Torpedo-man Dawson eventually confessed, and was sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour. His sentence was later commuted by President Roosevelt who asked that no punishment be handed out for what was clearly an accident. Someone had to carry the blame, however, so Captain Walker and several of his crew were drafted to mundane shore assignments.
It is interesting to note that an earlier torpedo boat named Porter (TB-6) had fired a torpedo at the armoured cruiser New York during a night engagement off Cuba in 1898, also luckily missing.
BITER BITTEN
The escort carrier HMS Biter was with the 5th and 7th Escort Groups in mid Atlantic in November 1943, covering several convoys, when on 16 November one of her own Swordfish aircraft carrying a homing torpedo crashed just astern of the carrier when coming in for a landing. The torpedo was released by the impact, its engine started, and it homed on Biter. The torpedo hit her rudder, but with only a low-order detonation. The bottom aft corner of the rudder was blown off, and hull plating below the waterline suffered mild damage, but still sufficient to require a month’s dockyard attention on her return to the UK.
NORTH CAPE 1943: FIFTY-FIVE TORPEDOES RUNNING
KM Scharnhorst was designated a ‘battlecruiser’ because of her light main armament guns — chosen for political reasons at the time the ships were designed, and capable of eventual upgrading to 15in — and for her extremely high speed: 165,000shp turbines propelled her at a designed top speed of 32 knots. Her later ‘Atlantik’ bow enabled her to maintain high speed in sea conditions where other large warships fell behind.
But in every respect except her 11in triple turrets she was a ‘fast battleship’, displacing 38,900 tons at full load, with an armour belt up to 350mm (13.8in) thick and with 100mm (3.9in) total deck armour, although the latter was arranged on the old Great War style of ‘multiple thin decks’ (in Scharnhorst’s case 2 × 50mm/2 × 1.97in) — a defect she shared with the Bismarck class — instead of one single, very thick deck as had been introduced in the RN Nelson class. Her inner armoured torpedo bulkhead was 45mm thick (1.77in) and her TDS extended inward for a total distance of 5m (16.4ft).
The Scharnhorst had led an eventful career, and appeared to have a charmed life; indeed, she was known in Germany as the ‘lucky Scharnhorst’. With her sister the Gneisenau, Scharnhorst had sunk the AMC Rawalpindi on 23 November 1939, and escaped from forces sent to intercept them. In the early stages of the Norwegian campaign, the two sisters had been chased by the battlecruiser HMS Renown, nominally outclassed by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau together, but armed with 15in guns. The two Scharnhorsts had run away in high seas, accepting damage — flooding of their forward turrets — in order to escape possible destruction under the heavy guns of Renown. If and when they were upgunned it would be a different matter.
In the British withdrawal from Norway, on 8 June 1940 she and her sister ship had surprised and sunk the old aircraft carrier Glorious and her two destroyer escorts, but before sinking, HMS Acasta had launched her eight 21in torpedoes at Scharnhorst and scored one hit abreast turret Caesar. The torpedo made a hole 14m long by 6m high (46ft × 20ft), flooded thirty watertight compartments and let some 2500 tons of water enter her hull. Two of Scharnhorst’s three shafts were temporarily stopped, and two officers and forty-six men were killed in the explosion or drowned in the influx of water. This hit by Acasta saved a troop convoy not far away over the horizon.
During the Atlantic sortie in early 1941, Scharnhorst was spotted on two occasions by British battleships escorting convoys, HMS Ramillies, then HMS Malaya, but on each occasion the Germans withdrew without offering combat, eventually making port in occupied France. At Brest Scharnhorst was undergoing repairs to her boilers, so she missed the first and last sortie by Bismarck. Then at La Pallice she was hit by five bombs, of which three were 1000lb (454kg) armour-piercing weapons. These, however, passed completely through the ship without exploding.
During Operation Cerberus, the ‘Channel Dash’, Scharnhorst detonated two mines but arrived safely home in Wilhelmshaven. Cerberus was a tactical victory but a strategic failure, as it meant the ships were no longer based in French ports and capable of operating against the transatlantic convoy routes. It was following this operation that the two sister ships were to be permanently separated. Gneisenau in port had not been de-ammunitioned, and a British heavy bomb struck her and burned out the complete forecastle. Although this was taken as the opportunity to lengthen her bow and rearm her with 15in guns, the project was never started, and Gneisenau remained a hulk until the end of the war. Separated from her sister, ‘lucky Scharnhorst’ was moved to Norway to threaten the convoys to Russia.
Finally, on 26 December 1943 her luck ran out, off the North Cape of Norway, in the last big-gun encounter between battleships in European waters. Ordered by Dönitz to attack Russian-bound convoys to aid the struggling German war effort in Russia, Scharnhorst sortied from her Norwegian lair under the command of Konteradmiral Erich Bey, whom we last met at Narvik, when through his prevarication he doomed the entire German destroyer flotilla to destruction. He was to display far more elan during the action off North Cape.
Admiral Bruce Fraser set a trap for Scharnhorst, using the conjunction of outward Convoy JW55B of nineteen merchantmen and inbound Convoy JW55A with twenty-two. Their escorts included a total of eighteen destroyers. Immediate support was to be provided by Admiral Burnett’s Force 1 consisting of the cruisers Belfast, Sheffield and Norfolk. Distant support was provided by Force 2, comprising Fraser’s flagship the King George V-class battleship Duke of York, with cruiser Trinidad and four destroyers in company.
In the first of two engagements with Force 1, Scharnhorst’s forward radar was destroyed by an 8in shell from Norfolk. Bey, thinking he had made contact with a battleship, withdrew at high speed, and sent his five destroyers to search for the convoy, thus losing his own close escort and scouting screen. Trying to circumvent the cruiser force and fall on the convoy, Scharnhorst was illuminated by star-shells fired from the shadowing Belfast, and surprised by Duke of York, the German battlecruiser’s turrets clearly seen aligned fore and aft. Under heavy fire from Duke of York’s 14in guns, Bey turned for home at high speed, which again the British ships could not match.