Stirring memory’ of the Channel Dash remembered 70 years on

With snow on the ground as it was exactly 70 years earlier, arguably the bravest episode in 103 years of Royal Navy aviation was marked on and off the Kent coast at the weekend.

The Channel Dash, as it became known, saw a valiant but futile attempt by six obsolescent Swordfish torpedo bombers to stop three German heavy ships break through the Dover Strait and reach the safety of home waters.

The Germans shielded their warships – the battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen – with some 300 fighters.

Against this huge force were sent the half a dozen Swordfish of 825 Naval Air Squadron, temporarily based at RAF Manston, near Ramsgate.

All six were shot out of the sky in an action which lasted a matter of minutes. Some of the aircraft got their torpedoes away, but none hit their intended targets.

The squadron’s commander, Lt Cdr Eugene Esmonde, was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions on February 12 1942. His deeds, wrote Admiral Bertram Ramsey, the senior naval officer at Dover,

“will remain through generations to come a stirring memory”.

Half a dozen Royal Navy destroyers also tried to intercept the German force, but their torpedo salvo missed – and the response from the enemy guns badly damaged HMS Worcester which was set ablaze; 24 men aboard her were killed.

Of the five Swordfish crew who survived the attack on the ships, the last, Lt Cdr Edgar Lee, passed away in 2009 at the age of 88.

So it fell to veterans’ organisations, members of the Channel Dash Association who strove successfully to erect a monument in Ramsgate Harbour just a couple of years ago, former First Sea Lord Admiral the Lord Boyce, local Sea Cadets, and today’s RN, led by HMS Trumpeter to honour the dead of 1942.

Sadly, the hoped-for fly-past by one of the few surviving Swordfish from the RN Historic Flight did not materialise, but Trumpeter, which serves as the University Royal Naval Unit boat for Cambridge University, and a Thames pilot launch headed out into the Channel to lay wreaths in memory of Esmonde and his comrades.

“The Royal Navy is extremely proud of its heritage and my crew and I are extremely privileged to be a part of this memorial service in honour of the sacrifices and achievements of those before us,” said Lt Tom Jenkins, Trumpeter’s Commanding Officer.

As well as ceremonies in Ramsgate on Saturday, yesterday there was a service of remembrance at St Mary-in-Castro Church in Dover Castle for all three Services; in the tunnels below the castle, Ramsay directed the naval battle.

And on Saturday May 19 a memorial to Operation Fuller – the official British codename for the Channel Dash – will be dedicated on Marine Parade in Dover.

You can read a four-page historical feature on the Channel Dash in the February edition of Navy News, available online here: The Channel Dash