Operation Wonderland () was an operation from 16 to 30 August 1942 by the Kriegsmarine in the Barents Sea and the Kara Sea off the Arctic coast of the Soviet Union. The operation was an attack on Soviet shipping using the Northern Sea Route which ran along the Soviet Arctic coast from the Bering Strait, westwards along Siberia to the Kara Sea. The operation was the first part of a campaign to dominate the seas of the western Arctic. Reports from Japanese naval intelligence alerted the Germans to the sailing of a convoy, EON-18.
The German cruiser supported by five U-boats and reconnaissance aircraft sailed on 16 August for the Kara Sea where it encountered pack ice. The cruiser carried an Arado Ar 196 reconnaissance floatplane which found several groups of ships. Admiral Scheer sank the icebreaker Sibiryakov and bombarded the Soviet base at Dikson before returning to its base at Kirkenes in northern Norway. The meagre result obtained by Admiral Scheer was exceeded by the U-boats in the operation.
Background
German plans
In 1942, the (SKL) of , the high command of the German Navy () looked for fairly safe operational possibilities for its heavy units. On 5 May, Admiral Rolf Carls, the commander of (Naval Group North), ordered Admiral Hubert Schmundt, the commander of the German naval forces in northern Norway, to study the feasibility of sending the heavy cruisers , or , based in the north of Norway, on a sortie against convoys using the Northern Sea Route. In July, Naval Group North had suggested a plan to send Admiral Scheer into the Kara Sea, to attack Soviet merchant ships on the Northern Sea Route. Because Adolf Hitler had refused permission for Admiral Scheer to sortie into the Atlantic, Raeder agreed to this "makeshift operation". was the first part of a plan to gain control over the western Arctic Sea, to be followed by Operation Zar.
The Germans had polar ice information and aerial photographs of parts of the Kara Sea and its littoral from the airship Graf Zeppelin, which had made a Polar Flight in July 1931. The crew of gleaned information on ice conditions and took photographs of Franz Josef Land (), Northern Land (the archipelago) and parts of the coasts of the Taymyr Peninsula ( and Novaya Zemlya (New Land). Accurate maps had been drawn by the use of Photogrammetry on the aerial photographs. Information on ice conditions and navigational problems was also available from the report by Robert Eyssen, commander of the auxiliary cruiser and raider , which navigated the northern route, escorted by a Soviet icebreaker, in 1940.
On 5 May 1942, the (MND, Naval Intelligence) received information from a prisoner of war that the settlement of Amderma, on the Kara Sea, south of Novaya Zemlya, had been expanded into a big port and that it had a railway link to Vorkuta, thence to the hinterland of the Soviet Union. On 29 June, spies in Canada reported that 18,000 bushels of wheat had been loaded on ships in Vancouver, bound for Siberia. On 1 July, Carls submitted a plan to send Admiral Scheer and Lützow into the Kara Sea against ships using the Northern Sea Route, to bombard Amderma and to attack any fishing craft which were found. SKL accepted the plan but on 8 August, limited it to Admiral Scheer, because of a fuel shortage. The sortie was set for the middle of August, when ice conditions would be at their least obstructive, during a lull in Allied Arctic convoys, after the victory over Convoy PQ 17 (27 June – 10 July 1942).
Admiral Scheer was a Deutschland-class cruiser of welded construction, with diesel engines capable of , a range of and a maximum speed of . The ship carried six guns in two triple turrets, eight guns, eight guns, ten machine-guns and eight torpedo tubes. The ship had a belt of armour -thick along the water line and of armour on the turrets. Two Arado Ar 196 floatplanes were carried for reconnaissance but one was left behind during the Kara Sea sortie; Admiral Scheer had a crew of 1,150 men.