When and where was the Battle of the Barents Sea?

On the morning of 31 December 1942, in the Barents Sea off the North Cape of Norway, during the passage of Arctic convoy JW 51B to Murmansk.

Who won the Battle of the Barents Sea?

The British. Their destroyers and cruisers drove off a much stronger German force, and all fourteen merchant ships of the convoy got through.

What ships were sunk at the Battle of the Barents Sea?

The British lost the destroyer Achates and the minesweeper Bramble, with all 121 men aboard. The Germans lost the destroyer Friedrich Eckoldt with all hands.

Why did Admiral Raeder resign after the Barents Sea?

Hitler was furious that two big ships had failed to destroy a weakly escorted convoy and ordered the heavy ships scrapped. Raeder resigned and was replaced by Karl Dönitz.

Who was Robert Sherbrooke?

The captain of the destroyer Onslow and commander of the convoy's escort. He was badly wounded in the battle, lost the sight of one eye and was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Battle of the Barents Sea, 1942: the destroyers that saved JW 51B

The German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper in Norwegian waters, about 1942. US Navy photograph NH 71399, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Quick answer

What happened at the Battle of the Barents Sea?

On 31 December 1942 a German force led by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and the Lützow attacked convoy JW 51B, bound for Murmansk, in the Arctic twilight off the North Cape. British destroyers under Captain Robert Sherbrooke kept them off with feigned torpedo attacks until the cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica arrived. Not one merchant ship was lost, and Hitler's fury at the result cost Admiral Raeder his post.¹

The Battle of the Barents Sea was fought in near darkness, in a season when the sun never rises above the horizon there. It was small as naval battles go, but few have had such an outsized effect on the side that lost it.²

The convoys to Murmansk

From 1941 the Allies shipped weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union around the north of Norway to Murmansk and Archangel. In July 1942, according to Guttman, German submarines and aircraft sank 23 of the 35 ships of convoy PQ 17 after the British, fearing an attack by German heavy ships, ordered it to scatter. The heavy ships never came. Hitler was pleased, but he still expected his surface fleet to fight.³ › Channel Dash, 1942

Convoy JW 51B, fourteen merchant ships carrying war material, was sighted by the German submarine U-354 on 30 December. A German force put to sea at once in an operation called Regenbogen, Rainbow: Vice Admiral Oskar Kummetz in the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and the Lützow, each with three destroyers, were to catch the convoy between them.⁴

Kummetz sailed under a handicap. Since the loss of the Bismarck in May 1941 Hitler had ordered his big ships to avoid unnecessary risks, and as Kummetz left he was told again to use caution even against an enemy of equal strength.⁵

Destroyers against a cruiser

The fighting began at about 8:30 a.m. when the destroyer Obdurate came under fire from three German destroyers, soon joined by the Hipper. The British covering force, the light cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica under Rear Admiral Robert Burnett, was about 30 miles to the north.⁶

Captain Robert Sherbrooke, commanding the escort from the destroyer Onslow, did the opposite of what a weaker force is supposed to do. He split his destroyers, sending some against the German destroyers while he led the rest toward the heavy cruiser. Again and again the British destroyers turned in as if to fire torpedoes; under orders to avoid risk, the Germans turned away. His Victoria Cross citation records that four times he forced the superior enemy to retire under cover of smoke.⁷

After about 40 minutes the Onslow was hit forward and Sherbrooke was badly wounded in the face by splinters, losing the sight of one eye. He went on directing his ships until the next senior officer had taken over, and even then insisted on being kept informed in his smoke-filled sea cabin until the convoy was out of danger.⁸

Losses in the twilight

The escort paid for it. The minesweeper Bramble, searching for stragglers, ran into the Hipper and was blasted out of the water; none of her 121 men survived. The destroyer Achates, making smoke to hide the convoy, was sunk too. The Lützow reached the convoy but turned away in a snow squall.⁹

Then Burnett's cruisers arrived and attacked at once. They hit the Hipper, and the German destroyer Friedrich Eckoldt, which had finished off the Bramble, mistook the Sheffield for the Hipper and was sunk with all hands. The Lützow found the convoy again at 11:40 a.m. but did only minor damage, and nine minutes later Kummetz signaled a general withdrawal. Every merchant ship of JW 51B reached its destination.¹⁰

Hitler and the fleet

In Berlin the result turned to rage. The two accounts differ in degree: Jon Guttman of HistoryNet writes that Hitler ordered the entire surface fleet scrapped, while WW2 Today says he ordered all German capital ships broken up. Both agree on the result. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the navy since before the war, resigned, and Hitler replaced him with the head of the U-boat arm, Admiral Karl Dönitz. Dönitz kept the battleship Tirpitz and the battlecruiser Scharnhorst for Arctic operations but put the weight of the navy's war on the submarines.¹¹

Guttman draws the lessons plainly: a vague order to avoid risk robbed the German admirals of their initiative, the two halves of the attack lost each other in the weather, and a bold escort commander turned a hopeless position into a victory.¹²

Sherbrooke survived his wounds. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, and after the war he commanded the cruiser Aurora, became a rear admiral in 1951 and retired in 1954.¹³