(An epic failure on the part of British intelligence is apparent in this report. While Deutschland had been operating in the North Atlantic, the ship put into Gotenhafen (Gdynia) Poland on Nov. 16th, having slipped past the British patrols. In the papers yesterday there were front page reports that Deutschland has been sunk in the South Atlantic and at the same time there were reports that Deutschland was in the far North Atlantic sinking HMS Rawalpindi. Apparently, news editors did not notice the dichotomy between the two reports.

The two ships responsible for sinking Rawalpindi were the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. As it turns out, the British were not even looking for these two ships. The battleships had departed Wilhemlshaven, Germany on Nov. 21st and sailed into the far North Atlantic unobserved by the British. In fact the British incorrectly believed that both ships, along with the cruiser Admiral Graf Spee, were still in Wilhelmshaven, Germany as of Nov. 25th.

Another misunderstanding the British had was that Admiral Scheer was operating in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, when in fact the ship causing the chaos on the high seas was the aforementioned Admiral Graf Spee. Admiral Scheer was in Germany and the Baltic at the end of 1939 and never operated in the Atlantic.)

(A report by Joseph W. Grigg, Jr. of the Associated Press which is completely untrue. No British cruiser had been damaged let alone sunk. The U-boat commander given credit was Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, the man who sank HMS Royal Oak. He and his U-47 were not even at sea on this date, a fact which the reporter could not have known. Grigg apparently did not have any of his colleagues follow up with the Admiralty for confirmation. This report was widely published in the U.S., but ignored by the British press.)

(Apparently a summation of all the previous inaccurate reports of sunken German submarines. In reality only one U-boat was sunk in November of 1939 and that one, U-35, was sunk on this day, a fact which the reporter could not have known because information on the loss had not yet been released to the press.)