fire and was severely damaged. The fire forced the crew to shut down the ship's propulsion system until the blaze could be brought under control; this rendered Admiral Hipper motionless for several hours on the open sea. British reconnaissance failed to locate the ship, and after the fire was extinguished, the ship returned to Hamburg's Blohm & Voss shipyard, where repairs lasted slightly over a week. The ship made a second attempt to break out into the Atlantic that was designated Operation Nordseetour on 30 November; she successfully navigated the Denmark Strait undetected on 6 December. Admiral Hipper intercepted WS 5A, a convoy of 20 troopships on 24 December, some west of Cape Finisterre. Five of the twenty ships were allocated to Operation Excess. The convoy was protected by a powerful escort composed of the aircraft carriers and , the cruisers , , and , and six destroyers. Admiral Hipper did not initially spot the escorting warships, and so began attacking the convoy. With her main guns she badly damaged two ships, one of which was the transport Empire Trooper, before spotting the heavy cruiser Berwick and destroyers steaming toward her. She quickly withdrew, using her main guns to keep the destroyers at bay. Ten minutes later, Berwick reappeared off Admiral Hippers port bow; the German cruiser fired several salvos from her forward turrets and scored hits on the British cruiser's rear turrets, waterline, and forward superstructure. Admiral Hipper then disengaged, to prevent the British destroyers from closing to launch a torpedo attack. By now, the ship was running low on fuel, and so she put into Brest in occupied France on 27 December. While en route, Admiral Hipper encountered and sank the isolated passenger ship . Another round of routine maintenance work was effected while the ship was in Brest, readying her for another sortie into the Atlantic shipping lanes. On 1 February 1941, Admiral Hipper embarked on her second Atlantic sortie. The Kriegsmarine had initially sought to send the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to operate in concert with Admiral Hipper, but Gneisenau suffered storm damage in December that prevented the participation of the two ships. Repairs were effected quickly, however, and the two battleships broke out into the Atlantic in early February. Admiral Hipper rendezvoused with a tanker off the Azores to top up her fuel tanks. Upon learning that the British Force H had sortied from Gibraltar