Channel Dash

And there was more bad news.

On February 12th, the German battleships Scharnhorst and Neusenau and the heavy crews of Prince Eugen, long bottled up in Brest Harbor in France, launched Operation Cerberus, dashing north up the English Channel and escaping safely into German waters.

Four days later, some 80,000 troops were captured when Singapore fell to the Japanese, the single largest colonial defeat in the history of the British Empire.

britain was in desperate need of a win and so training for biting continued more joint army navy exercise were carried out on the beaches at weymouth and swanage with similarly dismal results while on february 15th the paris performed a live rehearsal jump near general browning's headquarters at syracuse house while thankfully nobody suffered any serious injuries missed time drops caused the paras to be scattered widely across the countryside as frost later recalled it was a shambles disorder and confusion and a mighty waste of time the general said he was satisfied more than i was Another practice jump was planned for the 17th, but freezing weather made the ground too hard for safe landings.

Admittedly, some of this is going after the U-boat pens, but a huge amount of this is actually representing the RAF trying to sink the two Scharnhorsts and Prinz Eugen while they're there.

The sheer intensity of that bombing campaign is what forces the Channel Dash, where they do make it back to Germany, but...

That actually, in a lot of ways, actually spells the end of the German heavy surface raiding campaign in the Atlantic because obviously from there, heavy German raiders, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen, they can head out into the Atlantic almost at will.

Once they're over in Germany, they get stuck up in Norway and that's basically it.