Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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The mood among the crews was subdued. Everyone had been disoriented by the cloud and the attacks had all taken place in ones and twos. Only two, possibly three torpedoes had been seen to hit the target. That was not a cause for celebration. Bismarck’s thick armour meant that even a direct hit amidships would not necessarily prove fatal, as the attacks from Victorious had shown. Moffat thought he might have been responsible for one recorded strike. A pilot who followed him in saw a torpedo exploding two-thirds of the way down the port side.
Visibility was too bad for another attempt that night but they would be sent off again the following morning. Someone remarked gloomily that ‘the Light Brigade had only been asked to do it once’. Then a stream of information started to arrive that lifted their spirits. Sheffield signalled that the Bismarck had slowed down. Then came the astonishing news that she had turned round and was heading straight towards the battleship King George V, which was approaching from the north. A little later, two Swordfish returned to Ark Royal from a long reconnaissance to report that Bismarck had lost speed and had steamed round in two full circles. HMS Zulu, which by now had arrived on the scene, confirmed it: Bismarck had been stopped, less than five hundred miles from the French coast.
Moffat learned later that it was probably his torpedo that had stopped her. It had exploded at the battleship’s stern, jamming her rudders at 12 degrees and making steering impossible. With that, Bismarck’s fate was sealed. Throughout the night she was subjected to repeated torpedo attacks from fast destroyers which had now caught up. In the morning, King George V and Rodney arrived and closed for the kill. The end was never in doubt but it still took forty-five minutes of pounding from the two British battleships and the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire before the Bismarck’s big guns stopped firing. By then Lütjens was dead, probably killed when a shell from King George V hit the bridge. Dorsetshire administered the coup de grâce. An able seaman on board, A. E. Franklin, watched two 21-inch torpedoes leave the cruiser’s tubes then saw ‘a tremendous explosion … the fish having truly planted themselves in the bowels of the Bismarck far below the water line amidships’. Dorsetshire closed to 1,000 yards to deliver another torpedo which struck squarely on the port side.
John Moffat was flying overhead when she went down. He saw a sight ‘that … remained etched in my mind ever since. This enormous vessel, over 800 feet long, her gun turrets smashed, her bridge and upper works like a jagged ruin, slowly, frighteningly toppled over, smashing down into the sea and her great hull was revealed, the plates and bilge keels glistening dark red as the oily sea covered her. Still leaping from her were men, sailors and there were hundreds more in the sea, some desperately struggling for their lives, some already inert tossed by the waves as they floated face down.’ Moffat was pierced by the knowledge that ‘there was nothing that I could do to save even a single one’. Bismarck finally sank, stern first, at 10.39 a.m., four hundred miles west of Brest, an hour and fifty minutes after the battle was joined.
Only 118 of the 2,224 men on board were saved. Most were taken aboard the Dorsetshire. Franklin recorded that with ‘the battle finished, the humanitarian instinct rises above the feeling of revenge and destruction … ropes come from nowhere. Willing hands rush to haul on board the survivors.’13 But then came a warning that an enemy submarine was in the area. The rescue work broke off and Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori, which was also standing by, made for safety, leaving hundreds of men bobbing in the oil-stained sea to await death.
The relief in London was immense. Churchill’s desperation for a victory had caused him to issue some unfortunate instructions. The night before the end Tovey had signalled that he might have to break off the chase. King George V’s fuel bunkers were draining fast and if they ran dry his flagship would be dead in the water, at the mercy of any prowling U-boat. Churchill’s response, passed on by Pound, was that ‘Bismarck must be sunk at all costs and if to do this it is necessary for the King George V to be remain on scene then she must do so, even if it subsequently means towing King George V’. Tovey was to describe this later as ‘the stupidest and most ill-considered signal ever made’,14 and the exchange deepened the mistrust developing between the two men.
Churchill broke the news to the nation in dramatic style. He was on his feet in Church House, where House of Commons business was conducted while bomb damage to the Palace of Westminster was repaired, describing the battle raging in the Atlantic when there was a commotion and a messenger handed him a piece of paper. He sat down, scanned it and got up again. ‘I have just received news that the Bismarck is sunk,’ he announced and the assembly erupted in a roar of applause.
There was much to celebrate. Hood had been avenged and a serious threat to Britain’s war effort neutralized. While the nation savoured the victory, satisfaction in the Cabinet and the Admiralty was tempered by the understanding that it had been a close-run thing, revealing many weaknesses in the navy’s armoury.
It had taken six battleships and battle cruisers, two aircraft carriers, thirteen cruisers and twenty-one destroyers to bring the Bismarck down. Most of the torpedoes of the Fleet Air Arm’s obsolescent aircraft had bounced off her and it was a lucky strike that doomed her. Of the 2,876 shells fired by the fleet, only 200–300 hit the target. Even when utterly at the mercy of her pursuers, Bismarck had proved extremely hard to kill. What, then, would it take to seal the fate of her surviving sister, Tirpitz?
Flight Lieutenant A. F. P. Fane was turning his Spitfire for home after a frustrating reconnaissance flight over the eastern end of Trondheimsfjord in central Norway when he glimpsed a large shape in the confused pattern of grey seas, dishcloth clouds and white-capped hills below. ‘I saw something like a ship hidden in the shadow of the far end,’ he recorded in a neat, pencilled hand in his diary. It was so large that he thought he was mistaken and it ‘must be an island’. He went down for a closer look. ‘By God it’s a ship – it’s the ship,’ he wrote. He ‘rolled onto my side to have a good look and remember saying out loud, “my God I believe I’ve found it!” I couldn’t believe my eyes or my luck.’1
Fane’s delight at his coup wore off as he struggled to reach home. The cloud pressed down to 600 feet and he was flying into ‘a hell of a wind from the south’. Twenty minutes after he should have landed he was ‘getting really worried’. There was still no sign of land and he was down to his last twenty gallons of fuel – less than half an hour’s flying time. Then a gap appeared in the cloud and he recognized Scapa Flow. He turned south and scraped down at Skitten, a satellite field near Wick. A little later he was back at base telling his flight commander Tony Hill that ‘I’d thought I’d found the old Rowboat but could not believe it’. He ‘hopped about on one foot then the other waiting for photos to be developed. When film was ready tore in to look at negatives.’ He was still worried that ‘maybe I’d missed the b––– thing. NO! there it was – no doubt now, it was the TURPITZ [sic] all right.’
Fane, a dashing thirty-year-old who was a Grand Prix racing driver before the war, had been sent with C Flight of No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) to Wick on the north Scottish coast on 21 January 1942 with the specific job of searching for Tirpitz. Now, only two days later, he had found her, tucked into Faettenfjord, a finger of deep water forty miles from the open sea.
Flight Lieutenant A. F. P. Fane
Churchill received the news with great excitement. He immediately ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans for Tirpitz to be bombed. ‘The destruction or even the crippling of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the present time,’ he told them. ‘No other target is comparable to it.’ A successful attack would mean that ‘the entire naval situation throughout the world would be altered’, freeing the Royal Navy to assert itself in the Pacific against Japan, which had now entered the war. He concluded: ‘The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this ship, which is holding four times the number of British capital ships paralysed, to say nothing of the two new American battleships retained in the Atlantic. I regard the matter as of the highest urgency and importance.’2