Chris Pope

I bet this car park has some nice shrubbery.

On the day after Christmas in 1943, the last great German battleship in northern waters sailed out into the Arctic night to attack a convoy, and was hunted down and destroyed in a radar guided battle in the polar darkness. Of nearly 2,000 men aboard, only 36 were pulled alive from the freezing sea. Told straight, as history, this is the death of the Scharnhorst. The Scharnhorst was a fast, powerful German battleship, and by late 1943 she was the great remaining threat to the Arctic convoys carrying Allied supplies to the Soviet Union. On December 26, under the command of Rear Admiral Erich Bey, who held the Knight's Cross and had made his name commanding destroyers, she slipped out of her Norwegian fjord to fall upon a convoy in the endless dark of the Arctic winter. It was a trap. The British had broken the German codes and knew she was coming, and they had laid a heavy ambush, cruisers to find and shadow her, and the powerful battleship Duke of York with its own escort waiting to spring. In the near total darkness of an Arctic December, where the sun barely rises, the battle would be fought by radar, the British able to see and shoot at a target they could barely glimpse with the eye. Bey made a fateful error, sending his escorting destroyers off to search elsewhere, which left the Scharnhorst alone. The British cruisers found her, shadowed her by radar, and drew her toward the guns of the Duke of York. When the big British battleship opened fire out of the darkness, the Scharnhorst was caught by surprise. She fought hard and tried to run, but a shell knocked out a boiler and slowed her, and then British destroyers closed in and hammered her with torpedoes until she could barely move. Bey sent a last defiant signal that they would fight to the last shell. Then the Duke of York and the cruisers closed in and pounded the Scharnhorst until she rolled over and sank. She went down in the black, freezing water with almost her entire crew, some 1,900 men. British ships searching the icy sea afterward could find only 36 survivors, and not a single officer among them. Erich Bey was seen in the water but was never recovered. It was the last time a German capital ship fought a surface battle, and it marked the effective end of the German surface fleet as a threat. The Battle of North Cape, fought in the Arctic dark by radar, closed the age of the German battleship.