When was the Channel Dash?

The German ships left Brest late in the evening of 11 February 1942, passed the Strait of Dover on 12 February and reached German waters on 13 February.

Which ships took part in the Channel Dash?

The battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escorted by destroyers, torpedo boats, E-boats and Luftwaffe fighters.

Why did the British fail to stop the Channel Dash?

They expected the ships to pass Dover at night, reconnaissance aircraft failed, sightings were reported late, and the attacks that followed were piecemeal and without enough fighter cover.

What happened to the Swordfish in the Channel Dash?

All six Swordfish of 825 Squadron, led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, were shot down, and 13 of their 18 crew were killed. Esmonde received a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Who won the Channel Dash?

The Germans achieved their aim and brought the ships home, a humiliation for Britain. But it is often called a strategic defeat for Germany, because the ships were much less of a threat to the Atlantic convoys once they left Brest.

The Channel Dash, 1942: three German warships through the Strait of Dover

Royal Air Force official photographer, Halifaxes of No. 35 Squadron attacking the dry docks at Brest, where Scharnhorst and Gneisenau lay, 18 December 1941 (IWM C 4109), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Quick answer

What was the Channel Dash?

The Channel Dash, German code name Operation Cerberus, was the run of the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from Brest in occupied France up the English Channel to Germany on 11 to 13 February 1942. Slipping out at night and unseen for hours, they passed the Strait of Dover in daylight. British air, naval and coastal gun attacks, including a hopeless charge by six Swordfish biplanes, failed to stop them; only mines damaged two of the ships.¹

No enemy fleet had sailed through the English Channel in defiance of the Royal Navy for centuries. In February 1942 three German capital ships did it in broad daylight, and the British discovered it only when they were already near Dover.²

Ships trapped at Brest

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had docked at Brest after raiding the Atlantic convoys, and Prinz Eugen joined them after the hunt for the Bismarck. The port was easy for the RAF to reach, and the ships were bombed again and again; the photograph above shows Halifax bombers over the docks on 18 December 1941. According to Manston History, Hitler wanted them home, closer to Norway, where he expected an Allied landing.³

The safer route ran around the British Isles through the Denmark Strait. The Germans chose the short one, a high speed run through the Channel, with surprise and Luftwaffe cover under Adolf Galland on their side. Manston History adds that minesweepers cleared a path and that false rumors spoke of a voyage to the tropics.⁴

A plan for the wrong timing

The British had expected exactly this and had a plan, Operation Fuller, which Manston History describes as combining motor torpedo boats, torpedo bombers, the coastal guns at Dover, Bomber Command and destroyers. By the same account, Enigma decrypts showed that Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax had joined Scharnhorst on 5 February and that the Germans were sweeping mines up the Channel. But almost everyone, from the Admiralty to Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay at Dover, assumed the ships would leave by day so as to pass the narrow Strait of Dover at night.⁵

Instead Ciliax sailed late on 11 February, just after an RAF raid had ended; Zimmerman gives 9:15 p.m., the RAF Museum 10:45 p.m.. The patrol aircraft that should have seen him failed one by one: two Coastal Command planes had radar trouble and a third was called home early by fog. Manston History notes that the submarine watching the port had moved off to recharge her batteries.⁶

Discovered off Dover

The squadron steamed up the Channel unseen through the night and into the morning. British radar picked up a large formation at about 10:16 a.m. on 12 February, and Spitfire pilots saw the ships soon afterward, but under orders to keep radio silence they reported only after landing, at 10:50 and at about 11:10. When Winston Churchill heard, according to Dwight Jon Zimmerman, he ordered that the ships be intercepted and made to pay dearly for their audacity.⁷

The response was slow and piecemeal. The coastal battery at South Foreland fired 33 rounds by radar, all of them misses. According to Manston History, motor torpedo boats from Dover were blocked by lines of E-boats and fired from too far away.⁸

Six Swordfish

The only aircraft ready to attack at once were six Fairey Swordfish of 825 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, at RAF Manston: slow, open cockpit biplanes trained for a night attack and now sent in by day. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, had by its account received the DSO from the King the day before for his part in the attack on the Bismarck. It also records his plea to the fighter controllers to get the fighters to him on time, "for the love of God".⁹

They took off at 12:20 p.m. Five squadrons of fighters were promised; only ten Spitfires met them. All six Swordfish were shot down by flak and German fighters, and 13 of the 18 airmen were killed. Esmonde was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Zimmerman quotes Scharnhorst's captain, Kurt Hoffmann: "Poor fellows. They are so very slow. It is nothing but suicide for them to fly against these big ships."¹⁰

Mines, and a mortifying verdict

Further attacks did no better. Zimmerman counts 242 bombers sent, of which only 39 were reported to have attacked, without a hit. The destroyers sent from Harwich made one torpedo attack, and HMS Worcester was left a drifting wreck with 27 dead. By Zimmerman's count Britain lost 42 aircraft in all.¹¹

The only damage came from mines. By Zimmerman's account two seriously damaged Scharnhorst and left her stopped for a time, and a third hit Gneisenau. Shortly before noon on 13 February, Zimmerman writes, Ciliax reported that Operation Cerberus had been successfully completed. The Times wrote that nothing more mortifying to the pride of British sea power had happened since the seventeenth century.¹²

Yet Zimmerman also calls it a tactical victory for the Germans and a strategic defeat: from Norway and German ports the ships were much less of a threat to the Atlantic convoys than they had been at Brest.¹³ › Battle of the Barents Sea, 1942