By the middle of 1941, all the raiders had returned to their home ports except Kormoran, Pinguin and Atlantis, which had been caught and sunk by Allied cruisers. Then came a succession of setbacks for the German commerce raiding effort. On May 27, the five-day cruise of the mightiest warship in the Kriegsmarine, the battleship Bismarck, ended in a fiery spectacle. Even while the consequences of that disaster were being appraised, Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22. As the Western nations began sending goods and materiel to their new Russian allies via Murmansk, Hitler concentrated his high seas fleet in the north to oppose the Arctic convoys. In February 1942, the major warships remaining in France–battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen–dashed up the English Channel to complete the concentration of German sea power in the Arctic. Their success was a profound embarrassment to the British, but it had also gathered the German surface warships in a much smaller area, enabling the Allies to concentrate their own forces to safeguard the convoys, keep the Germans under surveillance and hunt them down.

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By early 1942, German hopes of reopening the commerce-raiding campaign were faced with the loss of one of their key routes for slipping by the Royal Navy–since Birmarck’s foray through the Denmark Strait, that passage between Iceland and Greenland was being more heavily patrolled. Furthermore, on December 8, 1941, the United States entered the war and added the ships of their powerful fleet to the Allied cause. On the other hand, Japan now offered sanctuary in her ports to any German raider that should break out into the open sea. If things got too hot for the German ship to slip home through the Allied gantlet to Kiel or Brest, then they could carry on the war from Singapore or Yokohama. In any case, with the Battle of the Atlantic reaching a new peak, the Kriegsmarine placed renewed hopes on the ability of new raiders in the southern oceans to divert Allied warships from more vital tasks. The German’s first challenge, however, would be getting the raiders out to sea–they would be sailing the route of the “Channel Dash” in reverse, via the Bay of Biscay ports, before making for open ocean.

The second wave of commerce raiding was inaugurated by two veterans of the first wave–Thor departed Bordeaux on January 14, and Michel left Kiel on March 9. Both ships made their breakouts smoothly.

Stier, on her first foray, was not so fortunate. The British were becoming more vigilant in the Channel. During Michel’s run down the Channel between March 13 and 20, the Germans had thought it prudent to send along a torpedo boat escort. As she left Rotterdam on May 12, Stier got an even bigger escort–six motor minesweepers, six larger vessels from the 2nd Minesweeper Flotilla and four from the 8th Minesweeper Flotilla preceded her in three V-formations, while Seeadler, Iltis, Kondor and Falke of the 5th Torpedo Boat Flotilla closely boxed her within a diamond formation. The Germans may have overdone it. The convoy was impossible to disguise, and one merchant vessel afforded so many consorts could only have led the British to conclude that she was a special target worth taking equally special pains to dispose of.

As the convoy passed within sight of Dover, the British batteries spotted them and opened fire but failed to score any hits. The British alerted all motor torpedo boats in the area to Stier’s presence, however, and at 4 a.m. on May 13, the lookouts on Iltis spotted a torpedo track to port. The German torpedo boat’s skipper, Kapitänleutnant Jacobsen, ordered both engines full astern, but it was too late. Another torpedo, launched by MTB-221, struck Iltis just abaft her forward funnel, and she broke in two. As she sank off Stier’s starboard side, a confused night battle erupted between German guns and British torpedoes. Nine minutes after Iltis had been hit, Seeadler, at the forward point of the protective diamond, took an amidships torpedo hit from MTB-219. Seeadler rolled over to port, hurling her captain off the bridge and into the sea, where he watched his ship go the way of Iltis–broken in two and quickly vanishing with heavy loss of life. Eventually, the British disengaged, after losing MTB-220 and failing to do any damage to Stier. As Stier left the port of Royan in the Gironde and headed southwest into the Atlantic on May 20, Gerlach and his crew hoped that they might avenge the sacrifice of their escorts. That could only be done by sinking enemy mercantile tonnage, while simultaneously attracting and evading Allied warships.

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