Transcript
A (0:02)
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B (0:33)
During that night, not one of us thought about sleep. Once the warships had left port, two questions occupied us. Would the unit succeed in making up the lost time through the air raid? And had the attacking British bombers discovered that the expected German operation was about to begin? Its conclusion would largely depend on the answer to these two questions. And that of course was General De Flieger. Adolf Galland, kind of friend of the show, I suppose, writing in his self serving memoir, the first and the last of which he devotes an entire chapter to the Channel d'. Ache.
A (1:15)
Yes he does.
B (1:16)
And one of the things that struck me is here we are in kind of sort of early, you know, February 1942 and the Germans are really on the back foot. And isn't that remarkable? Cause you know, they're supposed to be the. The guy's kind of winning.
A (1:28)
Yeah, exactly. German war machine, mate. Welcome everyone to we have ways of making you talk with me, Al Marion James Holland, the Second World War podcast for all your Second World War needs and this is part two of our Channel Dash series. We I've called this episode Hide and seek because Cerberus is the German operation.
B (1:44)
I think that's strong.
A (1:45)
Fuller is the British response. And as James points out, the Germans are on the back foot. And in our last episode we touched on, you know, Barbarossa is beginning to unravel at this point in the war. I mean it's unravelled by February of 1942, hasn't it? The Soviets of Soviet has actually managed to repulse the German advance, push them back. It's not panning out the way they thought it would. Just as the naval strategy, if you want to call it that, has not panned out. Hence the need to extricate, and I think that is actually the right word, extricate. The Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau and the Prinz Eugen, three capital ships from a total of, I don't know, for the German navy. The Germans are on the back foot here and this is an expression of exactly that, this operation. And you've got to bear that in mind at all times, no matter how this story rolls out. It's full of the reasons that the Germans lose the Second World War. So in the last episode we talked about preparations and plans on both sides. The decision to get the German surface fleet out of Brest back to the fatherland, now known, now dubbed Operation Cerberus, and Thunderbolt Donerkheil, which is the air element, and the British plans made in anticipation, called Fuller and what the British anticipation was. And the Germans spurred on by Hitler's twin intuition that Norway is the zone of destiny. Wrong. And that the British will be unable to react quick enough. Right, so he's half right. They're going to leave Brest in darkness at night, meaning they'll do the bulk of the passage under cover of darkness. Long nights in February, arriving at the Pas de Calais at noon if things run to schedule. The raf, the Admiralty, fighter coaster and bomber commands, as well as the army manning the guns at Dover, have decided amongst themselves that the Germans will never risk such a move. That if they are going to do it, they're going to. It's going to be the other way around. They'll leave so that they arrive at the Straits Dover at midnight or whatever. Now, this is reflected, for example, in 825 Naval Air Squadron with its six swordfish. They're expecting to attack at night, when it's feasible to do so, and not