Each Boxing Day in his retirement Captain “Andy” Palmer broke out several white ensigns in the windows of his home in Mousehole, Cornwall, to commemorate the sinking of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape in 1943.

It was a naval victory in which he had a particular interest since he had been torpedo officer of HMS Belfast, one of the cruisers involved in the coup de grâce to the Scharnhorst after her main 11-inch turrets had been silenced and she had been reduced to a wreck by the 14-inch guns of the battleship Duke of York, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser’s flagship. It was a point of honour among “old Belfasts” that it was their ship and their torpedo officer that had finally sent this powerful foe beneath the waves, and Palmer liked to think so too.

The operation to trap the Scharnhorst and remove a powerful threat to Britain’s Arctic convoys had begun on Christmas Day when the battlecruiser and six destroyers sailed north from Langefjord to attack the convoy JW55B as it passed North Cape en route to Murmansk. With foul weather reducing visibility almost to zero in the dim twilight of an Arctic mid-winter’s day, the German destroyers lost contact with Scharnhorst.

By the small hours of Boxing Day, Fraser’s force, which included a cruiser and four destroyers, was in a position to cut Scharnhorst off from her base while three cruisers, Norfolk, Belfast and Sheffield, bore down from the northeast. Furnished by their radar with accurate reports of the enemy’s position, Fraser was able to approach to within 12,000 yards of the unsuspecting battlecruiser before opening fire at 4.50pm. Within 90 minutes Scharnhorst’s guns had fallen silent. Torpedoes from the destroyers and further salvoes from the Duke of York reduced her to a flaming wreck but she still refused to sink. Finally the cruisers were ordered “to finish her with torpedoes”.

After firing a salvo of torpedoes from Belfast’s starboard tubes, Palmer had his view of the target obscured by the cruiser Norfolk as the ship turned to bring his port tubes to bear. When he next obtained a view, sometime after 7.45pm, the dull glow denoting the stricken battlecruiser had disappeared. Calculating the running time of his torpedoes, Palmer always maintained that Belfast had struck the final blow, though of course the truth of the matter will never be established. The official history estimates that of the 55 torpedoes fired at Scharnhorst probably 11 had hit, in addition to a dozen or so 14-inch shells, a testimony to the robustness of German naval construction.

Edward (always known as Andy) Palmer had joined the Navy as a boy seaman at 16 and was commissioned in 1937. Much of his wartime service was on Atlantic convoys and he was awarded the DSC in 1942. After the war he was involved in the development of sonar at Portland and ended his naval career as Commodore Superintendent of the Malta dockyard.

His wife, Marian, died in 2001. He is survived by two sons and two daughters.

Captain “Andy” Palmer, DSC, torpedo and ordnance expert, was born on August 14, 1916. He died on June 5, 2008, aged 91