An epic account of how the Royal Navy tracked down, cornered, and sank one of the most fearsome German warships of the Second World War.
The Scharnhorst was a state of the art capital ship of Nazi Germany's navy. Launched in 1936 she had terrorized Allied shipping since the beginning of the war, famously destroying the aircraft destroyer HMS Glorious in June 1940. Since then she had made numerous sorties into the Atlantic to raid British merchant fleets and had evaded destruction in the Channel Dash of 1942 in order to interrupt convoys to the Soviet Union.
The danger posed by the Scharnhorst to the Arctic convoys was monumental. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, devised a plan to lure their enemy from its Norwegian base and pound it with shells from the battleship HMS Duke of York and supporting cruisers and destroyers.
John Winton's comprehensively researched book, drawing on British and German eyewitness accounts, uncovers how the threat of the Scharnhorst was eventually brought to an end at the Battle of the North Cape in the freezing conditions of the Barents Sea.
The engrossing but tragic history of the Royal Navy's worst loss of World War Two.
Ideal for fans of Jonathan Dimbleby, Max Hastings, and Craig L. Symonds.
On 8th June 1940, the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two destroyer escorts HMS Ardent and Acasta were sighted by the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst and her sister ship Gneisenau. In a brutal gun battle that lasted over an hour, all British ships were sunk and more than 1500 men lost their lives.
Why had Glorious left the main troop convoy to proceed independently? Why was she so lightly protected? Why did British Intelligence give no warning that the German battlecruisers were close by? And why were the survivors left in freezing Arctic waters for three days before being picked up?
Official documents do not answer these questions and so John Winton has drawn testimonies from men who served on Glorious in the pre-war days as well as her very few survivors to understand how this ship functioned both before and during the war, what happened on that fateful day, and why is there still so much secrecy surrounding this heart-rending event.
An engrossing history of the last major naval battle in World War Two's Pacific War.
In the late hours of 15th May 1945, the radar operator aboard the destroyer Venus identified a spot of light on his screen. Captain Power was in no doubt that this was the heavy cruiser, Haguro, that they had been searching for, but how could he stop this formidable enemy ship as it steamed hard for Singapore? A trap of torpedo and naval artillery was set by the 26th Destroyer Flotilla, there was no escape for the Haguro.
Drawing upon ships action narratives, message files, diaries, photographs and the memories of the officers and men of the Destroyer crews, the aircrews of Avenger, Liberators and Catalinas, from submarine captains, and from one of the Haguro's own officers has allowed the author to provide thorough insight into the last major open sea battle of the Second World War.
John Winton uncovers what it was like for these men in the weeks and months prior to that fateful night, how the Royal Navy had been searching for Japanese ships in the Far East and why vital inceptions from ULTRA and the code-breaking specialists was so essential to helping the Allied navy.
