The German Admiral Who Sailed Three Warships Straight Through the English Channel in Daylight

In February 1942, a German admiral did something the Spanish Armada never managed: he took three capital ships — the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen — up the English Channel and through the Strait of Dover in broad daylight, past the guns and airfields of the strongest navy on earth. This is Operation Cerberus — the "Channel Dash" — told from the other side of the hill. Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax ran one of the war's most audacious operations almost flawlessly: Galland's fighters filled the sky, British radar was quietly jammed, and six obsolete Swordfish biplanes were thrown into a hopeless attack that won their commander, Eugene Esmonde, a posthumous Victoria Cross. And yet the triumph was hollow. The only damage those ships suffered came from mines, not the enemy — and within a year, all three were sunk or crippled. This is a command study of the finest operation the German surface fleet ever ran, and why winning it meant losing the one thing that mattered. Recommended reading: Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea, Vol. II (HMSO, 1956) Ken Ford, Run the Gauntlet: The Channel Dash 1942 (Osprey, 2012) John Deane Potter, Fiasco: The Break-out of the German Battleships (Heinemann, 1970) Terence Robertson, Channel Dash (Evans Brothers, 1958) If your father or grandfather served against the German surface raiders, or in the Channel and Atlantic, I'd like to hear their story. Drop it in the comments — those stories matter.