The Channel Dash, 1942: three German warships through the Strait of Dover

No enemy fleet had sailed up the English Channel in defiance of the Royal Navy since the age of sail. In February 1942 three German capital ships did it in broad daylight, and the British discovered them only when they were already far up the Channel. The Times compared the German admiral to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had failed with the Armada where he succeeded.²

Who won the Channel Dash and why?

Germany won the battle and lost the campaign. All three ships reached home waters, and the British, who found them only after they had been twelve hours at sea, failed to score a single hit with aircraft, torpedoes or guns. Surprise, careful planning and strong fighter cover carried the Germans through, but back in Germany the ships no longer threatened the Atlantic convoys.³

Background: ships trapped at Brest

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had put into Brest after raiding the Atlantic convoys in 1941, and Prinz Eugen joined them after the hunt for the Bismarck. From Brest they threatened every Atlantic convoy, but the port was within easy reach of RAF bombers, and the ships were hit again and again; the photograph above shows Halifax bombers over the docks in December 1941.⁴

Hitler wanted them home. He was convinced that the British meant to invade Norway, and at the turn of the year he decided that the Brest squadron must return to Germany, by a surprise break through the Channel if possible. The plan was to leave Brest after dark, which meant accepting that the ships would pass the Strait of Dover in daylight.⁵

The decision was taken at a conference with Hitler on 12 January 1942. Raeder, who would not himself advocate so risky a breakthrough, laid the plans before him, and Hitler accepted them: at Brest the ships would be hit by bombs day after day. He compared the Brest squadron to a patient with cancer who is doomed unless he submits to an operation, and said that the passage up the Channel would be that operation.⁶

Armies and commanders

Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax, flying his flag in the Scharnhorst, planned the operation in detail. Minesweepers cleared and buoyed a route up the Channel. Six destroyers were to escort the big ships at first, torpedo boats would join them the next morning, and more torpedo boats, E-boats and small craft would meet them off Cape Gris Nez. Overhead, the Luftwaffe under Adolf Galland was to keep fighters over the squadron throughout the daylight hours, at full strength during the passage of the Strait.⁷

Ciliax chose his moment with care. He timed the sailing for four nights before the new moon, to give the ships a long first stretch of darkness, with a flood tide running up the Channel to speed them and to lessen the danger from mines. The Luftwaffe was to keep sixteen fighters over the squadron at all times in daylight, and Richards adds that Ciliax asked for the British radar stations in the Strait to be jammed; Roskill notes the jamming that began on the morning of the 12th.⁸

The British were not surprised in principle. On 2 February the Admiralty circulated an appreciation that judged an up-Channel dash the most likely German move; Roskill calls its description of the force that would make it remarkably prescient. A plan for such a break-out, Operation Fuller, had been drawn up in 1941: motor torpedo boats from Dover and Ramsgate, torpedo bombers, the Dover coastal guns, Bomber Command and destroyers from Harwich would attack in turn. Six Swordfish of 825 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, were moved to Manston in Kent to add to the striking force.⁹

The British plan rested on one assumption. Almost everyone, from the Admiralty to Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay at Dover, expected the Germans to time their passage so as to pass Dover in the dark.¹⁰ › The Dunkirk Evacuation, 1940

The forces waiting in the south were thin, and the British knew it. Churchill told the House of Commons afterward that heavy ships stationed to intercept in the Channel would have faced the same scale of air attack as the German ships at Brest, and would have weakened the guard over the convoys, the northern passages and the Tirpitz; Roskill writes that the Home Fleet was at a low ebb and that only light forces could be spared. Bomber Command was asked to lay magnetic mines in the channels the Germans had swept, and did so in the days before the dash.¹¹

The battle in phases

A night of failures

Ciliax meant to sail at 7:30 p.m. on 11 February, but an RAF raid delayed him; Roskill gives 10:45 p.m., Zimmerman 9:15. By midnight the ships, steaming at 27 knots, had rounded Ushant and turned up-Channel. The British patrols that should have seen them failed one after another. A Hudson watching Brest returned with radar failure and was late back on station; a second, on the patrol line from Ushant toward the Île de Bréhat, also lost its radar and went home unrelieved. Roskill says the third patrol, off Le Havre, flew normally but the squadron never came within its range; Zimmerman says it was called home early by fog. The submarine Sealion, watching the port, had drawn off to recharge her batteries.¹²

Even the patrol that was flown properly came close to finding them and did not. Post-war analysis of the German tracks, Roskill and Richards both record, showed that the Hudson patrolling off Brest had the squadron within range of its radar for only a few minutes early on 12 February, and its operator saw nothing that looked like a ship.¹³

Roskill's verdict is plain: the main cause of the British failure was that the German ships were at sea for twelve hours, four of them in daylight, before anyone found them.¹⁴

Seen at last

Coastal radar plotted a large formation on the morning of 12 February, but the jamming and the plots of German aircraft were not taken for what they were. At 10:42 two Spitfires flying low over the Channel found themselves directly above the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. They did not report until they landed at 11:09; Zimmerman blames Fighter Command's orders to keep radio silence, Roskill the fact that a message from so low could not have got through. By the time the alarm went out, the squadron had passed the Somme and was heading for the Strait.¹⁵

The response was slow and piecemeal. The five serviceable motor torpedo boats at Dover put out at 11:55, could not get past the screen of German E-boats and fired their torpedoes from long range; none hit. The heavy guns at Dover fired by radar into the murk without result.¹⁶

Six Swordfish

The only aircraft ready to strike at once were the six Swordfish at Manston, slow open-cockpit biplanes trained for a night attack and now sent in by day. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, had led the Swordfish from HMS Victorious against the Bismarck the year before. Five squadrons of Spitfires were to escort them, meeting over Manston at 12:25. Only one squadron arrived on time, and Esmonde, told that the rest would be late, would not wait. At 12:28 he set course for the enemy with ten Spitfires.¹⁷

German fighters were among them within ten minutes. In the words of his Victoria Cross citation, Esmonde flew on through the fire of the battle cruisers and their escort, which shattered the port wing of his aircraft, and was shot down almost at once. Two more Swordfish got close enough to drop their torpedoes before they too were shot down; the last three were seen closing in and never seen again. All six were lost, and 13 of the 18 airmen were killed; five were picked up from the sea.¹⁸

The citation, written in March 1942, says that at least one torpedo was believed to have hit the battle cruisers. Roskill, writing with German records in hand, says that none did. Esmonde was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.¹⁹

Beauforts, bombers and destroyers

Through the afternoon the attacks went on in failing weather. Coastal Command's Beaufort torpedo bombers and Hudsons came in by ones and twos; none hit. Of the 242 bombers sent out, Roskill writes, only 39 are believed to have attacked any warship, and none scored a hit. The old destroyers from Harwich made the boldest attack of all, closing through the murk to fire their torpedoes, and HMS Worcester, pressing in closest, was left badly damaged; every torpedo missed.²⁰

Turning point: the mines

The only damage was done by mines, dropped by the RAF in the swept channels before and during the dash. At 2:31 p.m. the Scharnhorst struck one and stopped for a time. That evening, off the Dutch coast, the Gneisenau was mined too, though only lightly, and at 9:34 p.m. a second mine left the Scharnhorst dead in the water, with her engines stopped and some 1,000 tons of water aboard. She limped into Wilhelmshaven in the night; the others reached the Elbe on the morning of 13 February.²¹

Counting the losses

The cost fell almost entirely on the British. All six Swordfish were lost with 13 of their 18 men. Of the 242 bombers that set out, fifteen were lost; Roskill counts seventeen of the 398 fighters sent out lost as well, and Coastal Command lost Beauforts and Hudsons in its scattered attacks. Zimmerman puts the total at 42 aircraft and 40 aircrew dead or missing. The destroyer Worcester, badly damaged, reached harbor under her own steam.²²

The Germans lost no ship. The Scharnhorst took in about 1,000 tons of water from her second mine and limped into Wilhelmshaven; the Gneisenau, more lightly damaged, reached the mouth of the Elbe with the Prinz Eugen at 7 a.m. on 13 February. Churchill told the Commons that both battleships had suffered damage that would keep them out of action for some time.²³

Aftermath

In Britain the escape caused fury. The ships had passed through home waters under the very noses of the navy and the air force, and The Times wrote that nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power had happened in home waters since the seventeenth century.²⁴ › Battle of the Barents Sea, 1942

On 17 February Churchill told the House that he had ordered a secret inquiry into why the ships had not been detected soon after daylight and whether liaison between Coastal Command, the other RAF commands and the Admiralty had been close enough, and he warned that its results might never be published. The board, under Mr Justice Bucknill, found that the main reason for the failure was that the ships were discovered so late, because the night air patrols had broken down and no morning reconnaissance was flown.²⁵

Churchill also put the best face on the loss. In the opinion of the Admiralty, he told the House, with which he cordially agreed, the German abandonment of Brest was decidedly beneficial: the threat to the convoy routes was gone, and the bombing effort spent on Brest could now be turned against Germany. Roskill, writing after the war, agrees that this was Britain's gain.²⁶

Roskill's own judgment, in the official history, is that the late discovery forced the British into piecemeal attacks against powerful defenses, and that there had been no single command to direct all the sea and air forces once the Germans moved.²⁷

Legacy and memory

The German naval staff itself summed up Cerberus as a tactical victory but a strategic defeat, and Roskill and later writers agree. From Brest the ships had threatened the Atlantic convoys; back in German waters they were tied to the defense of Norway, and the British no longer had to guard against them on the convoy routes. Roskill also credits the Germans with a plan well conceived and carried out with skill and determination.²⁸

The dash is remembered in Britain above all for the six Swordfish. Esmonde's citation ends with the hope that his courage would live in the traditions of the Royal Navy for many generations, and Roskill writes that there can be few more moving stories in the history of forlorn hopes than the last flight of 825 Squadron.²⁹