1939- 1945 Gneisenau: a brilliant compromise, or a waste of resources?
She was to become one of the best-known German war ships of the Second World War, but that actually says very little, for the surface fleet in which she served was incapable of making a real mark on the conflict.
SCHARNHORST AND GNEISENAU
There was an indissoluable bond between the two sister-ships, both at the time and in retrospect, and indeed, they were to operate together regularly; historians have come to consider, however, that they were at their most effective in terms of the threat they posed, rather than in the real damage they managed to inflict, and their worth has been brought into question as a result.
During October 1939, Gneisenau operated in the North Sea, but without notable success. The following month she sortied into the North Atlantic, to draw attention away from the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, and managed to sink the lightly armed (and unarmoured) auxiliary cruiser Rawalpindi on 23 November, being subsequently forced to return to port by storm damage. She sortied into the North Atlantic again in the spring of 1940, this time in company with Scharnhorst and the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. During the Norwegian campaign of May-June she served as the flagship of Gunther Lutjens, and was responsible, along with her sister-ship, for sinking the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two screening destroyers. She then took refuge in Trondheim until late June, and when she did put to sea again she was struck by a torpedo from the submarine HMS Clyde which put her out of action until the last days of the year. She tried to return to the open ocean then, but was forced back by storm damage. Launched in 1936 amongst huge publiciIy the Gneisenau was a compromise, under-gunned and poorly balanced. Twice she was driven back to port by storm damage.
THE CHANNEL DASH
Gneisenau finally managed to get out into the Atlantic again at the end of January 1941, and operated, once again in company with Scharnhorst, in the area south of Iceland, the two battleships sinking an estimated 115,000 tons of merchant shipping. At the end of this cruise the two ships made port at Brest on 22 March, and while at anchor there, Gneisenau was damaged by an aerial torpedo. In all, over the 11 months which followed, RAF bomber command dropped 3413 tons of bombs on Brest and lost 127 air craft in the process, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time before one or both of them was destroyed. The following February she made a run for the comparative safety of Kiel, in Operation Cerberus, the so-called Channel Dash. In company with Scharnhorst, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and six destroyers, she left Brest at 23.45hrs on 11 February, and began to make her way up the English Channel. Joined by ten S-boats and nine MTBs from Le Havre, it was a little after midday on 12 February before she first came under attack, from a formation of British Torpedo boats operating out of Dover and Ramsgate, just east of the Dover Straight. The attacking force was driven off. Next it was the turn of the Royal Naval Air Service, which sent six Swordfish torpedo bombers against the German flotilla, losing them all in the process. At 14.31hrs, off the Belgian Coast, Scharnhorst hit a mine, and was dead in the water for half an hour before her engineers got her under way again, and 15 minutes later the ships came under attack from Hudsons and Blenheims of the RAFs Coastal Command. A coastal patrol craft was sunk and two torpedo boats damaged, but the bigger ships drove the aircraft off with gunfire. At 19.55hrs it was Gneisenaus turn to hit a mine, but she was able to continue; Scharnhorst hit another at 2134, but she, too, limped onwards, arriving at Wilhelms haven in the early hours of 13 February. Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen joined her there before dawn, and immediately made their way through the Kiel Canal.
On the night of 26-27 February, a mixed force of RAF bombers attacked Kiel Dockyard, blowing off the Gneisenaus bow and killing 113 of her seamen. That was the end of her as an effective fighting unit. Her guns were removed and installed in coastal fortresses, and in April she was moved to Gdynia, supposedly to be repaired and refitted. This never took place, and she was scuttled to block the approaches to the harbour there in the last days of the war. Her hulk was broken up for scrap in 1947-48.
