The

The from the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to the December 2023 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast.

We shall fight to the last shell.

80 years ago this month, Britain was marking its fifth Christmas of the war with still no end in sight.

D-Day still lay in the future, and the campaigns

in Italy and on the Eastern Front ground on. However, on Boxing Day 1943, the Royal Navy achieved a

significant, if grim, success over the German Navy, sinking the Shanhorst, one of the few

last remaining large warships in the enemy fleet.

This victory would help to secure the safety of Allied convoys to Russia for the remaining

18 months of the war. The coatbreakers of Bletchley Park played a key role in helping the Navy

to locate Scharnhorst and were spectators on the final battle via the German messages read

in naval section at BP.

For this It Happened Here episode, we're joined by Bletchley Park's research historian, Dr David Kenyon,

who's recently published a book on this subject entitled Arctic Convoys, Bletchley Park and the War for the Seas.

As usual, our thanks go to Dr Ben Thompson and Sarah Langston for voicing our archival documents.

This is Bletchley Park. It happened here.

David, tell us about this ship, the Shanhorst.

The Shanhorst is sometimes described as a battleship, sometimes described as a battlecruiser.

It's a pretty large warship. When it's built, it's one of the largest warships in the German Navy. One of the

issues with the Second World War German Navy is, of course, that at the end of the First World War,

the German Navy is effectively abolished by the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans are only

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