Originally posted by Tobias:
Could you tell me your source for this unusual accentuation of the events? I am especially wondering why the Scharnhorst, at sea for some 24 hours, had been at GQ for nearly two days?
Tobias,
You're absolutely correct,
Scharnhorst had only been at sea a little under 24 hours and nothing like the two days I posted about. And it was
Duke of York and not
King George V. Let me plead a slip of the keyboard and several million misfiring neurons too.
Of course whether it was 24 or 48 hours and
DoY or
KGV is of no consequence whatsoever to my orignal assertion; Before the sortie was even over, the crew aboard
Scharnhorst was exhausted and the ship's command made several odd decisions that can be attributed to fatigue. Consider the following:
1 -
Scharnhorst managed to lose contact with their own 4th Destroyer Flotilla early on, never made any real effort to regain contact, and eventually simply ordered the flotilla to return to base.
2 - After ineffectually tangling with the convoy escorts twice,
Scharnhorst began her return to Norway apparently unware that the three British CAs of Force I;
Belfast,
Norfolk, and
Sheffield were trailing her at only ~8 nm. This went on for over three hours.
3 - The D/F gear aboard
Scharnhorst picked up signals from both Force I and Force II;
Duke of York and
Jamaica, yet no changes in course or speed occurred. KM stations ashore reported the same contacts to
Scharnhorst, had those reports acknowledged and, again, no changes in course or speed were made. Mark that, no changes were made even though speed was
Scharnhorst's hole card.
4 - The aft radar installation aboard
Scharnhorst somehow did not pick up the approach of Force II. This allowed the British battleship to approach within
visual range before firing.
5 - When he felt that he could no longer wait to begin shooting, Fraser, the RN admiral in charge of Force II, ordered
Belfast to illuminate
Scharnhorst with starshells. Every British observer was shocked to see that the German battlecruiser was steaming on a straight course with her main batteries trained fore and aft.
Scharnhorst was caught napping because her crew and officers were too tired to do any better. The few survivors picked up after the sinking say as much.
IF the crew had been in better condition,
Scharnhorst should have easily slipped the British net. She was over three knots faster than
DoY, the RN CAs couldn't close on her without risking themselves, and the sea conditions meant that RN destroyers couldn't match her speed.
IF the lookouts had be alert,
IF the crew had paid attention to their own D/F gear,
IF the crew had paid attention to their own radar,
IF the crew had paid attention to the warnings from their shore stations
Scharnhorst could have showed the British her heels and steamed easily back to Altafjord.
Yet, despite all that
Scharnhorst nearly got away. The shock of finding themselves under the guns of the
DoY must have cleared the cobwebs quickly. The German battlecruiser did what she should have done hours earlier when her D/F gear picked up the RN radio signals, she change course and increased speed to slightly over 30 knots. She got smacked around some, but nothing slowed her until
DoY's last salvo fired at extreme range under radar control. She lost a boiler room and her speed dropped allowing the British to catch her.
It was a near run thing. Until they noticed her speed decrease on radar, the British had ceased firing and Fraser had even wired home that he had no hope of catching her and was going to support the convoy instead.
There's the
http://www.scharnhorst-class.dk/ website for those who are interested. I've a few books dealing with the Battle of North Cape, I guess
Death of the Scharnhorst by John Winton, Sterling Publishing, March, 2001 can fill in most of them.
We now have two choices to explain the odd actions of the
Scharnhorst. Either they were:
A) Exhausted from over 8 hours at GQ and half of that in combat - from ~0930 when
Belfast fired on them near the convoy to ~1650 when
DoY caught them with their pants down.
or
B) Stupid.
I prefer to think that they were exhausted.
Anyway, all my fact dumping in theis post really adds nothing to the topic under discussion.
Watches Wear You Out. Period.
Have fun,
Bill
(This post was edited because I am a total
JACKASS)
