On Christmas Day in forty-three
The Nazi Scharnhorst put to sea,
For word somehow had reached Berlin
An Allied convoy was within
Two hundred miles of where she lay
In some Norwegian, hidden bay.
She went ahead, two-thirds her speed,
A mighty, master-monster steed,
She left the fjords, mountain walled,
Where oft her echoing bugles called,
She cleared the channel, marked the land
Drop far astern on either hand.
She steamed through fog and arctic day,
And then at night, when darkness lay
Completely over all the waste,
The Scharnhorst charged with fuller haste
To intercept the Allied ships
Which dared these bold Murmansk-bound trips.
Meanwhile the convoy, slow, serene,
Behind an escort naval screen,
Proceeded eastward off North Cape.
The Scharnhorst sensed the coming rape,
And manned her guns that early dawn,
But this is what she came upon:
The cruisers Norfolk, and Belfast,
And Sheffield, all the long night past
Had known the wild sea horse was free
To terrorize the Northern Sea,
And they had placed themselves between
The charging Scharnhorst and the screen.
The winter’s dawn was blackboard gray.
The Scharnhorst held her plotted way.
The Norfolk, Sheffield, and Belfast
Were tense with waiting. Hours passed
As closer these two forces drew,
Determined ships, determined crew.
The British sensed the approach of doom.
The Scharnhorst paused within the gloom,
But then a star shell, bursting high,
Illumined her against the sky.
The great seabeast began to snort
From every nostril turret fort.
The Sheffield’s guns belched smoke and flame;
Belfast’s quick turrets did the same,
The Norfolk’s screaming shell bursts bit
The monster’s triple hull, a hit!
The Scharnhorst screamed, she turned and fled
To mend her wound, to count her dead.
Belfast forbade his ships pursue.
He judged what Scharnhorst meant to do,
Pretend retreat and then renew
Attack upon the convoy later.
Scharnhorst’s speed he knew was greater,
So he kept his course the straighter.
Scharnhorst circled east and nor’ward,
Hoped to bring her power forward.
But the convoy changed its course
To shun this grim, abhorrent horse.
The cruisers cut the arc and then
Awaited Scharnhorst’s charge again.