Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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off two broadsides against their flimsy attackers. Ciliax made amends to Topp for his intervention. ‘Well done, captain,’ he said in front of the rest of the officers on the bridge. ‘You fought your ship magnificently.’ Exercising his prerogative as fleet commander he made an immediate award to Topp of the Iron Cross, taking off his own and pinning it on the captain.17
The surviving aircraft arrived back on the carrier at 11.00 a.m. to a cold reception. ‘The processes of debriefing and dissection of the fiasco ended in the surviving crews being mustered on the quarterdeck of Victorious to be addressed by senior officers in a very recriminatory way,’ Charles Friend remembered. ‘We received for our efforts and the loss of six men what can only be described in the naval slang of the time as a “severe bottle”.’ Friend considered his superiors’ disappointment as ‘natural’. But he judged that ‘their humanity seemed to have left them at that time’.18
Lucas was criticized by Bovell for launching his attack prematurely. He went on to conclude that ‘all aircraft were deceived by Tirpitz’s large size and dropped their torpedoes at too great a range’.19 A fairer criticism would have been of the system which placed Lucas in charge, even though he had received no training for such an operation and had never flown in action with his men before that day. In the judgement of the official historian of the war at sea, ‘to be called on to carry out so critical an operation in such circumstances was a very severe, even unfair test’.20
It was, as Tovey had said, a wonderful chance. But God was not on his side that day and the opportunity had been lost. For a few hours Tirpitz had been uniquely vulnerable, in open sea, with only her own guns and those of a single destroyer to defend her. There was some consolation in the safe arrival of PQ.12 at Murmansk on 12 March. But weighed in the scales of war, Tovey regarded the sinking of Tirpitz as ‘of incomparably greater importance … than the safety of any convoy’. To him the battleship remained a mortal menace, whose removal was worth gamble and risk.21 The moment had passed and there was no knowing when it would come again. As Tirpitz slipped into the safety of the sheltered anchorage at Bogen, near Narvik, the Home Fleet, with Victorious, headed disconsolately back to Scapa Flow.
The game was not quite over. The Bogen Bay anchorage provided only a temporary haven. If she lingered, Tirpitz could find herself bottled up by a blockading force stationed at the exit where the narrow Vestfjord met the sea, and vulnerable to air attack. Group Headquarters in Kiel ordered her back to Trondheim. She left at eleven o’clock on the night of 12 March, accompanied by five destroyers. They had been due to sail early on the 13th, but Topp, chastened perhaps by the near miss of the torpedo, superstitiously brought the departure forward.
They picked their way through the inner leads and raced south, through foggy seas, keeping a watch for mines. Though those on board did not know it, there were other dangers lurking. Once again Ultra had given warning of the movement. A flotilla of eight destroyers from Scapa Flow arrived off the coast between Bodø and Trondheim at 1.30 a.m. and steered north into the path of the oncoming Tirpitz. By 3.30 a.m., they had to turn away, so as to be clear of the coast when dawn came up, exposing them to Luftwaffe attack.22
Tirpitz steamed southwards, hugging the coast through fog and snow, passing close to four waiting submarines deployed tactically at points along the way where she had to leave the shelter of the leads for the open sea. By nine o’clock on the evening of 13 March, she was back in her anchorage in Faettenfjord. The thick weather persisted. It was not until six days later that a reconnaissance flight confirmed that Tirpitz had returned home.
The failure to nail Tirpitz was badly received in Downing Street. On 13 March, Churchill sent Pound a message asking him to ‘kindly let me have a report on the air attack on TIRPITZ, explaining how it was that 12 of our machines managed to get no hits as compared with the extraordinary efficiency of the Japanese attack on PRINCE OF WALES and REPULSE’.23 The underlying explanation, as he knew well, was that the Japanese had the aeroplanes and weapons to wage successful war at sea. The FAA was paying the price of its neglect. Its aircraft were outmoded and outclassed and, in the rapid expansion now going on, training had been rushed and units diluted with untested new arrivals. The debacle hastened efforts to repair these weaknesses, so that the next time the FAA met the Tirpitz the results would be different. In the meantime, Churchill could take satisfaction from an operation that was very much to his taste.
Chapter 6 ‘A somewhat desperate venture’
Tirpitz and all the Kriegsmarine’s other large units were now grouped in northern waters, but at the Admiralty the fear persisted that at some point they would return to the Atlantic. If they did, the expectation was that they would then make their base in France. The journey home after a raiding expedition, for refit and repair, would be extremely hazardous. It would make more sense to operate from ports on the Bay of Biscay, and in particular St Nazaire.
St Nazaire lies five miles along the northern bank of the mouth of the Loire where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. It housed a complex of reinforced concrete pens from which German U-boats sallied out against Allied shipping. It was also home to the world’s biggest dry dock, built between 1928 and 1932 for the construction of the great French luxury liner SS Normandie. The dock was the only one on the Atlantic coast large enough to handle a big battleship. It was where Admiral Lütjens had been heading when the Bismarck was damaged and was the obvious place from which Tirpitz could lunge at the transatlantic convoys.
Hitler by now had no intention of risking Tirpitz on a long-range mission. Räder agreed with him. Her performance against PQ.12 was disappointing. Nonetheless, she was providing a great service tying up a large portion of the Home Fleet which otherwise might be operating to greater effect in the Mediterranean or Far East. U-boats were, anyway, sinking large amounts of transatlantic Allied shipping every day without any help from the surface fleet – 1.2 million tons were lost in the first three months of 1942.
In these circumstances, the U-boat pens at St Nazaire would appear a more vital target than the dry dock. The port had already been subjected to air attack. In the spring of 1941, as the crisis of the Battle of Britain faded and the Battle of the Atlantic intensified, Churchill had demanded a maximum effort from the RAF against the two enemy weapons that were wreaking most of the destruction. His words were repeated in the directive handed to Bomber Command: ‘We must take the offensive against the U-boat and the Focke-Wulf (Condor) wherever we can and whenever we can.’1 St Nazaire was listed as a target. It was not until the next year that regular raids were launched. The bombing was inaccurate and ineffective and operations were restricted by Churchill’s instruction that aircraft were to attack only when visibility was good enough to minimize the risk to French civilians. A chance had been missed. By March 1942, nine out of fourteen planned submarine pens were finished. Shielded from bombs by massive layers of ferro-concrete, there was no hope of destroying them from the air. A land attack would take enormous resources and involve considerable losses.
The pens, then, were too tough a target, whichever way they were approached. The Normandie dock, however – even in the changed circumstances of early 1942 – still appeared a worthwhile proposition. The shift of all Hitler’s big ships northwards that was completed with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau’s dash through the Channel had not been interpreted in the Admiralty as meaning that the Kriegsmarine’s surface ships would no longer venture south.
Fear of the Tirpitz’s destructive capabilities remained as intense as ever. As long as the facilities at St Nazaire were intact, the possibility existed that a raiding force with Tirpitz at its heart would launch into the North Atlantic, laying waste to the convoys and diverting most of the Home Fleet into the effort to hunt it down. The destruction of the Normandie dock would shut down that possibility for ever.
In January 1942, following a conversation with Churchill, Sir Dudley Pound asked the Admiralty’s Plans Division to examine the possibilities. They in turn asked the newly appointed Chief of the Combined Operations Headquarters, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to devise a solution. Combined Ops was an inter-service organization tasked with devising disruptive raids that would harry and unnerve Axis forces. It could call on the troops of the Special Service Brigade’s