Description

An epic account of how the Royal Navy tracked down cornered and sank one of the most fearsome German warships of the Second World War

The Scharnhorst was a state of the art capital ship of Nazi Germanys navy Launched in 1936 she had terrorized Allied shipping since the beginning of the war famously destroying the aircraft destroyer HMS Glorious in June 1940 Since then she had made numerous sorties into the Atlantic to raid British merchant fleets and had evaded destruction in the Channel Dash of 1942 in order to interrupt convoys to the Soviet Union

The danger posed by the Scharnhorst to the Arctic convoys was monumental Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser commanderinchief of the Home Fleet devised a plan to lure their enemy from its Norwegian base and pound it with shells from the battleship HMS Duke of York and supporting cruisers and destroyers

John Wintons comprehensively researched book drawing on British and German eyewitness accounts uncovers how the threat of the Scharnhorst was eventually brought to an end at the Battle of the North Cape in the freezing conditions of the Barents Sea