Made for the home market in Germany during WWII, this silent film “German warships break through the Channel” shows the “Channel Dash” operation of the Kriegsmarine in 1942. The film begins with images of Brest harbor, as German ships plan a breakout thru the Dover Strait. At :35 Admiral Erich Raeder is seen addressing crew prior to the start of the operation. At :49 a map shows the strategic situation with ships leaving Brest. At 1:05 an E-boat or torpedo boat escorts the fleet into the Channel. At 1:13, Admiral Otto Ciliax is shown at the bridge of the Scharnhorst. At 1:37 a warship with dazzle camouflage paint is seen in the foreground. At 1;42 Luftwaffe planes provide cover. At 2:00 the operation reaches its climax as the ships pass between Dover and Calais. An alarm is sounded at 2:21 and crew scramble for their guns. At 2:30 the Germans begin firing at British aircraft. After a long defensive battle the Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen are shown intact. At 5:17 the crew assembles in friendly waters. The crew is congratulated by Admiral Raeder and Admiral Otto Ciliax, who led the operation aboard the Scharnhorst, is given the Knights Cross.
The Channel Dash or Unternehmen Zerberus (Operation Cerberus) was a German naval operation during World War II. A Kriegsmarine squadron of both of the Scharnhorst-class battleships, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and escorts, ran a British blockade from Brest in Brittany. In late 1941, Adolf Hitler ordered Oberkommando der Marine (OKM German Navy high-command), to plan an operation to return the ships to German bases, to counter a possible British invasion of Norway. The short route up the English Channel was preferred to a detour around the British Isles, to benefit from surprise and from air cover by the Luftwaffe.
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 run by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to keep watch on the ships and report the damage caused by British bombers. Operation Fuller, a joint Royal Navy-RAF contingency plan, was devised to counter a sortie by the German ships against Atlantic convoys, a return to German ports by circumnavigating the British Isles or a dash up the English Channel. The concentration of British ships in southern waters was inhibited by a need to keep ships at Scapa Flow in Scotland, in case of a sortie by the German battleship Tirpitz from Norway. The RAF had been required to detach squadrons from Bomber and Coastal commands for overseas service and also kept torpedo-bombers in Scotland ready for Tirpitz, which constrained their ability to assemble large numbers of aircraft against a dash up the Channel, as did the winter weather which reduced visibility and unpredictably blocked airfields with snow.
On 11 February 1942, the Kriegsmarine ships left Brest at 9:14 p.m. and escaped detection for more than twelve hours, approaching the Strait of Dover without discovery. The Luftwaffe conducted Unternehmen Donnerkeil (Operation Thunderbolt) to provide air cover and as the ships neared Dover, the British belatedly began operations against the German ships. The RAF, the Fleet Air Arm, Navy and coastal artillery operations were costly failures but Scharnhorst and Gneisenau hit mines in the North Sea and were damaged (Scharnhorst being put out of action for a year). By 13 February, the ships had reached German ports, Winston Churchill ordered an inquiry into the debacle and The Times denounced the British fiasco. The Kriegsmarine judged the operation to have been a tactical success and a strategic failure, by exchanging a threat to Atlantic convoys by German surface ships for a hypothetical threat to Norway. On 23 February, Prinz Eugen was torpedoed off Norway, repaired and spent the rest of the war in the Baltic. Gneisenau went into a dry dock and was bombed on the night of 26/27 February, never to sail again; Scharnhorst was sunk at the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943.
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