Margins
Death of the Scharnhorst book cover
Death of the Scharnhorst
1983
First Published
4.10
Average Rating
240
Number of Pages

An epic account of how the Royal Navy tracked down, cornered, and sank one of the most fearsome German warships of the Second World War. Ideal for readers of Craig L. Symonds, Max Hastings and Doug Stanton. The Scharnhorst was a state of the art capital ship of Nazi Germany’s navy. Launched in 1936 she had terrorized Allied shipping since the beginning of the war, famously destroying the aircraft destroyer HMS Glorious in June 1940. Since then she had made numerous sorties into the Atlantic to raid British merchant fleets and had evaded destruction in the Channel Dash of 1942 in order to interrupt convoys to the Soviet Union. The danger posed by the Scharnhorst to the Arctic convoys was monumental. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, devised a plan to lure their enemy from its Norwegian base and pound it with shells from the battleship HMS Duke of York and supporting cruisers and destroyers. John Winton’s comprehensively researched book, drawing on British and German eyewitness accounts, uncovers how the threat of the Scharnhorst was eventually brought to an end at the Battle of the North Cape in the freezing conditions of the Barents Sea.

Avg Rating
4.10
Number of Ratings
275
5 STARS
35%
4 STARS
46%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

John Winton
Author · 16 books
A former officer in the Royal Navy, John Pratt was the author of a variety of fiction and non-fiction works published under the pen name John Winton. Pratt also served for 14 years as an obituarist for The Daily Telegraph.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved