Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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commanded a crew of 2,608, made up of 108 officers and 2,500 men. Most of them were young and inexperienced. Among them, though, was a core of sailors who had experienced the full trauma of war at sea. They were survivors of the heavy cruiser Blücher, the newest ship in the Kriegsmarine which had been sunk by shore-based gun and torpedo batteries as she sailed into Oslofjord during the invasion of Norway in April 1940 – an event as shocking and unexpected as the loss of Hood was to be for the British. Tirpitz seemed immune from such a catastrophe. Everyone on board took comfort from the ship’s armadillo hide of steel armour and the huge guns, encased in turrets named Anton, Bruno, Caesar and Dora. ‘The many, very heavy guns give a sense of absolute safety,’ wrote Voigt to Erika in Berlin. The sheer size seemed to promise security, as reflected in the metaphors of impregnability that crop up again and again in his correspondence. The ship was a ‘fortress’, a ‘slab of granite’.
Tirpitz, though, was an offensive not a defensive weapon. In the aftermath of the Bismarck disaster there was uncertainty as to how she should now be used. The loss had jolted Hitler into action. Admiral Räder noted that the Führer abandoned laissez-faire and now became ‘much more critical and more inclined to insist on his own views than before’.9
The battleground for which Tirpitz had originally been intended no longer seemed attractive. America’s full entry into the war in December 1941 made the Atlantic a much more dangerous place for surface ships. The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau were still in the area, lying up at Brest, where they were harassed by Bomber Command and afflicted by mechanical problems that delayed their return to operational health. Tirpitz was still not at battle readiness and, even if she were, would face a dangerous voyage to a French Atlantic port and be exposed to RAF attack once she got there. If a raiding force did venture out its operations would be circumscribed by a dire shortage of oil. All in all, Atlantic operations by large ships seemed to offer more danger than they did reward.10
Hitler’s thoughts turned instead to Norway, which Germany had held since the spring of 1940. He regarded its possession as a strategic necessity. Norway commanded the Reich’s northern approaches. It was also vital for the transportation of essential iron ore supplies from Sweden. During 1941 he grew increasingly worried that Germany might be about to lose it. Hitler harboured a persistent suspicion – which sometimes seemed to shade into obsession – that Britain planned to invade Norway. A series of increasingly daring raids by British and Norwegian commandos on the Lofoten Islands, Spitsbergen and Bear Island, and Vaagsøy on the mainland, raised the possibility that a landing in Norway might be imminent. The prospect of losing Narvik was particularly alarming. It was the only ice-free port in the area, through which Swedish ore could be shipped to German war factories all year round.
On 13 November Hitler met Räder at the Wolfschanze, a headquarters in East Prussia from where he oversaw the war on the Eastern Front. It was decided to transfer Tirpitz from the Baltic to Trondheim. Hitler was now of the opinion that ‘every ship which is not stationed in Norway is in the wrong place’.11 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would be moved north when the circumstances allowed.
Räder doubted there was any real danger of a British attack on Norway. It was another example of Hitler’s exasperating belief in instinct over logical assessment. However, the move had his approval. He, too, had come to believe that the Atlantic was too dangerous for extended raiding operations. Northern waters offered a more advantageous battleground for his big ships. From Norwegian ports they could sally forth against the Arctic convoys which, in response to Stalin’s appeals to Churchill and Roosevelt, were ferrying substantial war supplies round the North Cape to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel. The first had sailed from Iceland on 21 August, six more followed by the end of the year and many more were expected in 1942.
The goal of strangling Britain had diminished in importance. The great struggle now was with the Soviet Union and Tirpitz could make an important contribution to the war on the Eastern Front. The holds of the cargo ships plying the Atlantic and Arctic oceans were crammed with tanks, aircraft, lorries, engines, guns and ammunition, shoring up Soviet resistance to the German onslaught. It was far more efficient to destroy them on the high seas than on the battlefield, and each ship sent to the bottom by the navy saved many Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe lives.
The mere presence of Tirpitz and the other big units in northern waters would also add greatly to the Royal Navy’s already crushing burden of duty. The convoys needed heavy protection and a substantial force of capital ships, destroyers, minesweepers, anti-aircraft vessels and submarines would have to shield them as they came and went. Even if the German ships never left port they would act as a ‘fleet in being’, forcing the enemy to maintain a countervailing force in the area, tying up valuable units that could be put to much-needed use elsewhere.
Räder summarized his intentions in his sailing orders. Her new home was to be Trondheim, halfway down Norway’s western coast. From there she was to ‘protect our position in the Norwegian and Arctic areas by threatening the flank of enemy operations against the northern Norwegian areas and by attacking White Sea convoys … to tie down enemy forces in the Atlantic so they cannot operate in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean or the Pacific’.12 Tirpitz would be supported by the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen which would soon be on their way from Germany.
Tirpitz left Gdynia on the Polish Baltic coast on the afternoon of 12 January 1942. At seven o’clock the following morning she arrived at Holtenau at the eastern end of the Kiel Canal which linked the Baltic to the North Sea. There she unloaded stores and equipment in order to lighten the load and ease the passage through the waterway. On board, excitement was mounting. After nearly a year of working-up exercises the preparations seemed to be over and operations about to begin. ‘Nobody knew anything,’ remembered Adalbert Brünner, a young midshipman who had joined the ship the previous autumn. ‘Everybody hoped we were off on a Gneisenau or Bismarck type of operation.’ The crew wondered whether ‘we were on our way to the Atlantic … the ship was humming with rumours.’13 It seemed barely possible that her broad beam would be able to squeeze through the canal. Water from the wash overflowed the banks and it appeared to Brünner as they passed under the high bridge at Rendsburg, halfway along the route, ‘one could almost shake hands with the pedestrians’.
That evening Tirpitz arrived at Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Elbe at the western end of the canal where she took on fuel and reloaded the cargo previously taken off. The following day she steamed out into the North Sea. It was there that the crew finally heard of their destination. They were going to Norway not the Atlantic. The news did nothing to deflate spirits. Either way they would soon be in action. To some, the move seemed predestined. By a curious chance, the ship’s symbol was the curved prow of a Viking longship.
It was deep midwinter, and the weather was on their side. Before setting off, Navy Group North reassured Topp that the forecast was bad for central England and Scotland, ‘with poor take-off conditions’.14 His ship stood a good chance of getting to Trondheim without being spotted by reconnaissance aircraft. On 15 January Tirpitz was on her way. The seas were so rough that the escorting destroyers were unable to keep pace and had to follow in the battleship’s wake as it sliced through the waves close to its top speed of just over thirty knots.15 Then, on the morning of 16 January, those on deck caught their first sight of the Norwegian coast. ‘It was hung with cloud, sombre, covered with snow,’ remembered Brünner. ‘It was a strange sight for all of us, scattered houses which didn’t look as if they were connected up by roads – it seemed like the quintessence of loneliness.’16
In the afternoon they turned to starboard and passed between the low headlands at the entrance to Trondheimsfjord which plunged for eighty miles east and north into the Norwegian mainland. Their final destination was a narrow finger of water at the south-eastern end – Faettenfjord. It was only about three-quarters of a mile across at its widest, with a small island, Saltøya, planted at the entrance, and it took great skill to bring Tirpitz in. Topp managed the feat easily. ‘The commander simply made fast there without any pilot ships or tugs,’ said Georg Schlegel. ‘He was the best. He could really drive that ship.’17
In Faettenfjord a berth had already been prepared with two