the figure of the so-called battlecruiser than to that of the typical battleship, since its heavy artillery ( At first, 38.1 cm guns were thought of, but the time of their manufacture discouraged it, and, in addition, they had a lower rate of fire), it was not usual in this type of capital ship, as was its high speed with its thrown bow, although it was, yes, very well protected.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, on September 4, 1939, our protagonist received a dangerous visit from British RAF bombers in the Kiel Canal, although he was not hit. Continuing with the fire tests and training of him, he began to carry out war sorties, and in one of them he sank, by cannon, HMS Rawalpindi, a British armed freighter, accompanied by the Gneisenau. The British Home Fleet was beginning to learn about the danger of this type of ship, and plans to catch it, before a superior force, were already entering their thoughts.
In April 1940, Hitler decreed Operation Weserübung, the occupation of Norway and Denmark. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were ordered to act as long escorts, and to this end they sailed under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens. The German threat was detected by British reconnaissance, and both leviathans engaged in a gun duel with the battlecruiser HMS Renow on 9 April, to no avail.
A month later, goddess luck allied with the Germans, because, on a patrol through the Norwegian Sea, they located a small British group of two destroyers (HMS Acasta and Ardent) and the aircraft carrier HMS Glorius, some 26,000 meters away. distance. They immediately brought Scharnhorst to readiness and fired on the surprised carrier with her main artillery, while their secondary aimed at the destroyers.
Repeatedly hit and burning like a torch, Glorius disappeared in the cold waters, but Scharnhorst took a torpedo hit from Acasta that ripped a hole 12 meters x 4 meters (embarking around 2,500 tons of water). Worst of all were her casualties, forty-eight dead and three wounded, though, to tell the truth, they were very light compared with the 1,519 British dead that day.
Shortly after, while undergoing repairs in Trondheim, British planes hit her with a bomb, albeit with minor damage, and she was able to sail to their shores at the end of June 1940.
In the following months he moved to the Baltic, and in January 1941, together with his inseparable Gneisenau, they began Operation Berlin, the entry of both ships into the Atlantic Ocean with the aim of preying on Allied convoys. These companies, very dangerous due to the British numerical and geographical superiority, were carried out through the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland, providing logistical support with oil tankers or submarines, and, very importantly, avoiding any combat with dangerous surface forces.
This raid was a true success, for at its conclusion, on March 22, 1941, the two German ships sailed a total of 17,800 miles and sank or captured twenty-two ships, after sixty-one days at sea. The Scharnhorst was responsible for eight of those sinkings.
The docking port was Brest, in French Brittany, and, although the exit to the Atlantic was clear from there, the proximity to the British Isles made them suffer numerous aircraft attacks, almost always at night. The lottery of the bombs reached the Gneisenau. Before the arrival of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, and after the sinking of the famous Bismarck a few days before, the Kriegsmarine accumulated too many important ships in that port and they feared a massive attack on them.
The first chosen to move was the Scharnhorst. They chose the French port of La Pallice, further away and more defended than the previous one. However, in that place it was hit on July 24, 1941 by five bombs that caused the death of two sailors and fifteen injured, plus a considerable flooding of the hull (about 3,000 tons) and a severe list of 8º.
This bombardment was clear proof that La Pallice was not safe either. As a result, the German commanders devised an incredible escape through Operation Cerberus, in February 1942. The plan basically consisted of crossing the English Channel in broad daylight with the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau and the Prinz Eugen. at full speed, to then head to German ports, with hardly any escort. An apparent suicide that was not consummated due to the surprise achieved, the British air and surface inefficiency and some chance.
The success was not complete, because the Scharnhorst collided twice with magnetic mines (once the Gneisenau), which were close to causing the disaster and kept it under repair for several months, together with its fallible propulsion equipment, in the waters of the Baltic Sea. , more secure in case of attack.
In any case, it was already 1943 and the war was turning in favor of the allies. The Anglo convoys supplying the Soviet Union were then the target of the repaired Scharnhorst. Up to two times they attempted the passage to Norwegian waters, but, detected, they canceled the process. On the third time, taking advantage of the bad weather, they succeeded, and by March of that year, her silhouette, together with that of the battleship Tirpitz, dominated those icy and calm waters.
An event altered the life of the Scharnhorst, when an explosion occurred in section III of its armored deck, which caused seventeen deaths and twenty injuries among the crew. Many spoke of sabotage.
In September, the Scharnhorst concluded the so-called Operation Sizilien, the destruction of the meteorological base on the island of Spitsbergen next to the Tirpitz. It was a new reminder of the potential threat of those ships for the allies, so they developed a daring attack with midget submarines on the German base, which immobilized the Tirpitz for months, but did not find the Scharnhorst, the ghost of the north.
Until then, the elusive ship had had a long history of actions, some humiliating for the British, and had been a constant maritime nightmare for them, who kept looking for a way to sink it for good.
On December 22, 1943, a German reconnaissance flight detected convoy JW-55B with nineteen merchantmen, ten destroyers, two corvettes, and one minesweeper. Scharnhorst and five destroyers, with Rear Admiral Erich Bey in command, gave chase.
He was heading towards a trap, since, at some distance, a strong escort was outlined with the heavy cruiser HMS Norfolk, along with the light cruisers HMS Belfast, HMS Sheffield and HMS Jamaica, plus the battleship HMS Duke of York, commanded by Admiral Fraser.
On the morning of the 26th, Bey ordered his units to disperse to locate the convoy in arctic waters, with poor visibility. Scharnhorst was sailing solo when, at 09:21, she was illuminated by the British cruisers and fired upon. She was hit twice with eight-inch shells.
About three hours later, and with sporadic fire from both sides, Bey decided to withdraw towards his base, sending the order to his destroyers to attack the convoy. His course was decisively cut off by Duke of York, which fired her salutes at him (14-inch guns) from about 11,000 meters and using radar quite accurately.
It would have been approximately 18:24 when the Scharnhorst, despite the hits received, which disabled its A and B turrets, continued firing. It looked like she might slip away again at her increased speed, but a final salvo from her main enemy hit boiler room no 1 and brought her speed down to ten knots.
The Scharnhorst was doomed, and, for many minutes, was repeatedly hit by projectiles of all kinds and eleven torpedoes until, at 7:45 p.m., a gigantic explosion made the ship disappear in the smoke and put an end to the naval battle. called after North Cape. Of the almost two thousand crew members of it, only thirty-six were saved. For the Kriegsmarine it meant the disappearance of its most successful surface unit.
