Despite the Enemy

The Allied convoy was creeping around Norway's North Cape when the Nazi warships hove into view. It was in the gloom of the Arctic morning, on the last day of the old year. Officers on escorting British destroyers, peering through their glasses, judged that some of these Nazi ships were big ones--probably a heavy cruiser and a pocket battleship--lured out at last from Norwegian hideaways. With them were a number of destroyers. The British escort, outgunned and outranged, promptly opened fire.

Two British destroyers were damaged. One of them subsequently went down. But for almost two hours they held off the Nazi raiders, until reinforcements came.

The British had one advantage. The glimmering of the northern daylight, which lay along the horizon, was behind the enemy. The flagship of the British squadron hit one of the heavy Nazis with her first salvo and closed in. The Nazi began to turn. As the British destroyer turned too, a Nazi destroyer cut in between. Said the British skipper: "We let fly with the forward main armament and again we hit with the first salvo." The skipper would have rammed the smaller Nazi ship then, but "we had hit him so badly--it was a pitiful sight--that we slipped around his stern instead, pumping 4-in. and pompom shells from secondary armament into him as we passed. . . . We left him in a sinking condition with his bow in the air."

All the Nazi vessels had turned tail and were plowing westward. Four hours after it had appeared, the Nazi fleet vanished again into the mists along the Norwegian coast. The Allied convoy lost not a single freighter.

Other big convoys--one last July, one last September--had suffered terrible losses from Nazi aerial hammering. This time, perhaps because of poor visibility, no planes appeared. As much of the Luftwaffe as was still based on Norway must not have cared for the weather.

Said the British Admiralty, announcing the victory last week: "In spite of almost continual darkness, extreme cold and navigational hazards due to ice and low visibility and interference from the enemy, supplies continue to reach Russia by the northern route."

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