Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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locate the convoy. The Arado 196 was a robust, fast and well-armed monoplane designed for reconnaissance. It carried a pilot and an observer who also operated the guns. It was equipped with two floats and got airborne by being fired off the deck by a thirty-four-yard-long catapult that could be extended telescopically over the side. Its main shortcoming was that on returning it had to land on the water as near as it could to the ship’s side, to be lifted back aboard by a crane. In anything other than calm conditions, this was a difficult and dangerous manoeuvre.
Arados had folding wings and were usually housed below decks. The Tirpitz aircraft, though, were parked on deck. It was appallingly cold and snow gusted over the heaving, iron-grey seas. When the crews inspected their aeroplanes they found the wings were coated in ice. Flying was impossible. There would be no aerial reconnaissance that day. Ciliax did the next best thing and detached the three destroyers to head off north-north-west, while he took Tirpitz on a north-westerly heading, judging that one or other force would sail across the route the convoy would take.
Tovey had been moving steadily in the opposite direction, with the intention of putting a defensive shield of warships between the expected German line of approach and the convoy. Like Ciliax, he was operating blind. The weather brought no advantages to either side. The Albacores aboard Victorious had iced up, just like the Tirpitz’s Arados. There was no way of tracking the enemy from the air, and no other technological aids to decision-making to fill the information gap. Radar only stretched to the horizon. The great boon of Ultra had its limitations. The Kriegsmarine used an Enigma encrypting machine which had a different key system to that used by the army and air force. The code breakers at Bletchley Park found naval intercepts more difficult to decipher. It was sometimes twelve hours between a message being picked up and the decrypted content arriving at the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC), and so far there was nothing to reveal Ciliax’s intentions.
As the forenoon of 7 March wore on, both admirals were sifting their options in a manner that would have been familiar to a fighting captain of Nelson’s era. Into their calculations went the state of the sea and the weather, the speed and capabilities of the enemy force and, not least, their own assessment of the character and propensities of their opponent. Tovey’s intention was not only to protect PQ.12 but to lure Tirpitz and her companions into a battle which he hoped would end in her destruction. Ciliax was content with doing the maximum damage to the convoy.
It was likened later to a gigantic game of blind man’s buff, as both commanders groped through the great wastes of empty water, swept by frequent squalls and blizzards. Through the middle hours of the day both forces held their headings, waiting for a development that would propel them on a more promising course. While they did so, the returning Convoy QP.8, travelling westwards, and the outgoing ships of PQ.12, crossed through each other’s lines in a snowstorm.
Though they did not know it, the hunters and the hunted were close to brushing each other. Z-25, the destroyer Ciliax had sent off earlier in the day to find PQ.12, had passed only ten miles from the home-bound QP.8 but in the snow and gloom had failed to see its smoke. As the afternoon wore on visibility improved and the weather quietened. Another destroyer, the Friedrich Ihn, saw a smudge of smoke on the horizon and hurried off to investigate. The smoke was trailing from the funnel of the slow-moving Russian cargo ship Izhora, a straggler from QP.8. She was pathetically easy meat. At about 4.30 p.m. a torpedo from the destroyer hit her square on the port side. A photograph taken from the decks of the attacker shows a fierce fire burning amidships and black and grey smoke swirling above and behind. In the next one the bow has already disappeared beneath the surface of the sea which is now flat calm. Tirpitz hurried to join the destroyers as the Izhora went down, but the job was done and there was no need for her to fire her guns. Before the stricken merchantman disappeared, her radio operator managed to get off a distress signal which was picked up by the Home Fleet.
Tovey now had a rough idea of the enemy’s position. It was supplemented by wireless bearings of an unidentified ship, which might have been the Tirpitz, which led him to take the main body of the fleet off eastwards towards Bear Island in pursuit. In case this proved to be a false scent, and the battleship had turned for home, he detached six destroyers to hunt along a line stretching from the last position of the Izhora to Trondheim. Tovey kept up his search to the east until midnight, then turned south so that he could stay in touch with his destroyers and place Victorious in a position where her aircraft could set off on an aerial reconnaissance in the morning.
The end of the Izhora
Ciliax was still intent on attacking PQ.12. By the evening of 7 March, his destroyers were running low on oil. There was no accompanying tanker to allow them to refuel at sea. Ciliax ordered Friedrich Ihn back to Narvik to replenish and rejoin him as soon as possible. The other two destroyers tried twice to refuel from Tirpitz’s bunkers but it was impossible to hook up the hoses in the heavy swell. They were sent back to Tromsø to fill up.
The following morning, 8 March, he carried on the hunt with Tirpitz alone. He ordered Topp to turn due north towards Bear Island, calculating this would put him ahead of the advancing convoy. Once there, they turned again, heading south-west on a zigzag course which Ciliax believed would bring him onto a collision course with his prey. He was sure his instinct was right and the crew were called to action stations. But as the tension mounted and Topp and his men steeled themselves for their first battle, the convoy was steaming safely eighty miles to the north.
PQ.12 had been warned of the ambush. An Enigma intercept had reached the OIC which gave notice of Ciliax’s move towards Bear Island and the news was passed on in enough time for the convoy to steer away from danger, moving north along the edge of the Arctic pack ice.11 It was yet another example of the blessings of Ultra. Had the intercept not been made, the merchantmen might well have sailed into Tirpitz’s guns while Tovey’s fleet was still two hundred miles away. By now Tovey had concluded that Tirpitz had eluded him and was on her way back to port. He intended to take the fleet back westwards to Iceland to replenish his destroyers. The new intelligence reached him in the late afternoon and at 5.30 p.m. he turned his ships round and headed north-east again in the direction of Bear Island.
Ciliax had spent a frustrating time steaming along his chosen line of interception. At 8 p.m. he finally decided to give up the hunt and return south to Norway. He signalled his intentions back to Kiel. The message was duly intercepted and passed to the Bletchley Park decrypters who worked frantically to crack it in time for it to be put to maximum use. By the early hours of 9 March, the information that the German fleet was on its way reached Tovey. At 2.40 a.m. he ordered the fleet around and steered south-east as fast as his ships were able in an attempt to cut off Ciliax and his force before they reached safety.
It was too late to catch them and bring them to battle. The aircraft aboard Victorious provided a strike force that could land a significant blow, however. By skill or luck, some of the Albacores’ torpedoes might find their target, slowing Tirpitz enough for the Home Fleet to catch her, presenting Tovey with the chance to crown his earlier triumph against Bismarck.
As the minutes passed the prospects of success seemed to grow. An Ultra signal reached Tovey from London giving further, invaluable details. An intercepted message from Naval Group North in Kiel gave the position, off the Lofoten Islands, where Tirpitz was to rendezvous with its replenished destroyers at 7 a.m. At 3.16 a.m. the information was passed to Captain Henry Bovell, the commander of Victorious, with the order ‘report proposals’.12 Charles Friend was in the Operations Room when the new information arrived. ‘[It] said in effect that Tirpitz would be in a stated position just off Vestfjord which leads up to Narvik,’ he wrote. He remembered that it also gave the battleship’s speed and course. The precision prompted him to think ‘that to have such prior knowledge Admiral Tovey must have had a spy on board Tirpitz’.13 It was only some time after the war was over that those who had fought in it finally learned of the existence of Ultra.
It was still too dark to fly but Bovell assured Tovey that operations would begin at first light. He signalled back: ‘Propose fly off searching force of six aircraft at 0630 … fly off striking force of 12 as soon as ranged about 0730.’ The Albacore crews were