Battleship battle veteran Tony Ditcham dies at 102
Veteran landed blows on mighty German battleship during epic naval battle but dismissed "hero" tag
Tony Ditcham, who had a grandstand view of the Royal Navy's last great battleship action, has died at the age of 102.
Mr Ditcham himself landed some blows against the mighty German battleship Scharnhorst when, in his role as gunnery control officer on the destroyer HMS Scorpion which had closed to almost point blank range under the cover of darkness, he hit her several times.
"We couldn’t miss," he would later recall.
“We fired three broadsides of four shells. They hit in rapid succession roughly in the same place." The shells from the destroyer's guns hit the enemy warship around the base of the funnel.
Battered by repeated hits from the 14-inch shells from the British battleship HMS Duke of York, and reeling from a succession of torpedo hits from attacking destroyers and cruisers, Scharnhorst slid beneath the waves, at last removing a dangerous threat to Britain’s Arctic convoys. Out of a ship’s company of just under 2,000 men, there were only 36 survivors, of which 30 were picked up from the freezing waters by HMS Scorpion.
The Battle of the North Cape, fought on December 26, 1943, in appalling conditions – in the Arctic Ocean north of Norway in a full gale in almost 24-hour darkness - was the last battleship duel in Royal Navy history, and for Mr Ditcham was just one highlight of a very active wartime career, mostly on destroyers.
