WW II: Germany's Toothless Dog
In Ancient Greek mythology, the Gates of the Underworld are guarded by Cerberus the three-headed dog, a fearsome, monster-sized creature with a serpent for a tail. Woe be to anyone who attempted to escape Hades having to get by that daunting animal. Operation Cerberus was the name of a significant German military maneuver in the early stages of World War II, and it certainly was one of the most audacious missions ever attempted.
To set this event in proper context, here was the situation: America had just been jolted into the war from the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor three months prior, on December 7th, 1941. The U.S. was reeling from early defeats at the hands of Japan in the Pacific and although we had declared war on Germany immediately after Pearl Harbor, we weren’t yet actually fighting in Europe. Great Britain was standing alone against Germany.
America was, however, supplying Britain with significant war matériel by way of ship convoy in the Atlantic Ocean. Munitions, food and fuel delivered by these convoys were literally keeping Britain alive in its struggle against Germany. Without the convoys, Britain would collapse. The Germans were countering these shipments with their surface warships, submarines (U-boats) and long-range maritime bombers and were extracting a huge toll. At that stage of the war, the Battle for the Atlantic might very well have determined the fate of Europe and whether or not Great Britain survived.
There were two German battleships that had been particularly successful in wreaking havoc on the supply convoys headed to Britain: The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. On a previous sortie raid in March 1941 in the North Atlantic, these twin warships sank an astounding 22 Allied merchant ships. Losses of that magnitude were simply unsustainable.
The battleships used the captured French port at Brest as their home port for repairs and refurbishment between missions. Unfortunately for the Germans, however, Brest was within range of Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers stationed in southern England and the British mounted almost non-stop aerial bombing attacks against the ships when they were in port. The British succeeded in damaging the ships on several occasions—although they failed to sink them—and the attacks delayed the Germans’ ability to send them out to sea for follow-up raiding missions for the balance of 1941.
Concurrent to the developments in the Atlantic Ocean in mid-1941, Germany had turned eastward and attacked its former ally, the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, as it was known, was the largest land assault ever undertaken, involving millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft. After enjoying smashing initial success, the German advance bogged down in the winter of 1941-42 as brutal early cold weather set in and the Russian military, with its vast numbers and production capability, began to right itself and mount a coordinated counter-offensive.
Hitler was wary of the British opening up a second front in Western Europe by invading German-occupied Norway. The British had already carried out successful commando raids against Norway in 1941 and Hitler knew he could scarcely afford to divert his now severely strained resources from the Russian front in the east to fight a second front in the west.
Therefore, he decided to move his formidable Atlantic Ocean raiders—the aforementioned battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau along with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen—northward from their port in Brest, France to northern Germany in order to be able to guard against a possible seaborne British assault on Norway.
Thus begot Operation Cerberus. It’s quite the auspicious name for a military operation. The action was planned for early February 1942, in what seems in retrospect to be a suicide mission. The Germans could either take a roundabout way around the British Isles to the west or hug the coast of Europe and go right up the English Channel.
With the first option, the German ships would have have been in the open Atlantic, then turning eastward, going right past the bulk of the British Navy—the world’s largest at the time—moored at the northward tip of the British Isles at Scapa Flow. Choosing that route would expose the three German ships and their meager escorts to the preponderance of the mighty British battle fleet, in what would certainly be a mismatch of dramatic proportions.
Alternatively, a trip up the English Channel right under the Brit’s noses, meant sailing right past all Britain's heavy coastal defenses and airfields. Choosing the latter route entailed considerable peril, obviously, but the payoff in time saved to reaching a safe haven made it an attractive option. If the Germans could get a surprise head start and make substantial progress before their actual goal was discovered and if the usually messy February weather cooperated and interfered with British defensive action and if Germany’s Luftwaffe (air force) could coordinate covering fighter sweeps to provide continuous protective air cover for the length of the journey, then the plan had a reasonable chance of success.
That’s an awful lot of ‘ifs.’ Military endeavors with that many serious, structural unknowns and uncontrolled loose ends are usually doomed to catastrophic failure.
Yet amazingly enough, the Germans pulled it off. They were underway for hours and had traveled nearly 300 miles before the British even knew what was really happening. This despite the Brits having cracked the Germans’ communications code and having advance knowledge that something big was afoot. When the German fleet was in the most dangerous part of the gauntlet, poor visibility and inclement weather hampered the British shore artillery’s attempts at firing. The RAF was astonishingly ineffective, despite flying several hundred sorties against the German flotilla. Their air force scored no hits, their bombers being totally unable to find the range on their elusive targets. When the Royal Navy sent the famed Fairy Swordfish to attack—the biplane torpedo bomber that had struck the decisive crippling blow against the German battleship Bismarck nine months earlier—they were all shot down, either by anti-aircraft fire or by marauding German fighters. Except for a few mine strikes when the German fleet was almost completely past the British defenses, the three big German warships made it through virtually unharmed, against all odds.
The utter failure of the British to catch and sink the German vessels, even as they sailed right past the Brits’ front yard, ranks as one of the most humiliating episodes in all of British military history.
However, Operation Cerberus accomplished nothing of long-lasting strategic value for the Germans. Nothing. The British never invaded Norway, nor were they even contemplating such a move. Germany robbed itself of a highly effective convoy-destroying weapon in order to guard against an eventuality that never materialized. Once in its new home port, Gneisenau was badly damaged by a British bombing attack and never went to sea again. Prinz Eugen spent the remainder of the war essentially on training missions in the Baltic and never raided another convoy. Scharnhorst continued to fight but was trapped by the British Navy and sunk in the Battle of the North Cape in December 1943.
Operation Cerberus was indeed an ambitious, daring venture, perhaps one of the riskiest, high-stakes missions attempted by either side during the war. But for the Germans, Cerberus ended up being more like a toothless, stumbling, half-blind old mongrel than a terrifying canine, ready to tear into anyone who crossed his path.
© 2020 Steve Feinstein. All rights reserved.
