For the first time since Jutland, a German navy could look forward to operations on blue water, not as skulking submarine raiders, nor like the Graf Spec and Bismarck, running for their lives before the pursuing British, but as a force that could stand and fight, or leap to a kill. Now, once again, Germany had a fleet in being. That fleet was small, but it was well built, new and powerful. It was gathered in the north, where it could strike as a unit.
Under the towering, snow-swatched cliff in conquered Norway's Trondheim Fjord the Tirpitz lay, 35,000 tons or more of naval might. No R.A.F. bomb or torpedo had yet shaken her.
Near her in the quiet fjord lay the crack 10,000-ton cruiser Prinz Eugen. She had been badly shaken. But Britain's airmen made no bet that the Eugen would not soon be ready for work again.
Like the Eugen, the 26,000-ton battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, known to Britons as S & G, had been continuously plastered in French ports. With the badgered Eugen, they had finally come out of their pit, had dashed through England's own Channel in February, dealing worse wounds to British pride than the damage they took themselves. Now the Gneisenau lay in Kiel. She seemed to have been hurt, as she had also seemed at Brest. But now she was in German home waters. So was the Scharnhorst.
So were the two pocket battleships and the big cruisers Admiral Hipper, Seydlitz and Derfflinger. So were Germany's two new carriers Graf Zeppelin and Deutschland. Finally, there was a brand-new 40,000-ton battleship, probably Friedrich der Grosse, and a few cruisers newly completed in German and occupied yards.
To the navies of the United Nations, convoying, fighting subs, mixing in swirling battles with the Jap in the Indian Ocean, watching a hundred naval rat holes from Trondheim to Surabaya, this concentration of the German surface fleet had a sinister look.
Map & Jap. German naval strategy had partly brought about this change, but only partly. Her submarines had forced the Allied fleets to spread themselves thin, searching for the answer to a vast global problem of logistics that had consistently kept the superior surface force on the defense. Germany had partly brought the change about by starting to build her surface fleet during the starvation days of the Weimar Republic, and keeping up the program even when the pinch of war put the emphasis on U-boats.
But the biggest part of the change had been brought about by the Jap. He had engaged the mighty U.S. Fleet, but in the Pacific; and from his coldly brilliant attack on Pearl Harbor to his thrust into the Indian Ocean he had stretched the U.S. Fleet thin, halfway around the world. More than that, he had snatched the British Far Eastern bases, and was now sucking British units toward India to head off the final rupture of the Empire. Meanwhile the Italians, who still had nuisance value, were-with the help of German airmen-holding other great British units in the Mediterranean.