Off Cherbourg Coast, Occupied France • February 12, 1942 At dawn on February 12, 1942, a Kriegsmarine (German Navy) battle fleet rounded the Cherbourg peninsula in German-occupied Normandy. Bolting from the port of Brest in neighboring Brittany late the previous night, twin sister battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, together with heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and supporting vessels,…
Tromsø Fjord, Occupied Norway • November 12, 1944 On this date in Norway’s Tromsø Fjord the British Royal Air Force dropped 3 “Tallboy” 13,000‑lb/5,897‑kg bombs to capsize the German battleship Tirpitz, the Kriegsmarine’s ill-starred wannabe surface raider. Ever since September 22, 1943, when a pair of Royal Navy midget submarines engineered a hair-raising daylight attack on this…
Tokyo, Japan • November 11, 1940 Seventh child to a Japanese schoolmaster and his second wife and named “Isoroku” to memorialize his father’s age (56), the future commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet (Rengō Kantai) for much of World War II would seem to have been born under what Westerners call “a lucky star.”…
Scapa Flow, Northern Coast of Scotland, Orkney Islands • October 14, 1939 Illuminated only by the northern lights (aurora borealis) early on this date in 1939, barely 6 weeks into World War II in Europe, a German Type VIIB diesel-electric submarine under the command of Kapitaenleutnant (Captain Lieutenant) Guenther Prien infiltrated the defenses of Scapa Flow, the newly reactivated…
Mers-el-Kébir, French Algeria • July 3, 1940 On June 22 and 23, 1940, representatives of the new French prime minister, Marshal Philippe Pétain, signed armistices with emissaries from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Article 8 of the Franco-German armistice permitted the defeated French nation, headquartered after July 1 in the spa town of Vichy, to…
London, England • May 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the German battleship Bismarck set out from occupied Norway into the main Atlantic shipping lanes, there to act as long-distance commerce raiders. It was the maiden combat voyage of Nazi Germany’s monstrous battleship, the most lethal weapon…
North Cape, Norway • December 26, 1943 On this date, the day after Christmas 1943, the German battleship (aka battlecruiser) Scharnhorst and her crew of 1,968 met their fate in the Battle of the North Cape off the northern tip of Norway. At 32,100 long tons, the sleek, 771‑foot/235‑meter state-of-the-art warship fitted out with 9 11‑inch/28‑centimeter…
Alexandria, Egypt • November 11, 1940 Italian Army operations in North Africa, based in Libya, required a supply line from the Italian mainland. The British Army’s North African Campaign, based in Egypt, suffered from supply difficulties in the Mediterranean Theater due to the proximity of Italy’s Regia Marina naval base at Taranto on the Italian…
Berlin, Germany · June 8, 1940 In an operation remarkable for its precision and boldness, Germany launched Operation Weseruebung, the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, seized its capital, Oslo, and captured the important port of Narvik in Northern Norway. Narvik boasted an ice-free harbor during the long Scandinavian winters, and it was the rail…
London, England · December 26, 1943 The Scharnhorst was a German capital ship, variously described as a battleship and battlecruiser of the German Kriegsmarine. Launched in 1936 and completed in 1939—her nine‑gun, triple turrets the pride of the Kriegsmarine—the 31,500‑ton ship was sister ship to the Gneisenau. During much of the early part of the…