Channel Dash - Outcome

Outcome

By mid-morning on 13 February, Admiral Ciliax sent a signal to Admiral Saalwächter in Paris: "It is my duty to inform you that Operation Cerberus has been successfully completed."

The British services (RN, RAF and Army) had failed to stop the ships of the Brest Group before they reached the safety of German home waters and had suffered severe damage to a destroyer and lost 42 aircraft. The Germans had suffered unexpectedly small damage and losses: Scharnhorst hit two mines, off Flushing and Ameland, but arrived safely at 10:00 on 13 February at Wilhelmshaven (the damage took three months to repair). Gneisenau hit one mine off Terschelling, but suffered little damage; the magnetic mine exploded some metres off the ship, making a small hole on the starboard side and temporarily knocking one of her turbines out of action. The ship was brought back to action after thirty minutes and she continued with the "lucky ship", the undamaged Prinz Eugen, which had suffered one dead from attacking British aircraft. Both ships then tied up at Brunsbüttel North Locks at 09:30. The torpedo boats T13 and Jaguar were slightly damaged by bomb splinters and machine gun fire, the latter suffering one killed and two wounded; of the Luftwaffe air umbrella over the ships, 17 fighters were lost with eleven pilots.

In Britain, the mood was sombre. An editorial in The Times of London read: "Vice Admiral Ciliax has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia failed. Nothing more mortifying to the pride of our seapower has happened since the seventeenth century. It spelled the end of the Royal Navy legend that in wartime no enemy battle fleet could pass through what we proudly call the English Channel."

However, after the war, author Stephen Roskill noted: "The German Naval Staff, however, summarised the outcome as a 'tactical victory, but a strategic defeat'". These three powerful warships were no longer a menace to the Atlantic convoys but were instead re-assigned to the defence of Norway against an imagined invasion. The St Nazaire Raid a few weeks later eliminated the threat to the North Atlantic convoys by capital ships of the Kriegsmarine. This elimination of the threat was made even more so when only ten days after the operation, on 23 February, Prinz Eugen was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Trident, destroying her stern and being knocked out for nearly a year. Gneisenau's luck ended a few days later on 26–27 February at Kiel when she was heavily damaged during British air attacks and effectively put out of the war.