by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
On the South Bank of the Thames in the centre of London lies the HMSBelfast. Now a museum ship, it once took part in one of the most significant sea battles of the Second World War. It fought the Scharnhorst in the last great sea battle based on the power of great guns. The Belfast needed more than just brilliant naval tactics to stand a chance. It needed help from computer science and electronic engineering too. In fact, without some brilliant computer science the battle would never have been fought in the first place. It came about because of the work of the code crackers at Bletchley Park.
Getting supplies across the Atlantic and then round to Russia was critical to both the British and Russian’s survival. By 1943 the threat of submarines had been countered. The battleship Tirpitz had also been disabled. However, the formidable battle cruiser Scharnhorst was left and it was the scourge of the Allied convoys. It sank 11 supply ships in one operation early in 1941. In another, it destroyed a weather station on Spitzbergen island that the Allies used to decide when convoys should set off.
By Christmas 1943 something had to be done about the Scharnhorst, but how to catch it, never mind stop it? A trap was needed. A pair of convoys going to and from Russia were a potential bait. The Nazis knew the target was there for the taking: the Scharnhorst was in a nearby port. Would they take that bait though, and how could the British battle ships be in the right place at the right time to not only stop it, but destroy it?
The Allies had an ace up their sleeve. Computer Science. By this point in the war a top secret team at Bletchley Park had worked out how to crack the Enigma encryption machine that was used to send coded messages by the German Navy. It was always easy to listen in to radio broadcasts, you just needed receivers in the right places, but if the messages were in code that didn’t help. You had to crack the day’s code to know what they were saying. Based on an improved approach, originally worked out by Polish mathematicians, the Brits could do it using special machines that were precursors to the first electronic computers. They intercepted messages that told them that Scharnhorst was preparing to leave. It was taking the bait.
The British had two groups of ships. The Belfast, the Norfolk and the Sheffield were coming from Russia protecting the returning convoy. The HMS Duke of York was tracking the new convoy heading to Russia. Both were keeping their distance so the convoys looked unprotected. They needed to know when and where the Scharnhorst would attack. Bletchley Park were listening in to everything though, and doing it so well they were reading the messages almost as soon as the Germans. At 2am on Boxing Day morning the Belfast got the message from Admiralty Head quarters that SCHARNHORST PROBABLY SAILED AT 1800 25 DECEMBER. A further radio signal from the Scharnhorst asking for a weather report allowed the spies to work out exactly where the ship was by picking up the signal from different listening stations and triangulating: drawing a line on a map from each station in the direction the radio signal came from. The point they meet is the ship’s location. This is an example of meta-data (information about a message rather than the message itself) giving vital information away. The spies had done their job. It was enough to tell Vice Admiral Burnett on the Belfast where the Scharnhorst was aiming to attack the convoys. They could lie in wait. At this point, electronic engineering mattered. The Belfast had better radar than the Scharnhorst. They detected its approach without the Scharnhorst having any idea they were there. The first the Captain of the Scharnhorst knew was when they were hit by shells from the Norfolk. The Belfast ended up out of position at the critical point though and couldn’t join in. The faster Scharnhorst turned tail and ran. The Brits had had their chance and blown it!
Burnett now needed luck and intuition. He guessed the Scharnhorst would try another attack on the convoy. They took up a new waiting position rather than actively trying to find the Scharnhorst as others wanted them to do. By midday the radar picked it up again. The trap was reset, though this time the initial surprise was lost. An all out battle began, with radar helping once again, this time as a way to aim shells even when the enemy wasn’t in sight. Having failed to reach the convoy undetected a second time the Scharnhorst retreated as the battle continued. What they didn’t know was that they were retreating deeper into the trap: heading directly towards the waiting Duke of York. The chasing Belfast stopped firing and dropped back, making the Scharnhorst crew think they were safe. In fact, they were still being followed and tracked by radar once more, though only by the Belfast as the other ships had actually been partially disabled. Had the Scharnhorst known, they could have just stopped and taken out the Belfast. After several hours of silent shadowing, the Belfast picked up the Duke of York on the radar, and were able to communicate with them. The Scharnhorst’s radar had been crippled in the battle and thought it was alone.
The Belfast fired shells that lit up the sky behind the Scharnhorst as seen from the Duke of York, then largely watched the battle. Luck was on their side: the Scharnhorst was crippled and then sunk by torpedoes. Over a thousand German sailors sadly died. The crew of the Belfast were well aware that it could just as easily have been them, sealed in to a giant metal coffin, as it sank, and so held a memorial for the dead Germans afterwards.
The Belfast didn’t fire the torpedoes that finally sank the Scharnhorst and was not the key player in the final battle. However, it was the one that was in the right place to save the convoy, thanks to the Enigma decrypts combined with the Vice Admiral’s intuition. It was also the one that pushed the Scharnhorst into the deadly trap, with its superior radar then giving it the advantage.
It is easy to under-estimate the importance of the Bletchley Park team to the war, but they repeatedly made the difference, as with the Scharnhorst, making Allied commanders look amazing. It is much easier to be amazing when you know everything the other side says! The Scharnhorst is just one example of how Computer Science and Electronic Engineering help win wars, and here, in the long run at least, save lives. Today having secure systems matters to everyone not just to those waging war. We rely on them for our bank system, our elections, as well as for our everyday privacy, whether from hacking newspapers or keeping our health records secret from ruthless companies wanting to exploit us. Cyber security matters.
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