Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [70]
Still the attrition went on. Gneisenau was bombed in port and made useless. Scharnhorst made one more significant appearance; she came out against a North Russian convoy over Christmas of 1943. On December 26 the British caught her up in the Barents Sea, and in the icy waters off the North Cape, they pounded her to death. Only thirty-six of a crew of nearly 2,000 survived.
That left only one threat, the new Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck. Her career was far less spectacular than that of her older twin. She spent most of her life operating out of Norway, constantly hounded by the Royal Navy and the R. A. F. They bombed her several times, and in September of 1942 they got at her with midget submarines and planted mines under her hull that immobilized her for six months. From 1943 on, the British launched increasingly heavy bombing attacks, eventually hitting her with 10,000-pound “blockbuster” bombs. At last, reduced to the ignominy of a floating battery in Tromso harbor, she was hit hard and capsized.
That was late in 1944. Germany’s proud fleet was gone. Bombed, mined, depth-charged, torpedoed, sunk by gunfire, U-boats and battleships alike disappeared. Victory for the Royal Navy was a costly, near-run, tedious affair. There was no sudden ray of light at the end, just a gradual clearing of the atmosphere. Slowly the enemy’s presence was less obvious, and it all ended in May of 1945 when the last survivors of the U-boats came sullenly to the surface and hoisted black flags of surrender. Once again the Royal Navy had mastered all the challenges a brave, daring, and vicious enemy could throw against it.
12. War in the Mediterranean
AFTER THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN, and indeed before it was ended, Hitler turned his attention to the east, and began planning to finish off Russia. The focus of the war shifted not eastward, however, but southward. For the next nine months, and as far as Britain was concerned for the next three years, the main theater of the war was the Mediterranean.
Few questions about the conduct of the war have been argued at greater length than that of the so-called Mediterranean strategy followed by Great Britain. On both sides of the Atlantic, writers have claimed that it was either basically sound or wastefully divergent. Some have said that it arose out of Churchill’s failure at the Dardanelles in 1915 and his subsequent determination to prove that he had been right in World War I by winning World War II from the south, and Churchill himself coined the infelicitous phrase “the soft underbelly of Fortress Europe.” There has been endless argument about the British preference for a peripheral strategy as opposed to the American desire to go straight to the heart. In fact, the diversion into the Mediterranean grew out of the logic of events. Whatever responsive chords fighting in the middle sea may have struck in Winston Churchill, if any one man may be said to have caused the war to center there, that man was not Churchill, it was Mussolini. Almost everything followed from Il Duce’s inability to sit quietly and mind his own business.
At the start of the war Germany had neither territories in nor access to the Mediterranean. War did not come to that sea, therefore, until Italy declared war on France and Britain in June of 1940. Then, ringed by states that were either belligerents, potential belligerents, allies or colonies of belligerents, the Mediterranean heated up very quickly. From west to east on the northern side of the sea there were Spain, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, and Turkey. On the southern side there was French North Africa, divided into the colonies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, then Italian Libya, and then British-held Egypt. This parceled-out arrangement continued right down the Red Sea coast to the horn of Africa, where there were Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, then Italian Eritrea and Ethiopia, then French and British Somaliland, and finally Italian Somaliland. Once Italy was in the war it was inevitable that fighting would flare over all