Scharnhorst

Scharnhorst was ordered as Ersatz Elsass, a replacement for the old pre-dreadnought Elsass, under the contract name "D", and the Kriegsmarinewerft at Wilhelmshaven took the work. She was launched on 3 October 1936 before Hitler, War Minister Werner von Blomberg and the widow of Kapitän zur See Schultz, who had commanded the armoured cruiser Scharnhorst sunk at the Falkland Islands in 1914. Fitting-out ran to January 1939, and she commissioned on 9 January for sea trials.

Those trials found a dangerous tendency to ship large amounts of water in a seaway, flooding the bow and damaging electrical systems in the forward Anton turret. She went back to the yard for extensive rebuilding: the original straight stem was replaced with a raised "Atlantic bow", a raked funnel cap fitted, the hangar enlarged and the mainmast moved further aft. The work finished in November 1939, and only then was she fully operational. Her first commander was Kapitän zur See Otto Ciliax, who went on sick leave that September.

She displaced 32,100 long tons standard and 38,100 at full load, ran 234.9 m overall on a 30 m beam, and was driven by three Brown, Boveri geared steam turbines developing 159,551 shaft horsepower for 31.5 knots on trials. Her main battery was nine 28 cm L/54.5 guns in three triple turrets — Anton and Bruno superfiring forward, Caesar aft. The design allowed for replacement by six 15-inch guns in twin turrets; that up-gunning was never carried out, and she fought her whole war with eleven-inch guns.

Secondary armament was twelve 15 cm guns, eight in twin turrets and four in single mounts, with fourteen 10.5 cm heavy anti-aircraft guns directed by four stabilised SL-6 director posts. Light flak began at sixteen 3.7 cm and ten 2 cm weapons, the 2 cm eventually rising to thirty-eight. Two triple 53.3 cm torpedo tubes, taken from the light cruiser Nürnberg, were added in 1941.

Her armoured belt was 320 mm thick over the magazines and machinery, with an armoured deck 20 to 40 mm on the flat rising to 105 mm on the sloping sides that met the bottom of the belt. Main battery turret faces carried 360 mm and their sides 200 mm; the conning tower had 350 mm sides. It was a heavily protected ship whose weakness lay elsewhere — persistent trouble with boiler superheater tubes dogged her from the Atlantic sortie of 1941 through to the end of 1942, when a complete overhaul of her propulsion was required.

Her first operation began on 21 November 1939, when she and her sister Gneisenau went out to attack the Northern Patrol between Iceland and the Faroes and draw British attention away from Admiral Graf Spee. On the 23rd her lookouts sighted the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi at 16:07. She opened fire at 17:03, and three minutes later a salvo of 28 cm shells struck Rawalpindi's bridge, killing Captain Edward Kennedy and most of the officers. Rawalpindi scored one hit in return, causing minor splinter damage.

In April 1940 both ships covered the Narvik and Trondheim assaults of Operation Weserübung under Vice Admiral Günther Lütjens. Early on 9 April, Gneisenau's Seetakt radar found the British battlecruiser Renown; the Germans returned fire three minutes after spotting her gun flashes. Scharnhorst's radar malfunctioned and she could not engage effectively, and Renown shifted fire to her at 05:18. By 07:15 the two German ships had used their speed to break away, shipping so much water forward that Anton turret was put out of action by flooding.

On 8 June, during Operation Juno, the German battleships sighted the carrier Glorious and the destroyers Ardent and Acasta at some 40,000 m. Scharnhorst opened fire at 18:32 from 26,000 m and hit six minutes later at 25,600 m, one of the longest-range naval gunfire hits in history; the shell struck the upper hangar and started a large fire. A shell from Gneisenau killed Glorious's captain on the bridge. All three British ships were sunk, but as Acasta went down one of her torpedoes hit Scharnhorst at 19:39, tearing a hole 14 by 6 m, letting in 2,500 tonnes of water, disabling Caesar turret and killing 48 men.

In January 1941 she and Gneisenau sailed for Operation Berlin under Lütjens, slipping into the Atlantic through the Denmark Strait on the night of 3/4 February. Lütjens's orders forbade engaging Allied capital ships, so convoy HX 106 and its escort Ramillies were left alone despite her captain Hoffmann closing to 23,000 m to try to draw the battleship off. Hunting independent ships instead, Scharnhorst sank the tanker Lustrous and the Greek cargo ship Marathon, and on 15–16 March took six more totalling 35,080 GRT before the pair made for Brest.

In Brest and La Pallice she became a bombing target. Nineteen major raids fell on Brest between 30 March and 7 July 1941. Moored at La Pallice on 23 July, she was found by aerial reconnaissance and attacked on the 24th by fifteen Handley Page Halifaxes that had flown an extra 200 miles to reach her. Five bombs hit in an almost straight line down the starboard side; three 1,000 lb armour-piercing bombs failed to explode but passed clean through the hull, causing significant flooding and an eight-degree list. Two men were killed and fifteen injured, and repairs took four months.

On 12 January 1942 the naval command decided to bring her, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen home through the Channel. Operation Cerberus began at 23:00 on 11 February, the ships hugging the French coast at 27 knots under a Luftwaffe fighter shield flown at masthead height. Six Swordfish that attacked after the Strait of Dover were all destroyed. Scharnhorst struck an air-dropped magnetic mine off the Scheldt at 15:31, which stopped her for nearly twenty minutes, and a second off Terschelling at 22:34 that left only her centreline shaft turning. She reached Wilhelmshaven, and repairs at Kiel ran to July 1942.

She reached Bogen Bay outside Narvik on 14 March 1943, joining Tirpitz and Lützow; her arrival forced the British to suspend the Arctic convoys that summer. On 6 September she and Tirpitz bombarded Spitzbergen in Operation Zitronella, destroying a two-gun battery and shelling fuel tanks, coal mines and the weather station that was feeding the Allies the forecasts used to schedule convoys. After X-craft crippled Tirpitz that month, she was the only effective German heavy unit left in the north.

On 25 December 1943 Dönitz ordered her against convoy JW 55B. The British were reading her Enigma traffic, and Admirals Robert Burnett and Bruce Fraser positioned accordingly. Belfast found her on radar at 08:40 on the 26th; the cruisers opened fire at 09:24 and an 8-inch shell destroyed her forward radar antenna, leaving only an aft set with a limited arc. She hit Norfolk twice around 12:25, disabling that cruiser's gunnery radar and her X turret, then turned away. At 13:15 Konteradmiral Erich Bey gave up and turned for base.

Duke of York made radar contact at 16:17 and opened fire at 16:50 from 11,000 m. Within five minutes a 14-inch shell jammed Anton turret and started a fire that forced the flooding of both forward magazines; another wrecked both forward 15 cm turrets at 17:30; around 18:00 a shell through the thin upper belt exploded in the number 1 boiler room and cut her speed to 8 knots. Duke of York ceased fire at 18:42 after 52 salvos and at least 13 hits. The destroyers Scorpion and HNoMS Stord put four torpedoes into her at 18:50, and she went down by the bow at 19:45. Of 1,968 officers and men, 36 survived.

A joint BBC, NRK and Royal Norwegian Navy expedition went looking for her in September 2000, scanning the sea floor with the survey vessel Sverdrup II and then examining the contact visually from HNoMS Tyr. An ROV positively identified her on 10 September by armament consistent with Scharnhorst. She lies upside down in about 290 m of water, main mast and rangefinders scattered around her, damage from shellfire and torpedoes plain, and the bow — blown off, presumably by a magazine explosion in the forward turrets — lying in a tangled mass of steel some distance from the hull.