1:00 a.m.
on the morning of the 13th of February, 1942, a private telephone rings in the residence of the first seaord.
Admiral Sir Dudley Pound picks up the receiver.
He calls the direct line to 10 Downing Street and waits.
When Churchill answers, Pound tells him that the German battle cruisers have cleared the Straits of Dover, that they have reached the safety of home waters, that they are gone.
Churchill says one word, why? And puts down the phone.
The following morning, the Times publishes an editorial that will be quoted for decades.
Nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power has happened in home waters since the 17th century.
The question reached every newspaper in the country, every corridor in Westminster.
How? Here is the answer that makes the question worse.
Britain knew they were coming.
The execute order for the defense plan had been issued 10 days before a single German ship left port.
The Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and the Coastal Artillery had been on alert.
In three German warships, three had sailed through the world’s most heavily patrolled waterway 21 mi from the English coast in broad daylight.
and not one of them had been stopped.
That is not a story about surprise.
It is a story about something more troubling than surprise.
Shanho and Gnis now had arrived in Breast on the 22nd of March 1941, completing two months of operations against Allied convoy routes in the North Atlantic.
Between them, they had terrified a supply line Britain could not afford to lose.
They could not match a British battleship.
Their 11-in guns were too light for that.
But they could destroy any convoy they found and any cruiser that tried to protect one.
As long as they existed in an Atlantic port, the Royal Navy had to keep capital ships in reserve against them, tying up warships needed elsewhere on every other sea.
In June 1941, the heavy cruiser Prince Agen joined them at Breast, fresh from accompanying Bismar on her final sorty.
And the three ships became what the Admiral Ty quietly called the Breast Group.
A fixed problem that could not be solved, could not be ignored, and refused to go away.
Bomber Command tried between December 10th, 1941 and January 20th, 1942.
37% of all heavy bomber sorties were directed at three ships in a single harbor.
37% of a strategic air campaign expended on targets that continued to float.
The ships were damaged, repaired, damaged again.
They did not sink.
The fleet airarm tried too.
In April 1941, flying officer Kenneth Campbell of number 22 squadron pressed his torpedo bomber through a wall of anti-aircraft fire to put a torpedo into Gnisenau.
He was the only aircraft to reach the target.
His plane was shot down immediately after.
The damage to Ganisau was real but not fatal.
Campbell was awarded aostumous Victoria Cross.
Gnai was back at sea within months.
The breast group had survived everything Britain threw at them for nearly a year.
By the winter of 1942, the Admiral Ty had arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion.
If these ships were going to be stopped, they would have to be stopped at sea.
On January 12th, 1942, Adolf Hitler convenes a conference at his headquarters in East Prussia.
Around the table, Field Marshall Keitel, General Yodel, Grand Admiral Rider, General Jesune of the Luftvafer, and two men who will matter enormously in the weeks ahead.
Vice Admiral Otto Celiacs, who will command the German squadron, and Colonel Adolf Galland, who will protect it from the air.
Hitler speaks first.
He has become convinced the British will invade Norway, that the northern coast is the critical vulnerability of his European fortress.
The three ships at breast are wasted in the Atlantic.
He wants them moved to Norwegian waters and he wants them moved through the English Channel.
Raider objects.
His memo to the Furer dated January 8th is unambiguous.
A channel passage would expose the fleet to attack at the most dangerous point, the narrowest stretch of water in the world, overlooked by British guns at Dover, patrolled by British aircraft, seown with British mines.
He predicts heavy damage at best, total loss at worst.
I therefore see myself, according to my innermost conviction, Raider writes, not in a position to propose such a transfer operation.
Hitler’s response is straightforward.
If Raider refuses, the ships will be decommissioned, their guns dismantled and mounted on shore batteries.
Raider gives in.
The plan that follows is meticulous in ways Raider’s objections never anticipated.
Celiacs will command the squadron from Shanhost’s bridge.
The departure window, moon, tides, weather points to the period of 11th to 15th February, and the timing contains a decision that will prove to be the single most consequential choice of the entire operation.
The British, everyone agrees, will expect the German fleet to reach Dover at night when the English coastal guns cannot engage a moving target in darkness.
So the Germans plan the opposite.
They will leave Breast after dark on the 11th.
They will pass Dover at noon on the 12th in broad daylight at full speed into whatever Britain can throw at them.
Gallen’s air umbrella is the keystone of the whole plan.
At least 16 fighters overhead at all times.
Four flights of four rotating in 30 minute cycles, flying figure 8 patterns at low and high altitude east and west of the fleet.
Eight days of rehearsal patrols between 22nd January and 10th February practicing the rotation until the pilots can execute it without thinking.
They are told nothing about why.
These are officially routine sorties.
Galand guarantees continuous fighter cover from the moment the fleet enters the channel to the moment it clears the North Sea.
General Martini, the Luftvafer’s radar chief, addresses the other problem.
British coastal radar will be watching.
The solution? Begin jamming the radar frequencies now in early February at such low power it reads as background interference.
Increase the power by imperceptible degrees day by day until by the time the fleet sails, British radar is producing noise rather than contacts.
And British operators have spent 2 weeks attributing it to equipment faults.
While the technical preparations proceed, so does the theater.
Drums of lubricating oil stamped for use in the tropics are unloaded visibly at breast railway station.
White uniforms and sun helmets appear aboard the ships.
Admiral Salvear sends his officers an invitation.
A shooting party in the woods outside Paris, followed by dinner.
A masked ball for the enlisted crews is organized in breast itself.
Both events are scheduled for the 12th of February, the exact day the fleet intends to be at sea.
There is one officer who is not optimistic about the mission.
Siliacs, chosen to lead it, is privately unconvinced.
He is 50 years old, a career naval officer who earned his first command before the current war began.
His nickname in the fleet, Dear Schwartzar, the Black Zar, reflects his reputation as a disciplinarian rather than an inspirer.
He is not a man for flourishes.
When he addresses his captains before departure, he does not reach for the ceremonial.
It is a bold and unheard of operation for the German Navy.
He tells them it will succeed if these orders are strictly obeyed.
He believes it can be done.
He does not particularly believe it should be.
Britain is not caught by surprise.
That is the most important thing to understand about what follows.
On February 2nd, 1942, the Admiral T issues a signal.
The intelligence picture Ultra Decrypts photographic reconnaissance agent reports from France has converged on a single assessment.
The breast group is going to move and it is going to move through the channel.
The signal carries the code word executive fuller.
It is the order to activate the defense plan 10 days before a single German ship leaves harbor.
Operation Fuller as written is formidable.
Motor torpedo boats from Dover.
Coastal guns at the straight.
Five RAF fighter squadrons escorting fleet air armed torpedo bombers.
Destroyers from Harwitch, bomber command in coordinated waves, mines laid along the route.
The plan covers every phase of a German transit and assigns each service its role.
The plan has one floor.
It is not a small floor.
Admiral Bertram Ramsay, stationed at Dover, has built Fuller around a single assumption.
The Germans will time their departure to reach the narrowest point of the channel at night under cover of darkness when the coastal guns cannot engage.
Everything in the plan calibrates to this.
The MTBs expect to operate without daylight.
The Swordfish torpedo bombers have been briefed on nighttime approach routes.
The coastal batteries have prepared for nightfiring conditions.
No one questions the assumption.
It is the logical thing the Germans would do.
logical to the point where the alternative is barely considered.
There are other problems.
The heavy ships of the home fleet are held at Scapa Flow watching for turpets in Norway.
Torpedo bombers that might reinforce the channel defenses have been sent north for the same reason or dispatched overseas to other theaters.
Coastal commands night patrol aircraft are uncoordinated.
Their crews have not been briefed on Fuller’s existence, and when their radar malfunctions that night, they file technical reports rather than raise an alarm.
And somewhere in the planning files, assigned so little priority that the crews who fly the missions call them gardening.
There are orders for mine laying sorties along the southern approaches.
Inexperienced crews use these runs to build their hours.
Nobody pays them particular attention.
Breast.
The evening of February 11th, 1942.
A British submarine is holding station off the approaches to the harbor, positioned there specifically to watch for this moment, to report if the German ships move, to fire if she can.
Her batteries need recharging.
She withdraws to the surface and moves off to conduct her routine.
She will be back on station in the morning at 9:15 p.
m.
as the last RAF aircraft from a bombing raid turns for home.
Shanho Gnisau, Prince Oegan, and their escort of six destroyers move out of breast under cloud cover and head north.
By 2:00 a.
m.
, the fleet is passing Ushant, entering the channel proper.
Silix addresses his crews by loudspeaker from Shan Host’s bridge.
The Furer has summoned us to new tasks in other waters.
He begins.
He closes with the formula all German commanders use when there is nothing comfortable to say.
The crews listen.
The engines turn at 27 knots.
The fleet disappears north into the dark.
Dawn comes gray and difficult.
Cloud sits low over the channel.
Intermittent rain squalls move in from the west.
The morning reconnaissance patrols see nothing through the overcast.
The radar interference that British operators have been logging for 2 weeks as equipment malfunction continues to produce noise across the coastal stations.
One patrol aircraft returns early because of fog at its base.
Another abandons its route because its radar has stopped working.
The third sees nothing.
At Bigan Hill, a sector controller named Squadron leader Bill Igo is watching his radar display.
He reads the plots with more care than the accumulated assumptions suggest is necessary.
He identifies the formation.
He identifies it correctly.
He raises the alarm.
His warning is not given the priority it deserves.
The machinery of institutional response turns slowly, calibrated for a fleet expected at midnight rather than at morning.
When it turns, it turns toward procedures built for the wrong scenario.
It is now approaching 11 in the morning.
The breast group is in the do straits, the narrowest point of the English Channel.
More than 200 Luftvafa fighters rotate above them in gallons, figure8 patterns, 30inut cycles, low and high altitude both.
The fleet is moving at 29 knots.
The British had planned for do at midnight.
While the German fleet was crossing the Dover Straits on the morning of the 12th, the man who would lead Britain’s most consequential response had spent the afternoon and evening before at Buckingham Palace.
The 11th of February, Lieutenant Commander Eugene Mond stands before King George V 6th in the palace investature room and receives the Distinguished Service Order.
He’s 32 years old.
He has been a pilot for most of his adult life.
commercial flying boats between London and Sydney in the 1930s.
A regular route between Rangon and Manderlay.
The kind of long-d distanceance work that teaches a man weather and navigation and what machines can and cannot do at their limits.
He survived the sinking of HMS Courageous in 1939.
He survived the sinking of HMS Ark Royal in 1941.
In May of 1941, he led 825 naval air squadrons, nine Swordfish biplanes off the deck of HMS Victorious in foul North Atlantic weather, flew 120 mi, and hit Bismar amid ships with a torpedo, not enough to sink her.
Enough to say it was done.
The DSO is for the Bismar attack.
That evening, Esmon drives to RAF Manston in Kent where 825 squadron is on alert.
He knows what the alert is for.
He knows what his aircraft are.
The fairy swordfish is a fabric covered biplane.
Open cockpit fixed undercarriage.
A single radial engine producing 690 horsepower.
enough to move the aircraft at 138 mph without a payload.
Under a full torpedo load, it flies at perhaps 90.
The German fighters protecting the fleet fly at 370.
The Swordfish carries no armor.
In the right conditions, it can be brought down by rifle fire.
Is asks Sir Dudley Poundound not to send his crews on this mission.
He does not dress it up.
He tells the first sea lord plainly that his aircraft cannot survive a daylight attack through the fighter cover the German fleet is carrying.
Pound’s response.
The navy will attack the enemy whenever and wherever he is found.
There is nothing in that sentence as Mond can argue with.
It is not cruelty.
It is the Navy’s entire tradition spoken aloud.
As understands this, he goes back to Mansston.
He waits for the morning.
The morning comes.
The first response is already underway.
Five motor torpedo boats under Lieutenant Commander Een Pumprey have been scrambled from Dover and are running northeast through a building sea.
They charge through the destroyer screen.
They fire their torpedoes.
The German destroyers and Eboats push them off.
No torpedoes connect.
The 14-in coastal guns at Dover open fire.
They are shooting through reduced visibility at targets moving at 29 knots at ranges that strain the guns to their practical limit.
They hit nothing.
The German fleet does not slow down.
At Manston, Esmond has been waiting at the rendevu for his escort.
The plan calls for five full RAF fighter squadrons to accompany the six swordfish.
The five squadrons cannot be briefed and assembled and airborne in time.
Of the five, one fraction arrives.
10 Spitfires of number 72 squadron.
As Mont waits as long as he calculates he can, every minute he waits, the German fleet moves further northeast, further from effective range.
He takes off with the 10 Spitfires and what he has.
It is shortly after noon.
The six swordfish climb out over the channel.
The Spitfires trying to hold formation with machines flying at a third of their natural speed.
Within minutes of crossing the coast, German fighters from JG2 and JG26 engage the escort.
The Spitfires break to fight.
The swordfish, camouflaged on top and slow below the cloud layer, disappear into the merc.
When the Spitfires look for them again, they are gone.
A swordfish doing 90 mph is invisible inside cloud to a fighter doing four times that.
The cloud closes between them.
The six swordfish are alone.
They fly on below and ahead the gray bulk of the German fleet.
Shanhost, Gnisau, Prince Oyen, and a screen of 30 odd destroyers and torpedo boats.
All guns elevated.
the air above them.
A continuous rotation of FW190’s leads from the front.
He has always led from the front.
His aircraft takes the first serious hit before he reaches the fleet.
The port wing is shattered.
Not destroyed, shattered, hanging wrong, trailing fabric.
He flies on.
His aircraft is hit again.
It catches fire.
He holds the heading.
He releases the torpedo.
The plane goes into the sea.
Behind him, the other five Swordfish press on in aircraft that are already coming apart.
Sub Lieutenant Brian Rose, wounded in the back by cannon shell splinters, holds the controls while his rear gunner is killed behind him.
He releases his torpedo toward Gnisau.
His fuel tank is hit and he glides the plane down half a mile from Prince Organ and puts it on the water.
He and his observer climb out.
The plane sinks immediately.
They wait in a dinghy for 90 minutes until a motor torpedo boat finds them.
20 minutes after leaving Manston, all six swordfish are down.
Of the 18 air crew, 13 are dead.
Five survive.
The German war diary entry for 12th of February, 1942 records the mothball attack of a handful of ancient planes piloted by men whose bravery surpasses any other action by either side that day.
Admiral Ramsay will later write that the attack constitutes one of the finest exhibitions of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty of the war.
Eugene Esmon was 32 years old.
He was postumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
The second received by a member of 825 squadron following flying officer Kenneth Campbell’s postumous decoration for an equally hopeless torpedo run against Gnisau a year before.
The destroyers from Haritch try next.
Five ships run southwest at 28 knots in worsening weather, bombed simultaneously by the Luftvafer and in the confusion by the RAF.
Each fleet mistaking them for the others escorts.
HMS Worcester closes to 2,200 yd before firing 2,200 yd from the main battery of a German battle cruiser.
Six heavy caliber shells hit her in return.
23 men die.
No torpedo from the destroyer attack finds a target.
By midafter afternoon, bomber command has dispatched 242 aircraft.
They fly singly in pairs through the overcast and squall that has settled over the southern North Sea.
39 find their target and drop their bombs.
22 aircraft are shot down or go missing.
None of the bombs hit.
The fleet clears the straits.
It accelerates into the North Sea.
Intact.
Silc has done what he said he would do.
The North Sea.
Early evening of the 12th.
The German fleet is running hard for home.
Shanho shutters.
Below the water line.
Something detonates.
The starboard engines lose power.
Water comes in.
1,000 tons of it before the watertight sections hold.
The ship slows to 12 knots while the damage control parties work.
Then she limps on.
At 5 minutes to 9 in the evening, Gna now hits a mine.
A hole opens in her starboard side.
The center turbine goes offline.
She can make 15 knots.
She makes 15 knots.
These mines were not laid by a heroic strike mission.
They were not part of any coordinated response to the channel dash.
They were laid by bomber command on mine laying sorties.
Gardening missions so named because crews thought of the mines as seeds being sewn at sea.
Low prestige work frequently assigned to inexperienced crews building their flight hours before moving on to the main bombing campaign.
No special briefings, no tactical coordination, just trainees flying out over dark water, dropping their cargo at the designated coordinates, and flying home.
The MTBs failed.
The coastal guns failed.
The swordfish were destroyed.
The destroyers were shot to pieces.
242 bombers could not put a single bomb on a German warship.
The gardening sorties, the training missions nobody thought twice about, damaged two of the three ships.
Churchill cannot tell Parliament.
He cannot tell the newspapers.
If the British acknowledged that mine strikes revealed knowledge of German rooting, it traces back to Enigma.
And Enigma must be protected above everything.
Britain’s only real success of the day is a secret the government must keep until the war is over.
The Bucknell report investigating every failure of the day was completed in 1943.
The Admiral T suppressed it until 1947.
Shaunh arrived at Vil Helms Harven on the morning of the 13th carrying a thousand tons of sea water and damage that would take 3 months to repair.
Ganizer now limped into Ke was hit by RAF bombers in harbor two weeks later and the resulting magazine explosion destroyed her forward turret.
She was taken out of service for conversion and never returned to it.
She spent the rest of the war at anchor was scuttled as a block ship in 1945 and never fired her guns in anger again.
Shanhost was back at sea within the year.
On December 26th, 1943, she was caught by HMS Duke of York and her consorts in the Barren Sea.
When the firing stopped, all but 35 of her crew were dead.
Prince Ugen was the survivor.
She made it through the war, was handed over to the Americans, and was towed to Bikini Atal in 1946 as a target ship for the atomic tests.
She survived both blasts.
She was contaminated with radiation, could not be decontaminated, could not be birthed, and in December 1946, she capsized in the lagoon and sank.
These were the ships Britain failed to stop.
They never threatened the Atlantic again.
The moment they left Breast, they abandoned the finest Atlantic base in occupied Europe, a harbor that had allowed them to menace British convoy roots for nearly a year.
6 weeks after the channel dash on 28th March 1942, British commandos raided San Nazair and destroyed the Normandy dock, the only dry dock in France large enough to accommodate Germany’s heaviest warships.
The marine had surrendered its best strategic position for a Norwegian coastline it never needed.
It had traded the Atlantic for a fjord and left behind a base the British promptly made unusable.
Raider had written that he could not in good conscience propose such an operation.
He was wrong about the tactical outcome and write about everything that came after.
At Ramsgate in Kent, there is a granite stone with a black marble tablet.
13 names.
Winston Churchill in his 1945 victory broadcast mentioned Eugene as Mund by name.
He had received his distinguished service order on the evening of the 11th of February.
He was killed at sea before noon on the 12th.
He was 32 years
