Through The Strait

It was almost a greater humiliation than Singapore. No enemy had even dared such an exploit since 1690, when the French Admiral Tourville defeated the British and the Dutch off Beachy Head and then triumphantly swept along the English coast. The humiliation was not distant; it took place in the Channel itself, named for the homeland, in the Strait named Dover's.

The little German Fleet--the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen, their destroyers and minesweepers--got proudly through the Channel, 700-odd miles from Brest to their home base in Germany.

The Germans ran a super-gantlet: the British Home Fleet, the Fleet Air Arm, the entire R.A.F., the big guns of Dover, minefields. The Germans were not driven into this corridor of hell; they chose it. And when they were safely through, it was the British who were bloody. The British had lost 20 bombers, 16 fighters and six torpedo planes, had suffered heavy damage to at least one destroyer. The Germans admitted losing 28 planes, which they might do in a day of raiding along the Kentish coast.

The sting drove deep. The British had raided these ships, as they lay for ten months in the harbor of Brest, no fewer than 110 times; they had begun to think of them as almost fixed targets. And it hurt badly to think back on the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, lost to a lesser force off Malaya.

Worse than the humiliation was the new fear. Now the Germans could assemble a pretty formidable fleet--the battleship Tirpitz, the pocket battleships Luetzow and Admiral Scheer, the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin (and perhaps another, the Deutschland), the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, four heavy and perhaps eight light cruisers, about 25 destroyers. This was probably more than the British could quickly assemble at any one pressure point. Such a striking force could be used with overwhelming effect against convoys. It could sever British lines to Archangel and the Mediterranean. It might raid Iceland, as the U.S. Fleet had raided the Marshall Islands with devastating effect. It could, as it did last week, draw off most of Britain's effective naval and air strength in one direction--the perfect precondition for invasion.

The British were wonderfully gallant as they attacked the German Fleet, steaming along under clouds, smoke screens and what seemed like a carapace of planes; but gallantry was not enough. The fact was that the Germans had won an important naval battle simply by not losing it. And they had won it by employing the great new naval weapon which the British still fight against in more ways than one, the airplane.

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