Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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the added weight tipping the ship over. Able Seaman Bill Smith, who made the voyage aboard the anti-submarine sloop HMS Magpie, recalled how eyebrows, eyelashes and nasal hair froze solid, ‘like needles’. Men came off watch with their faces covered in blood from rubbing their noses without thinking.2
These were not waters into which sailors ventured happily and the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, and the Home Fleet commander, Sir John Tovey, had opposed the Arctic convoys. They argued instead that supplies to the Soviet Union should be sent via the Persian Gulf which, though longer and slower, would cost fewer ships and lives.
Churchill overruled them. His motives were political as well as practical. As the summer of 1941 faded, German armies prepared to close on Moscow, and Stalin needed swift and solid proof that Britain and America were genuine allies. The first convoy sailed on 21 August 1941, opening a pipeline which, with some significant interruptions, gushed tanks, aircraft and stores to the – largely ungrateful – Soviets until the last days of the war
There were frequent differences between Churchill and some of the admirals. On the whole his relations with Pound were good – a result, said critics, of the First Sea Lord’s emollient and accommodating attitude – and his opposition to the convoys was soon forgotten. The clash with Tovey, though, merely deepened Churchill’s irritation with the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet. Even as an adolescent at Dartmouth, ‘Jack’ Tovey had been marked for the top and he had a stubborn faith in himself and his judgement. He was also deeply religious and if he had to choose between the will of his Maker and the dictates of the Prime Minister, God was always going to trump Churchill.
Tovey’s robust integrity had caused problems with Pound in the aftermath of the Bismarck episode. With the Prime Minister’s encouragement, the First Sea Lord had proposed disciplining senior officers for their alleged timidity during the battle of the Denmark Strait. He started moves to bring court-martial proceedings against the commander of the Prince of Wales, Captain John Leach, and Rear Admiral William Wake-Walker, who took command of the force after Admiral Holland went down in the Hood. It was Wake-Walker who ordered Prince of Wales to break off the action against Bismarck on the grounds that she was bound to come off worse. Tovey agreed with the decision. He let it be known that if proceedings were brought he would resign and appoint himself ‘prisoner’s friend’ at the service of the accused and Pound was forced to drop proceedings.
Churchill interpreted this behaviour as evidence of cautiousness rather than moral fortitude. Even though he had – after some initial dithering – put Tovey in charge of the Home Fleet, he came to regard him as lacking in offensive spirit, the military quality that he prized above all others. By the beginning of 1942 he was complaining to Pound about Tovey’s ‘negative, unenterprising and narrow-minded’ attitude.3 Tovey, for his part, had a professional’s contempt for Churchill’s continuous interventions, which often seemed wildly at odds with reality. After an early meeting he wrote to his friend Vice Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham expressing surprise at the Prime Minister’s ‘astonishing statements about naval warfare both at home and abroad’.4 Cunningham shared his view, confiding in a letter to an aunt that Churchill was ‘a bad strategist but doesn’t know it and nobody has the courage to stand up to him’.5
Churchill had served two stints as First Lord of the Admiralty, first in 1914–15 and then from September 1939 until arriving at Downing Street in May 1940. Like Hitler, he had an extraordinary capacity for absorbing facts and few matters, great or small, escaped his attention. There was no phony war at sea and the first weeks of the naval conflict were fraught with drama and incident. Churchill nonetheless found time on 21 November 1939, a day when the new cruiser HMS Belfast had had her back broken by a German mine in the home waters of the Firth of Forth, to dictate a memo on the question of whether having a cockney accent should be an impediment to rising up the service (it should not). His experience, and his image of himself as a born warrior, persuaded him that his judgement was at least equal to that of the admirals. There were enough occasions when he was demonstrably right and they were wrong to confirm him in this view.
Churchill’s intention to keep the Arctic convoys sailing at regular intervals throughout the year presented Tovey with a continuing logistical migraine. He did not have the ships to provide a strong escorting force as well as mounting an effective guard on the northern passages to the Atlantic. The lengthening hours of daylight made the voyage increasingly hazardous. In the first few months of 1942, the convoys had got off lightly. Only one destroyer and one merchantman had been sunk and several convoys had passed undetected. The concealing robe of darkness, though, was slipping away. The same was not true of the polar ice cap, which would take several more months to retreat, forcing the convoys to pass through narrow waters patrolled by U-boats and within easy reach of the newly arrived Luftwaffe reinforcements on land. Tovey voiced his fears but Churchill was adamant that the risks were acceptable and the convoys would sail.
Tovey could take some comfort in the thought that a great opportunity had arisen from the new situation. Tirpitz was now in Norway, with the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer to support her. Another convoy was due to set to sail at the beginning of March. Surely they would venture out to attack it, providing him with the chance to bring off an extraordinary coup? He had already sent Bismarck to the bottom. Now he was well placed to sink her sister. It was a thrilling prospect, and he was eager to seize it. So, too, was Churchill. The Prime Minister’s fascination with Tirpitz was unabated. On 27 January he had taken the trouble to complain to Alexander about the waste of time involved in signalmen, cipher staff and typists referring to the ship as ‘Admiral von Tirpitz’ in every signal when ‘surely TIRPITZ is good enough for the beast’.6 Now there was a chance that the beast might come out to fight. On 3 March he once again emphasized Tirpitz’s great significance in the strategic picture, telling the War Cabinet Defence Committee that she was ‘the most important vessel in the naval situation today’, and that ‘her elimination would profoundly affect the course of the war’.7
By then, a new convoy, PQ.12, was already at sea. It had set sail on 1 March, with seventeen vessels from Iceland, bound for Murmansk. At the same time, Convoy QP.8, made up of fifteen ships which had made the journey earlier, set off from Murmansk for home. The lurking presence of the Trondheim squadron meant that, for the first time, the movement in both directions would be covered by the main body of the Home Fleet. PQ.12 would have a close escort comprising a cruiser, Kenya, two destroyers, Oribi and Offa, and several Norwegian whaling vessels converted to hunt submarines. A larger force consisting of the battleship Duke of York, the battle cruiser Renown and six destroyers, commanded by Vice Admiral Alban Curteis, had put to sea from Iceland on 3 March to cover from a distance. Tovey, on board King George V, followed two days later from Scapa Flow, together with the cruiser Berwick and six destroyers. To provide air cover and to attack any German shipping, the 29,500-ton carrier HMS Victorious sailed with them. She was fast, modern and could accommodate thirty-six aircraft. It was a lavish use of the Home Fleet’s stretched resources. Altogether, the thirty-two merchantmen in the outward and inward convoys would be protected by forty-two escorts.
Around noon on 5 March 1942 one of the Luftwaffe long-range Focke-Wulf Condors that scoured the northern sea routes for enemy convoys saw ships sailing eastwards near Jan Mayen Island, a barren lump of rock in the middle of the Norwegian Sea about 350 nautical miles north-east of Iceland. The news was passed on to the headquarters of Naval Group North, at Kiel. Its commander, Generaladmiral Rolf Carls, eagerly signalled the naval staff in Berlin for permission to attack.
Räder, with Hitler’s blessing, gave permission. Here, at last, was a chance for Tirpitz to do something to justify its existence. The Kriegsmarine’s big ships soaked up enormous amounts of materiel and manpower that were much needed elsewhere yet had made little difference so far to the war at sea. It was becoming clear from the battle in the Atlantic that submarines and aeroplanes were far more effective than surface vessels at the business of ravaging allied seaborne commerce. By now U-boats had destroyed more than five and a half million tons of Allied merchant shipping. Enemy aircraft had accounted for nearly two million tons. Warship raiders, however, had managed only to sink seventy-three ships totalling a paltry 363,146 tons. Submarines and aircraft had also proved a deadlier enemy to the Royal Navy’s big ships than their opposite numbers in the Kriegsmarine’s