German sailors were patriotic, not idiotic, and forty thousand tons of jinx was not their idea of patriotism.
Never in the annals of maritime history has there ever been a ship like the Scharnhorst. She was forty thousand tons of deadly fighting fury---and just as hoodooed as the Flying Dutchman herself. No German sailor anywhere wanted a berth aboard her, and many said she should have been sold into scrap on the day she was born. But Germany was at war, and Hitler needed the ship. Cursed or not, the Scharnhorst was built.
Hitler’s scientists put everything they had into their sleek new battleship. She had speed to outrun the heavier British dreadnaughts, long-range guns to strike powerful blows over the horizon, and new electronic gear to find enemy shipping before they found her. By all accounts, she should have been an honor to her fleet, but that was before her keel was laid.
The first indication of the trouble to come was when she was almost completed. With a loud ugly moan and the hair-splitting shriek of metal stretched to its limits, she rolled over on her side, squashing sixty-one men like bugs underfoot and injuring one hundred and ten more. It took three months to right her---with crews that had to be drafted. No one wanted to be anywhere near her. The word was out: the steel monster was cursed.
When it came time to launch her, all Germany rejoiced. The Nazis wanted to impress the world as a whole --- and their quaking neighbors in particular --- with their skill in contriving the best seagoing weapon. An elaborate celebration was planned with attendance by all of Germany’s top men. Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Doenitz were only a few of the dignitaries on hand for the occasion. The only thing missing was the star attraction herself. The Scharnhorst, it seems, had a mind of her own. She launched herself in the dead of night, grinding up two large barges on her escape to the sea. She went to war, hoodoo and all.
Although surprised and embarrassed, the Nazis quickly recovered. They spread propaganda of their new launching system. The Scharnhorst, they said, was launched at night to keep the secret of their new method of sliding the giants into the sea safe from prying eyes. It may have fooled all Europe, but the superstitious German sailors knew better. The Scharnhorst was one ship none of them wanted.
The Scharnhorst’s first major battle was at the seizure of Danzig. She pumped hundreds of tons of death and destruction into the hapless city, and German newsreels of the occasion flooded the world. What Germany failed to report was that she killed nine of her own men when one of her big guns exploded, and suffocated twelve more when the air system quit working in a neighboring turret. The Scharnhorst curse was stronger than ever.
German sailors avoided the Scharnhorst like the black plague that she was. In her first months at sea, she lost many to death and more to desertion. Every German sailor knew it was only a matter of time before the jinx struck again. They didn’t have to wait long. During the siege of Oslo, as Nazi battleships poured their fire into the Norwegian port, the Scharnhorst took more hits than the entire fleet combined. She staggered and reeled, belching flame and black smoke from more than thirty wounds before the Gneisenau left the battle to pull her to safety beyond the range of the shore batteries.
She even encountered disaster on her way home. So badly damaged from her near miss off Norway, she was forced to limp along the coast at night and hide from British warplanes by day. On the blackest night of the year, she crept into the Elbe River on her journey to what should have been safety...of sorts. For some unknown reason, her radar failed to reveal the world’s largest ocean liner directly in her path in the narrow ship channel. The man on watch sounded the alarm, but he was far too late. He died seconds later in the grinding collision with the Bremen. Although the Scharnhorst pulled free and continued upstream, the pride of the German passenger fleet sank on the spot. The Bremen settled into the mud, where British bombers found her the next day and pounded her to junk. The Scharnhorst curse had claimed another victim.
Hitler’s fire was fading fast by the time the Scharnhorst was ready for action once again. The British had sunk the mighty Bismarck, and the gigantic Tirpitz lay riddled with torpedoes on the bottom of a Norwegian fjord. Hitler had no choice but to send out the Scharnhorst, curse and all.
The jinxed ship slipped down the Elbe at night, past the bombed out hulk of the rusting Bremen, and north toward the Allied shipping in the Arctic Sea. Attacking the lightly protected convoys should have been an easy, routine patrol for a dreadnaught with her capabilities, and maybe if she had been any other ship, it might have been. But the same blackness that shielded the Scharnhorst from British patrols also shielded a crippled British boat from the Scharnhorst. She never saw the paralyzed smaller craft as she thundered past. It was a fatal mistake. The warning flashed: a German battleship was on the prowl.
The British fleet was immediately in full pursuit, but the Scharnhorst was too fast for her lumbering adversaries. The British lost her in the inky blackness. The British commander spread out his fleet like a fan. In the tense moments that followed, a destroyer spotted her, but lost her in the heaving, mountainous waves. A cruiser suddenly flashed a range of 16,000 yards and the British commander took a chance. He guessed at the direction the Scharnhorst would turn and fired a broadside of high explosives.
Miles away, the Scharnhorst turned directly into the path of the incoming shells. She staggered from the blows, and fires burst forth everywhere. Sea water rushed in, flooding all decks. Unable to make speed, she sunk low in the water. More hits quickly followed. In a matter of minutes, the jinx of the German Navy rolled over on her side and slid into the sea.
Most of the crew died with the Scharnhorst in the bitterly cold water sixty miles off the Norwegian coast. A few made it into life rafts and were picked up by the British Navy. Two, however, managed to reach a tiny rock island in their flimsy rubber raft where their skeletons were found a few years later. An investigation showed they died from the explosion of their little emergency oil stove. They had escaped the British and the icy sea, but they couldn’t escape the Scharnhorst curse.