Having returned to Germany for repairs, May 1940 saw Admiral Hipper back in Norway. On 13 June she was attacked by British naval aircraft and again damaged, returning once more to Germany for repairs. Her next sortie, in September that year, was a commerce-raiding cruise in the North Atlantic, but once again she got no farther than the Norwegian coast when engine trouble forced her to return. In December 1940 she tried again, encountering convoy WS5A off the west coast of Africa, en route to the Middle East via the Cape of Good Hope. Tracking the convoy from late on Christmas Eve, Hipper attacked early on Christmas morning but ran into the cruiser escort, Berwick, Bonaventure and Dunedin. There was some exchange of fire, one merchant ship was damaged and Hipper also received some minor hits. The action was brought to a halt when the German heavy cruiser found herself again plagued by engine trouble and broke away to the north. This sortie was on the face of it a failure, but it had an unforeseen knock-on effect. Included in the WS5A convoy were five fast merchant ships under the code name Excess which, instead of going around the Cape, were to leave WS5A at Gibraltar and proceed at speed through the Mediterranean with troops, airmen and crated Hurricane fighters for Malta, plus supplies for Greece.
When Hipper attacked, orders were given for the convoy to scatter, and the Excess ships were held at Gibraltar. Excess finally sailed on the evening of 6 January, some ten days later than anticipated, escorted by Force ‘H’ – the battlecruisers Renown and Malaya, aircraft carrier Ark Royal, cruiser Sheffield and six destroyers (the size of the escort for five merchant ships illustrates graphically how urgently the supplies were required). On the evening of the 9th Force ‘H’ turned back for Gibraltar, handing the convoy on to the cruisers Gloucester and Southampton, strengthened later that day by the main escort under the command of the C-in-C Mediterranean, Admiral Cunningham, in the battleship Warspite, with the battleship Valiant, aircraft carrier Illustrious, and seven destroyers in attendance.[165]
Excess had been delayed for ten days or so as a result of Admiral Hipper’s abortive attack, and during that time an important change had taken place in enemy dispositions in the Mediterranean. Fretting that the Italians were not pressing the British hard enough, on 10 November Hitler wrote to Mussolini proposing that Luftwaffe units should operate from Italian bases against British shipping. Il Duce agreed, and by Christmas 1940 the unit chosen, Fliegerkorps X, was moving down through Italy. By 8 January ninety-six bombers had arrived at bases in the south from which they could strike at Allied shipping, to be strengthened by the end of January to 120 long-range bombers, 150 dive bombers and 40 fighters. Fliegerkorps X were the Luftwaffe anti shipping specialists.[166]
The newly arrived Luftwaffe units struck the convoy and escort on 10 January, concentrating most of their attack on Illustrious. Seven direct hits and three near misses crippled the carrier, turning her into a blazing wreck – but for her armoured flight deck she must surely have been sunk. Suffering a further attack on the way, the severely damaged ship managed to reach Gibraltar where she was patched up and sent to the United States for repair. She would be out of the war for over a year. The merchant ships all reached their destination, but the crippling of Illustrious was a serious blow to the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean.[167]
Following her attack on WS5A, Hipper arrived at Brest on 27 December, was repaired, and was at sea again on 1 February 1941. Her prey now were convoys from Britain to the United States and the Mediterranean, her operational area between the latitudes of Gibraltar and south-west Ireland. Chronically high fuel consumption meant that the first order of business on arrival was to refuel at sea from a supply ship; however on 11 February her luck changed when she sighted the unescorted, laden, UK-bound convoy SLS64, comprising nineteen merchantmen. The cruiser subsequently sank seven ships totalling 32,806 gross tons, and damaged four more.[168]
Back at Brest on 14 February Hipper became the target of British bombers but escaped damage. As persistent engine problems necessitated a return to Germany for a major refit, on the night of 15/16 March she slipped away from France and having refuelled at sea off southern Greenland, passed through the Denmark Strait on 23 March, heavy weather shielding her from patrolling British warships waiting for just such an opportunity to catch German raiders heading to or from the Atlantic.[169] Having had to refuel again, Admiral Hipper arrived at Kiel on 28 March. Her unreliable engines and short cruising range made her particularly unsuitable for operations in the Atlantic, consequently she was relegated to a long period of training exercises in the Baltic.
By March 1942 Admiral Hipper was en route to northern Norway, and on 5 July, in company with Tirpitz and Admiral Scheer, she sailed from Altenfjord to attack convoy PQ17, but when the convoy scattered the battle squadron was recalled, and the attack was left to U-boats and the Luftwaffe, (see pp. 10–12).
The heavy cruiser remained based in northern Norway, carrying out minelaying operations off the north-west coast of Novaya Zemlya in the eastern Barents Sea in September, and from 5 to 9 November, in company with destroyer Z27, sank the Russian tanker Dombass and anti-submarine vessel No.78. Recurring engine problems prevented several proposed sorties to attack independently routed merchant ships bound for Russia, but she was scheduled to attack the next Russia-bound convoy discovered in the Barents Sea.
During the German invasion of Norway, British naval forces attacked a large German destroyer force in Narvik, and in battles fought over two days, 16–17 April 1940, sank the entire complement of ten ships for the loss of two of their own. As replacements, the Kriegsmarine designed and built what were intended to be the most powerful destroyers in the world. Popularly referred to as the Narvik class, after the ships lost in Norway, they weighed in at 2600 tons and boasted five 5.9 in (150 mm) guns, against the 4.7 in (120 mm) to 5 in (127 mm) guns of the more powerful of the British or American destroyers. Unfortunately for the Kriegsmarine this significant increase in firepower led to other drawbacks with the design. The forward two 5.9 in guns were carried in a twin turret weighing a massive 60.4 tons (61.37 tonnes), compared to the 25-ton (25.4-tonne) twin turrets of the British Tribal class destroyers. This meant that the German boats were prone to dip their bows into the sea under the weight, while yawing and proving very difficult to handle in a following sea.[170] To improve seagoing characteristics some were fitted with a lighter single turret forward, replacing the heavy twin mounting. An additional, and it would seem fairly obvious, drawback with the large guns was the weight of the shells, which, at 100 lb (45 kg), had to be loaded by hand – a considerable physical strain for the gun crews. Due to their difficult heavy-weather handling these ships were not best suited to operations in the Arctic; nevertheless five were sent to Norway to support the naval build-up.
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