World: The Prince Steps Out

Out of Trondheim near week’s end slipped the sleek 10,000-ton cruiser Prinz Eugen with four destroyers around her, a hefty flight of Nazi fighters circling overhead. British reconnaissance pilots spotted the force, beep-beeped frantically on their radios for help. They got it quickly. From Britain a heavy air striking force —Beaufighters, Blenheims, Hudsons and Beaufort torpedo carriers—swept out across the North Sea. They found the Nazi force and piled in, while German fighters hacked at them.

While Beaufighters tangled with the Messerschmitts, torpedo carriers bored in on the Eugen. At least one tin fish got home, struck her fairly. A “great pillar of dirty black smoke” gushed from her superstructure and she shuddered under two mighty explosions. In the hurlyburly, Beaufighters swung down out of the sky, plastered the destroyers with bomb and machine gun and the force streaked for home. The British reported losing nine planes, knocking down five Germans. Said Berlin: “Unsuccessful—British losses 29 planes.”

British guess was that the cruiser, recently torpedoed by an English sub, was being moved somewhere—probably into the Baltic—for dockyard repairs.

If she was still afloat, the need had become more pressing than before.