German Wwii Kriegsmarine
(WWII) Scharnhorst: why did the Royal Navy only rescue 60 German sailors after sinking it?
There were RN ships all over the place when the Scharnhorst went down.
The Royal Navy left almost two thousand German sailors to freeze to death/drown in the North Sea.
It is not credible that the RN was afraid of U-Boats (also, is it really likely that even if there had been U-boats in the area, they would have attacked an RN ship rescuing German sailors? Everybody knew that the Germans had lost the war by that time)
More likely, it looks like the Royal Navy let the Scharnhorst survivors perish as an act of psychological warfare (or perhaps retaliation for similar conduct by the Kriegsmarine).
First, the credibility of a British journal that relies on good will of RN sailors (like “Whitley’s”) is probably not an impartial or objective source for this type of information. Obviously, Whitley’s would not easily be able to report an atrocity at the hands of the Royal Navy under almost any circumstances. In other words, the statement that RN ships searched for survivors was likely to have been simply taken at face value from disingenuous after-action reports.
During WWII, the (almost) complete loss of the entire complements of capital ships happened several times. In every instance of that happening (that I have read about) it seems to coincide with those incidents where the hull sank very quickly (or was disintegrated in an explosion). The Scharnhorst did not suffer a catastrophic explosion of any magazines. It was hulled by two torpedoes. It was a very large and sophisticated ship built to withstand torpedo hits. There is no report that it sank immediately.
That leaves history to legitimately wonder what happened to the crew?
These kind of reports give us a clue: “Both Rear Admiral Bey and the Captain survived the sinking and were seen swimming in the water, but both drowned although Hintze was very close to being rescued by Scorpion.”
and,
“Of the Scharnhorst’s total crew of 1,968 men, only 36 survived. Many of those had been ordered to abandon ship, but were left behind in the water when the Allied ships quickly departed the area. Remembering the incident, Rex Chard, Navigating Officer on one of the destroyers, remarked, ‘in sea-warfare one is always very sorry for the sailors. It’s the ships you’re after – not the men. It could have been you.’”
http://www.mikekemble.com/ww2/scharnhorst.html
The logical conclusion that the crew of the Scharnhorst were simply left to their fate. The reason? Probably both retaliation for identical German conduct and a desire to strike at Kriegsmarine morale.
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