The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 12

Norway, was increasingly up-gunned with single and quadruple 20-mm
antiaircraft mounts, but by and large she remained until the end of her days, like
most battleships, vulnerable to air attack. 15
However, it is important to remember that any advantages or
disadvantages Tirpitz may have possessed as a fighting ship were rendered largely
academic by the increasing superiority of Allied radar technology. By 1943, the
ability to locate, track, and train their capital ships’ weapons by radar gave the
Allies an enormous advantage in any gun duel, especially in the perpetual
darkness and inclement weather of the Arctic winter. This is perhaps best
illustrated by the fate of the German battleship Scharnhorst off the North Cape in
December 1943. Lured out to sea by a British ruse, Scharnhorst made for convoy
JW-55B only to come under fire from enemy warships in a carefully laid trap.
Scharnhorst, considered by her crew the luckiest ship in the Kriegsmarine,
fumbled blindly around in the Polar darkness while she was ambushed repeatedly
by accurate British radar directed gunnery. Her superior speed almost enabled her
to escape back to Norway, until a parting shell from the battleship Duke of York
crippled her propulsion and enabled the British to close. Overwhelmed, the
gallant but doomed Scharnhorst eventually slipped beneath the icy waves with all
but thirty-six of her crew. Tirpitz’s radar equipment, though good by early-war
standards, was by 1943 outclassed by the rapid pace of Allied electronic
development—particularly the ability to integrate radar and fire control. 16
The battleship Tirpitz, named after Grand-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz,
father of the German Navy, was launched on (a perhaps inauspicious) April
Fools’ Day in 1939. Commissioned 25 February 1941, the ship will forever be
associated with Nazi-occupied Norway and the Arctic convoy battles. Upon
completion of sea trials in January 1942, she was allocated to Norway as the
centerpiece in Hitler’s defense of Fortress Europe’s northern flank. From the
outset, the intention was to utilize the battleship actively against the Allied
convoys to the Soviet Union. The battleship’s two major forays against the Arctic
convoys would, however, prove abortive, although Tirpitz’s presence in the area
indirectly led to the annihilation of convoy PQ-17. 17
Tirpitz’s first sortie into the Arctic Ocean has in post-war sources been
called Operation Sportpalast. The operation’s actual name, insofar as it was given
one, was Nordmeer, coined by its commander Admiral Otto Ciliax. Nordmeer
took place between 6 and 13 March 1942; the target was convoy PQ-12, bound
for Murmansk. Accompanying Tirpitz was a small escort composed of destroyers
Z25, Friedrich Ihn, and Herrmann Schoemann. Having left Kiel in Germany for
her new base in Fættenfjord, near the city of Trondheim in central Norway, only
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