There was another circumstance that worried Peters: the British, he said, would want to do whatever they could to guard against the possibility that the German Fleet would attack from the south. This would lead those in charge of the convoy to sail it as near to the northern ice as possible. In his diary, Peters explains why this spelt trouble: ‘The further north it is attacked, the easier it will be for the British battle group – which has yet to be intercepted by our air reconnaissance, but which past experience… tells us is approaching – to intercept our forces.’ If that was not argument enough against permitting the attack to proceed, Peters also pointed out that the inability because of the weather for the German reconnaissance planes to scour the ocean for the Home Fleet would make it impossible to know before Bey’s force reached the convoy – which was scheduled to take place at dawn the next morning – whether Fraser’s ships would be within striking distance. This led him to conclude: ‘As a result the conditions required for the operation to go ahead… are not met as far as I can tell.’13

  But even as Peters was telling Schniewind he thought the operation should be cancelled, Dönitz was circulating the following stirring exhortation explaining why the attack was needed:14 ‘The enemy is making it harder for our eastern army by sending a big convoy laden with food and arms to Russia. We must help…

  ‘The tactical situation must be exploited with courage and skill. Partial success is not enough. Once the attack begins, it must be followed up. Our best asset is Scharnhorst’s superior gunpower. Therefore every effort must be made to bring these guns to bear. Destroyers must be used to make it happen.’15

  At 8.30 p.m. Schniewind finally managed to pass on Peters’ concerns to Dönitz via the Grossadmiral’s 52-year-old Chief of Staff, Vizeadmiral Wilhelm Meisel. By this time Schniewind, who had never been keen on the operation, had also decided it was not advisable.16 ‘An operation in these conditions has too much going against it,’ he wrote in the report summarizing his views, continuing: ‘A decisive victory is unlikely. I therefore suggest the operation should be aborted. However if Germany’s plight demands an operation be carried out in spite of these reservations, I propose that Scharnhorst should be sent out to attack the convoy without the destroyers.’17

  Thus Schniewind weakly gave Dönitz’s plan the green light even though it was opposed by the man who was to carry it out. It may be an exaggeration to say that never has a German commander gone into battle as unwillingly as Bey, but this cannot have been far from the truth.

  Bey’s frame of mind was underlined by another message sent by the acting Befehlshaber der Kampfgruppe. Shortly after 9 p.m. during the night of 25–26 December, Bey broke radio silence to tell Schniewind that in view of the weather he was encountering as he made his way out of Altenfjord: ‘Use of destroyer weapons drastically impaired.’

  Unfortunately for the Germans, although Peters in Narvik had Bey’s warning just over an hour after it was sent, it did not reach Schniewind until after Dönitz had made his final decision based on what Schniewind had previously written to him.18

  The Grossadmiral’s final verdict was that the attack should go ahead, provided the Home Fleet was not spotted close to the convoy.19 And at 12.35 a.m. on 26 December Schniewind received the follow-up message from Meisel telling him that Bey should be permitted to attack with Scharnhorst alone, if as a result of the rough sea the German destroyers were unable to function effectively.20

  It was only later that Dönitz’s flawed reasoning would become known. He was giving the go ahead partly because no British covering battlegroup had been detected and because the bad weather would hamper the light enemy naval forces as much as the German destroyers. But it was also partly because, as the Seekriegsleitung operations division’s war diarist put it: ‘It was possible to surprise the enemy since he had already passed two convoys through to Northern Russia unmolested by our forces.’21

  Given that was how Dönitz was thinking, how horrified he would surely have been had he somehow been able to read the pair of Ultra messages that were sent by the British Admiralty to Fraser and Burnett some two hours after Schniewind had received the final confirmation of Dönitz’s marching orders.

  Contained within the haunting dots and dashes that at 2.17 a.m. 26 December were beeped over the air waves from the Admiralty in London to the admirals in the flagships of the two British forces approaching the convoy simultaneously from east and west there was an implicit warning concerning the impending attack. The Ultra started with the word: ‘Emergency’, and then carried on: ‘Scharnhorst probably sailed 1800A/25th December.’22

  The details of the intercepted and decrypted German signal – an Enigma message sent by Bey at 5.15 p.m. on Christmas Day – on which the first Ultra was based followed a minute after the first Ultra was sent: ‘A patrol vessel… was informed at 1715 that Scharnhorst would pass outward bound from 1800A/25th December.’23

  The fact that Bletchley Park’s codebreakers were able to decrypt the message so quickly (within 9 hours of the German signal being intercepted) was fortunate from the British viewpoint. Their contribution was all the more significant because of the failed attempt by Norwegian agents to warn the Admiralty that Scharnhorst had been seen leaving Lang Fjord where she had been anchored (see Note 24 for Norwegian agents’ actions).24 The Ultra signal, and another in the same vein, were to be of great assistance to the convoy’s defenders. That was the case in spite of Fraser at the time he received them being only too aware that, these warnings notwithstanding, his warships, still ploughing through the very rough seas, of necessity well below their top speed, some 200 miles to the west of JW55B at 4 a.m. on 26 December, would be unable to reach the convoy in time to ward off the initial attack, if as seemed likely, it took place at the beginning of twilight that morning (see 3A-E in Map 18 for locations of both sides’ ships at 4 a.m. 26 December; twilight times are described in Note 25).25

  Knowing what was coming enabled Fraser to improve the merchant ships’ chances remotely.26 He did this by breaking radio silence again, at 4.01 a.m. and at 6.28 a.m. on 26 December, to order the destroyer Onslow’s Captain James McCoy, the senior officer in command of JW55B’s close escort, to divert the convoy, which had been moving east-north-eastward, initially to the north and subsequently to the north-east.27 In case that was not sufficient to hide JW55B from the Germans, he could only hope that his risk assessment the previous day had been well judged. He had then concluded that the ten original destroyers with the convoy reinforced by four more taken from the west-going convoy RA55A, combined with Burnett’s Force 1, would have the necessary firepower to fend off the German battlegroup until the Home Fleet was in a position to intervene.28

  Not that firepower alone was ever sufficient in itself. But on this occasion, as at the previous battle almost exactly a year earlier, it was to be backed up by what might be referred to as the Royal Navy’s secret weapon: Burnett’s seemingly unerring capacity, thanks to a mixture of intuition and rational thought, to position his ships where they could inflict the maximum damage on a superior enemy. The following extract from his after the action report describes how, on being instructed by Fraser’s 6.28 a.m. 26 December message to close in on the convoy, he took care to place his ships, which at the time were to the south-east of JW55B, in an advantageous position: ‘I altered course to 270° (heading west), my intention being to approach the convoy from the southward to avoid, in the event of action, steaming into the strong south-westerly wind and heavy seas, which outweighed the advantages of ensuring that the enemy would be between me and the light southerly horizon.’29

  But he was once again helped by the Germans. Not only had they gone ahead with an operation by their surface fleet at a time when their U-boats were not shadowing the targeted convoy continuously. As a result they could not be sure the British would not divert the convoy away from its expected path, as Fraser had in fact done.

  They had also failed to learn one of the key lessons that could be drawn from the Battle of the Barents Sea: it was dangerous in the Arctic winter to allow the capital ship to become separated from one or more of the supporting destroyers. On this occasion the separation took place after the German battlegroup, whose general direction of travel during the night of 25–26 December was north-north-eastward, at around 7 to 7.30 a.m. on 26 December reached the place which Bey believed would be in the path of the convoy. (This appears to have been based on the incorrect assumption that JW55B had carried on heading in the east-north-eastward direction reported by a U-boat on 25 December, starting from the convoy’s position reported by a second U-boat during the early morning of 26 December.)30

  Bey had then ordered the five destroyers to turn to port so that they could rake south-westward towards where he believed the convoy would be found. The destroyers were to proceed 10 miles ahead of Scharnhorst (the location where the German battlegroup turned to the south-west is shown at 4 in Map 18, and is described in Note 31).31 Whether intentionally on Bey’s instructions, or because of the rough seas whipped up by the south-westerly wind they were sailing into, Scharnhorst failed to keep in touch with the German vanguard, and visual contact once lost was never regained.

  Given Bey’s declared opposition, prior to setting out, to Scharnhorst getting in the way of the destroyers in poor visibility, it is tempting to see this as the maritime equivalent of Bey eating what had been served up with a very long spoon; it certainly had Bey’s fastidious disdain for the use of capital ships in the Arctic in winter written all over it.

  The upshot was that when at around 8.40 a.m. on 26 December Scharnhorst was detected, around 20 miles away to the north-west – more or less halfway between Force 1 and the convoy – by the cruiser Belfast’s radar, the German battlecruiser was all alone (see 5 in Map 18 for detection position, and 1A, 1B and 1C in Map 19 for respective relative positions of Force 1, Scharnhorst and JW55B at this time).32

  Worse still from the German point of view, when at around 9.30 a.m. the gunners in Norfolk, another Force 1 cruiser whose radar was tracking Scharnhorst, opened fire at the battlecruiser after the German ship had ended up going on six miles to the cruisers’ south, Scharnhorst’s crew were it seems taken by surprise (see 2A and 2B in Map 19 for relative positions of Force 1 and Scharnhorst respectively when Norfolk’s gunners opened fire).33

  The encounter was to be unsatisfactory whichever side you were on. It ended minutes after it started, when Scharnhorst was turned away, without those great guns so extolled by Dönitz scoring so much as one hit.34 Bey would later be criticized by Dönitz for not standing his ground and sinking his much less imposing opponent. If Bey had done his duty, the merchant ships would have fallen into his hands ‘like ripe fruit’, according to the Grossadmiral.35

  But at least two of the 8-inch shells fired from Norfolk were on target.36 One penetrated Scharnhorst’s deck on her port side between the 5.9-inch gun mounting and the port torpedo tubes and ended up in a seamen’s mess deck without exploding. Nineteen-year-old Signalman Matrosenobergefreiter (Able Seaman) Helmut Backhaus, 38 metres up the battlecruiser’s main mast on the lookout platform, nearly paid with his life for being in a position to describe what happened to the second of Norfolk’s shells that connected with the battlecruiser. ‘I… felt the draught when the shell whistled right over me,’ he recalled when interviewed about his experiences after the war. ‘The… shot from the English ship dropped through the tower where two men were sitting. The shell then exploded. One man was killed. The other lost his leg, and the radar was destroyed.’37

  Bey still had his destiny in his own hands however, as he had Scharnhorst wheeled away to the north-east, because Burnett made the controversial decision not to chase the German ship, an action he later justified with the following explanation: ‘I was convinced he was trying to work round to the Northward of the convoy, and in view of the limit on my speed imposed by the weather, I decided to return to place myself between him and the convoy.’38

  This fails to mention that intentionally breaking off radar contact with Scharnhorst by turning Force 1 to the north-west, as Burnett did at 10 a.m., was a brave call. It risked contravening one of the most fundamental rules all naval officers of the day were taught: never lose contact with the enemy unless you have a very good reason.

  Belfast’s 42-year-old Captain Freddie Parham witnessed how anxious Burnett was concerning what he had done. When Parham, by then an admiral himself, was interviewed after the war, he revealed that shortly after radar contact with the German battlecruiser was severed, Burnett ‘sent for me. He was down in the chart house, one deck below the bridge. He himself worked entirely from the plot. I don’t know that he ever came to the bridge… (For much of the time) there was nothing to be seen; it was pitch dark…

  ‘He said to me, “Freddie, have I done the right thing?” I said… “I’m absolutely certain you have.” Shortly after that (at 11.04 a.m.) we had a fairly snorting signal from the C-in-C, which said, roughly speaking: “How the hell do you think I’m going to bring her to action,” or words to that effect.

  ‘It was a terrible thing. Poor old Bob. He was a terribly emotional chap. He was jolly nearly in tears about it [although] I was able to reassure him.’39

  Fraser’s signal to Burnett was uncharacteristically harsh. Events during the day were to show that he was fundamentally a very kind man. However, during the morning of 26 December he had had a lot on his plate. The first reverse he encountered occurred shortly after 10 a.m. when Duke of York was still approximately 200 miles to the south-west of where Scharnhorst’s first engagement that day had been fought. He was informed that Duke of York’s radar had detected three German aircraft about eight and a half miles away which were shadowing Force 2 from the starboard quarter. One of them was overheard reporting back to base. This carried on for nearly three hours, all of which time Fraser must surely have been wondering whether that might be the cue for Scharnhorst to go scuttling back to her base, putting paid to his chances of catching up with the German battlecruiser (see 6 in Map 18, and Note 40 for the approximate location of the British ships detected).40

  Bey might have ordered just that had it not been for another extraordinary lapse on the German side. Although Leutnant Helmut Marx, the captain of the Blohm & Voss 138 aircraft crew doing the signalling, duly reported the detection of a group of ships where none should have been, Oberst Ernst-August Roth, the commander of Fliegerführer Lofoten, failed to circulate ‘the sighting’ details immediately, and even when he did during the early afternoon, he failed to mention one of the ships detected was significantly larger than the others.41

  Schniewind appears to have compounded Bey’s intelligence deficit by failing to communicate with him adequately, or at all, concerning another ominous development: helped by the B-Dienst, the German Navy’s interception of signals and codebreaking service, by around 11.15 a.m. on 26 December, staff at Marinegruppenkommando Nord had worked out that a ship, which appeared to be the cruiser whose guns had fired at Scharnhorst during the battlecruiser’s earlier encounter, had reported making contact with the enemy to another mysterious ship. It was realized that the recipient of the message might be the commander of the expected heavy cover group.42

  So it was that shortly before midday on 26 December, Bey, deprived of evidence or at least analysis concerning the approaching threat that should by this stage have been passed on to him, stripped of some of the protection that might have been offered had all his radar been in working order, and constrained by the push me-pull me orders from Dönitz and Schniewind prior to the attack that respectively urged reckless attack and safety first retreat simultaneously, terminated the long loop northward by turning to port in the hope he could target the convoy again.

  This second attempt was to be no more successful than the first. Once again Belfast’s radar detected Scharnhorst before the crew in the German ship knew the whereabouts of her foe. At 12.05 p.m. radar operators in Burnett’s flagship registered Scharnhorst some 17 miles to the north-east. The German battlecruiser was approaching the three British cruisers, which were positioned some ten miles to the north-east of the convoy (see Note 43, and 7 in Map 18 for approximate location, and 3A and B in Map 19 for Force 1’s approximate position relative to Scharnhorst’s at this juncture).43 Burnett’s uncanny ability to place his ships exactly where they were most needed had stood him in good stead once again.

  Shortly before 12.30 p.m. the cruisers’ gunners, complying with Burnett’s order, opened fire on the battlecruiser when she was just over six miles away (see 4A and B in Map 19 for approximate position of Force 1 relative to Scharnhorst at this stage).44 But because the action took place during the last of the twilight hours that day, as Sheffield’s gunnery report confirmed. ‘At no time could the target be seen clearly from the Director Control Tower, being merely a grey shape slightly darker than the background.’45 Although there would subsequently be claims by members of the cruisers’ crews that Scharnhorst was hit more than once, in the prevailing murk, no Force 1 personnel could know the extent of the impact. The gun teams in the three cruisers were eventually reduced to aiming impotently at the gun flashes coming from where Scharnhorst was believed to be located.46

  By way of contrast, the silhouettes of the three British cruisers, which stood out against the light sky to the south, were only too visible from the battlecruiser.47 As a result, on this occasion Scharnhorst’s shelling quickly drew blood, albeit not with her first salvos. Sheffield was struck by a piece of shrapnel described by one of her officers as ‘about the size of a man’s head’ that hit her starboard side just below and aft of the bridge without causing significant damage or any injuries.48