German Naval HQ knew the position, speed, course and destination of almost every convoy leaving or approaching Britain. They knew the position of every British capital ship — and they knew that on that day, 21 November, 1939, every British capital ship was either in harbour or in far distant waters: that the NELSON and the RODNEY were in the Clyde, the HOOD and the French battlecruiser DUNKERQUE were in Plymouth, a cruiser squadron was fuelling and victualling in Rosyth, and that the only other ship they might have had to fear, the aircraft carrier FURIOUS was in Nova Scotia with the battleship REPULSE. They knew, too, that after the torpedoing of the ROYAL OAK in Scapa Flow by Leutnant-Kapitan Gunther Prien's U-boat, the British Navy had precipitately abandoned that far northern base, and retreated to the Clyde and Forth, maintaining only a small secret base in Loch Ewe, a north-westerly Scottish fjord. At least it was secret as far as the British public and most of the Royal Navy were concerned: the Germans knew all about it.
There was, of course, no guarantee that these ships would remain where they were. Again, the Germans were unworried. Their experts had completely broken the British naval codes at that time, with the results that British naval redisposition orders were known to the Germans almost as quickly as they were to the captains of the ships concerned.
Not that Marschall had any intention of engaging any large British ships in any case. His superior, Admiral Raeder, had been adamant on this point. This was only a shakedown cruise which might pay the added dividends of dislocating our shipping and drawing off our patrols.
There was the further possibility that news of the departure of the squadron might be transmitted to London by espionage agents, but, in view of past achievements of the British Intelligence Service, that was highly unlikely. At the time, our Intelligence Service was untrained, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffectual — the DEUTSCHLAND, for instance, after her first Atlantic foray, had been back in the Baltic for over a month before we knew anything about it. And, it must be confessed, our sketchy air patrols over the North Sea were, at the time, not much better than our Intelligence Service.
Vice-Admiral Marschall, therefore, felt justifiably light of heart as his two battle cruisers, the SCHARNHORST and the GNEISENAU cleared Jede Bay and sailed out into the cold, wind-swept darkness of the North Sea. A bitter night, a bad night, but Marschall welcomed it, for over and above all the cards he held in his hand, the darkness of the long northern winter nights, the forecasted bad weather and visibility reducing rain-squalls and fog were further powerful allies, that made for safety. Marschall reckoned that it would take him exactly forty-eight hours to reach the Iceland-Orkney line of the British contraband control.
The British Northern Patrols were in position, thinly stretched out over nearly a thousand miles of sea. Cruisers were the backbone of this patrol, but mostly superannuated ships of the old C and D classes. Only four ships could be reckoned as really effective fighting units: the NORFOLK and the SUFFOLK, the same two ships as were to report the historic breakthrough of the BISMARCK into the Atlantic in May 1941, were in exactly the same position as they were on that memorable day — the Denmark Strait — the GLASGOW was just to the north-east of the Shetlands, with the NEWCASTLE stiffening the line between the Faroes and Iceland. Of these, only the NEWCASTLE was anywhere near the coming scene of action, but even she was too far away.
Holding much of the line in between these cruisers were the armed merchant ships. For contraband control — the stopping and searching of ships carrying proscribed cargoes — these ships were ideal in the high wild latitudes of the Atlantic. Big ex-passenger ships, able to remain at sea for long periods in bad weather, they were stripped of all their luxury fittings, and fitted with guns sufficient to deal with any cargo ship. But only with cargo ships — they were never intended to cope with anything else: it is significant that the very first move of the Admiralty when they finally learnt of the breakthrough of the SCHARNHORST and GNEISENAU, was to withdraw all the armed merchant ships off the northern patrol. But the order came too late, tragically but inevitably, for one of these ships; for it was not until the SCHARNHORST and GNEISENAU turned their great guns on the RAWALPINDI that the Admiralty knew that these two ships, then the most powerful in the German Navy, were loose in the Atlantic.
The 17,000-ton RAWALPINDI, in peacetime a crack P&O liner plying between Britain and the Far East, was one of the first Merchant Navy vessels to be converted to an armed merchant ship. Her gay pre-war colours were gone, lost under a drab coat of battleship grey. The lavishly furnished interior had been gutted, a main control gunnery room constructed and deck fittings removed to make way for ammunition lockers and her hastily installed armament — eight old 6-inch guns, four ranged along either side. But there had been no time, no opportunity to make any alteration to her unarmoured sides and decks, and the strengthening of these was largely impossible anyway: in terms of the penetrating power of modern armour-piercing shells, the hull of the RAWALPINDI might as well have been made of paper.
The crew of the RAWALPINDI knew this, but just accepted it, with the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug, as just another of the hazards of the sea. Among the 280 officers and men aboard, there was not one to whom the sea and all its dangers were unknown, for in terms of experience if not in actual age — but more often than not in age as well — it was a crew of old men. Apart from fifty-odd officers and men who had served with the RAWALPINDI as a regular passenger liner, the entire crew was composed of RNVR men of the Merchant Navy. RNVR — civilians with the bare essentials of naval training — reservists, and pensioners who had come back to the sea after having already completed twenty-two years in the Navy. There was not one active service officer or rating aboard the RAWALPINDI, but there was a tremendous fund of knowledge and experience, more than any regular Naval ship could ever hope to boast. The crew knew the sea and its dangers, and accepted them. They knew too the very sharp limitations of their ship and accepted these also. And when, in latitude 63°40′ North, 11°29′ West, at 3 o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday, 23 November, they saw the lean sleek shape of the SCHARNHORST looming through the ice-cold rain-squalls of the bleak sub-Arctic waters, they knew that this was indeed the end, but they accepted that also.
On the bridge, Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, called back to the colours after seventeen long years in the unwanted wilderness of civilian life, had seen the danger and recognized its implications even before any of his men. He wrongly identified the ship as the DEUTSCHLAND, but the mistake was one of academic importance only: he rightly identified it as a German pocket battleship or battlecruiser, 26,000-ton leviathans with 13-inch armour-plate and nine-inch and twelve 5.9 guns capable of delivering a 8,000-pound broadside in reply to his own puny 400 — and his light 100-pound shells could never hope to penetrate that massive armour anyway.
Even as she emerged from the rain-squalls the SCHARNHORST'S big signalling lamp was stuttering out the command to 'Heave-to'. The sensible thing, the wise and politic thing — for which there couldn't possibly have been any reproach — would have been to do as the SCHARNHORST ordered. But with Kennedy, as with most of the great British naval captains down the centuries, prudence in the face of the enemy was a quality that he had never learned, and certainly never inherited. He knew he could neither fight nor outrun the SCHARNHORST, but there were sheltering icebergs and fogbanks nearby and, while there remained even one chance in a thousand he was determined to take it. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over and smoke floats to be dropped to cover their withdrawal.