Battle of the North Cape

26 December 1943, Barents Sea, off the North Cape

British victory; Scharnhorst sunk

On Christmas Day 1943 Scharnhorst, the last German battleship fit for sea, sailed from Altafjord with five destroyers under Rear-Admiral Erich Bey to attack convoy JW 55B. British codebreakers read the signals, and Admiral Bruce Fraser was waiting to the south-west with the battleship Duke of York. In darkness and a gale on the morning of 26 December Bey sent his destroyers off to search; they never found the convoy, and took no part in what followed. Vice-Admiral Robert Burnett's cruisers Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield found Scharnhorst by radar, hit her and twice drove her off the convoy. That afternoon, steering for home, she ran into Duke of York. Blinded by star shell and outranged in the dark by radar-directed 14-inch guns, she was hit again and again; a shell in her boiler room slowed her, and Fraser's destroyers closed in from both sides with torpedoes. Belfast and Jamaica finished her. She sank at 19:45. Of 1,968 men aboard, 36 were saved; Bey and her captain, Fritz Hintze, were not among them. It was the last battle between big-gun ships in European waters.