Channel Dash 1942
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Date | 13 February 1942 | Wikidata |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1942 | Wikidata P585 (point in time) |
| Era | World War II era (1939–1945) | derived from year |
| Location | France | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Europe | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | Battle of the Atlantic | Wikidata P361 |
| Coordinates | 50.9792, 1.7358 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The Channel Dash (German: Unternehmen Zerberus, Operation Cerberus) was a German naval operation during the Second World War. A Kriegsmarine (German Navy) squadron, comprising the two Scharnhorst-class battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and their escorts was evacuated from Brest in Brittany to German ports. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had arrived in Brest on 22 March 1941 after the success of Operation Berlin in the Atlantic. More raids were planned and the ships were refitted at Brest. The ships were a threat to Allied trans-Atlantic convoys and RAF Bomber Command attacked them from 30 March 1941. Gneisenau was hit on 6 April 1941 and Scharnhorst on 24 July, after dispersal to La Pallice. In late 1941, Adolf Hitler ordered the Oberkommando der Marine (OKM; German Navy High Command) to plan an operation to return the ships to German bases, in case of a British invasion of Norway. The short route up the English Channel was preferred to a detour around the British Isles for surprise and air cover by the Luftwaffe and on 12 January 1942, Hitler gave orders for the operation.
The British exploited decrypts of German radio messages coded with the Enigma machine, air reconnaissance by the RAF Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) and agents in France, to watch the ships…
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Channel Dash (revision 1375525536), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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