The Bloody Barents Sea

Hipper and Onslow, sea-horses; Entwining, as one turned the other; Also on parallel courses; Steaming, a zig-zag raking.

– Alan Ross, poet and sailor on Onslow in JW51B

This is a scenario for my ruleset There's The Effing Scheer, and its expansion Striking Effectively First, which allows you to wargame early- to mid-war WW2 naval combat.

I play wargames to try what-ifs in history.

New tactics or strategies, or just to see if luck doesn't play out in the same way as before.

The Barents's Sea scenario is a great example of this.

On paper, an Allied convoy of a dozen ships guarded by five destroyers and some smaller escorts, a cruiser cover force in the wrong place, against two German heavy cruisers and half a dozen large destroyers. To top it off, the British escort strategy of uniting to shield the convoy from a surface attack would have been perfectly countered by the German strategy of the double pincer, with one of the heavy cruiser groups arriving unopposed. On paper, a solid Kriegsmarine victory.

Except life isn't all on paper and no one had read the script. The polar night, aggressive escorts, horrible weather and hesitant German actions all worked to allow the convoy to slip out of the trap set for it. And the battle would be decisive as it led to the firing of Admiral Erich Raeder and the Kriegsmarine's surface force losing face and their future efforts being curtailed.