Scharnhorst

FOREWORD

I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Admittedly, when I was born - in February 1950 in Hammerfest, the world's northernmost town, not far to the west of the North Cape - the war had been over for nearly five years. But at that time the town had still not been rebuilt after its devastation in the autumn of 1944, and both my parents were still marked by their experiences during five years of war.

Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940, the first enemy soldiers making their appearance in Hammerfest in August of that year. They were soon followed by many more, as the town was an important staging-post for the forces being assembled for a joint German-Finnish attack launched on the ice-free port of Murmansk in June 1941, making it an important though little-known sector of the Eastern front.

The first years of occupation were peaceful. Hammerfest was a small town of barely four thousand inhabitants, so the presence of large numbers of enemy troops and naval units demanded a good deal of forbearance and give-and-take on both sides. After a time facilities were improved and the town turned into a supply base. To this end, as early as the autumn of 1940 a large refrigerator ship, the Hamburg, was anchored in the harbour. The ship's owners purchased large quantities of Norwegian-caught fish, which were processed and frozen on board. Shortly afterwards a Cuxhaven company, Heinz Lohmann & Co. AG, set up a permanent fish-processing factory in the town, not far from my childhood home. Although the fish was mostly processed by four hundred female workers brought in from the Ukraine, many Norwegians also found employment at the Lohmann factory. One of them was my father, who started work there in 1941. At one time a whole floor of our house was requisitioned as living quarters for two of the factory's managers.

The German presence was further reinforced in January 1943 when Hammerfest became the front-line base of two U-boat flotillas, nos 13 and 14, which operated against convoys carrying supplies through the Barents Sea to Russia. U-boot-Stützpunkt Hammerfest was the Black Watch, a 5,000-ton passenger liner which the Germans had commandeered and on board which U-boat crews were given an opportunity to rest and relax after their long and arduous patrols in the Arctic Ocean; it was backed by a cargo ship, the Admiral Carl Hering, which provided workshop facilities and kept the U-boats supplied with torpedoes and ammunition. The Black Watch was moored behind anti-submarine nets close to the Lohmann wharf and was thus clearly visible from my parents' home.

The end came in the autumn of 1944 when Finland concluded a separate peace with the Soviet Union. Soviet troops broke through the Litza front on the Kola peninsula, which for three years had been the scene of a bloody and more or less static war of position. Forced to establish a new line of defence east of Tromsø, the mountain troops of 20. Gebirgsarmee made a rapid retreat. To prevent the Russians from following close on their heels, Hitler ordered their commander, Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic, to adopt the same ruthless scorched-earth policy that had been used to such terrible effect in the Soviet Union. In northern Norway the consequences were disastrous, with more than fifty thousand people being forcibly evacuated to regions further south. Every building, along with the infrastructure, was destroyed, being either burned or blown up, and the harbours were mined. By the time the retreat came to an end in February 1945, an area the size of Denmark had been razed. The only building left standing in Hammerfest was the small sepulchral chapel. My mother, father, brother and two sisters were evacuated towards the end of October 1944. All they were able to take with them were two small suitcases; everything else was consumed by the flames.

I grew up in the 1950s, when Hammerfest was still being rebuilt as a centre of Norway's modern fishing and tourism industries. As children, I and my friends played in the ruins of the Lohmann factory, in the demolished bunkers and in what was left of U-boot-Stützpunkt Hammerfest. In the long winter evenings I often heard my mother talk about the many dramatic events of the war. She described what it had been like when the Russians and British bombed the German installations and when a German troopship, the Blenheim, was torpedoed just outside the approach to the harbour with heavy loss of life. She had seen both the Tirpitz and the Scharnhorst glide past, shadowy shapes against the mountains to the south.

As a writer and chief editor in the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's Television Documentary Department, I set out in the spring of 1999 to search for the wreck of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, but it was not just with the intention of recreating the Battle of the North Cape, which was fought on St Stephen's Day, 26 December 1943. I also felt an urgent need to acquire a deeper understanding of the events that had made the islands and fjords around Hammerfest and Alta into northern Europe's largest naval base - and had so strongly affected the lives of my own family.

I discovered that many good books had been written about the battle, but they were all based on either British or German sources. My advantage was that I would probably be the first person in a position to draw upon declassified files and other sources in all the countries involved in the chain of events that concluded with the tragic loss of the Scharnhorst, namely Great Britain, Germany and Norway, as well as, to a lesser extent, the United States and Russia.

The Battle of the North Cape reached its climax after four action-packed days, starting from the moment convoy JW55B was discovered by a German aircraft in the Norwegian Sea at about eleven in the morning of Wednesday 22 December 1943; the Scharnhorst was sent to the bottom 66 nautical miles north-east of the North Cape at quarter to eight on the evening of Sunday 26 December. On the German side, in addition to the Scharnhorst herself and her five escorting destroyers of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, also engaged were various reconnaissance aircraft and eight U-boats operating from bases in Narvik and Hammerfest. On the basis of war diaries, reports, letters and interviews with survivors, I have endeavoured to cover every facet of the action - to convey something of what it was like for the men battling against wind and wave in the U-boats and surface vessels, for those carrying out lonely reconnaissance flights above the endless expanse of storm-lashed ocean and for those who waited at home, on both sides of the front line. It is the first time such a comprehensive approach has been adopted. I have also tried to put together the first complete picture of the intelligence obtained, both through Enigma decrypts and through the work of the agents in the field. Aided by the new insights afforded into the Scharnhorst's last moments by our film of her mangled hulk on the sea floor, I hope that I have succeeded in recounting the story of the German Navy in northern Norway and the Battle of the North Cape as accurately and realistically as possible. This book is about one of the greatest naval battles ever fought. But it is first of all a book about the people involved.

Many people are entitled to a share of the credit for locating, after much hard work and many frustrating attempts, the wreck of the German battlecruiser in the autumn of the year 2000. They all helped to make this book possible and all are mentioned by name, either in the text or in the notes.

I should like at this point to express my thanks to Bordkameradschaft Scharnhorst, in the person of the association's president, Wolfgang Kube, as well as to the survivors of the ship's sinking and the next-of-kin of the men who were lost, all of whom, in the course of countless long conversations, so freely shared their memories with me. I am especially indebted to Mrs Gertrud Bornmann and Mrs Sigrid Rasmussen, who lost their loved ones in 1943 and 1944 respectively, and who opened their lives to me. I should also like to express my gratitude to the surviving members of U-716 and other German U-boats who took part in the long, drawn-out and arduous submarine war in the Arctic and who so patiently answered my many questions. The same applies to the British and Norwegian officers and men of the Allied fleet which finally surrounded and defeated the Scharnhorst in the fury and darkness of winter off the North Cape.

Allow me also to thank the British television producer Norman Fenton. Over the years he and I spent a great deal of time together in the Barents Sea, from the time we began to search for (and found) the wreck of the British trawler Gaul, right up to the time when we did the same with the Scharnhorst. It is doubtful whether we would have succeeded had it not been for Norman's experience and unflagging enthusiasm.

At the Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv in Freiburg I was greatly helped by Helmut Döringhoff, who on our many visits led us to the documents we sought. The same applies to Jürgen Schlemm, a specialist on the U-boat war, who works in close collaboration with Das U-boot-Archiv in Cuxhaven and the amazing website uboat.net, and who so generously shared his expertise with me. I also wish to thank my Norwegian editor, Harald Engelstad, for his advice and encouragement in the writing of this book, and my translator, Basil Cowlishaw, who, thanks to his experience as a wireless...