Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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seize Crete. The British effort was faltering. After being caught off guard, the Germans had fought back strongly. Paratroopers seized the vital airfield at Maleme and reinforcements were flying in. Luftwaffe fighters had begun to arrive that day as well as artillery units. Bismarck’s detection raised hopes that some better tidings might be on the way. Churchill waited up until 3 a.m., for the latest developments, but eventually gave up and went to bed.
The Bismarck’s breakout had been expected for days. An initial report from Captain Henry Denham, the busy British naval attaché in neutral Sweden, that the battleship had left the Baltic was soon reinforced by sightings by RAF reconnaissance flights and German naval signals decrypted by the Bletchley Park code breakers.
The question was, which way would she come? There were two possibilities. She could aim for the Denmark Strait. Or she could take the shorter route and dart at the gap between the Faroe and Shetland Islands. The Commander of the Home Fleet Sir John Tovey had dispatched Norfolk and Suffolk under the command of Rear Admiral William Wake-Walker to deal with the first eventuality. At the same time he had detached a squadron under Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland consisting of the battle cruiser Hood, the battleship Prince of Wales and six destroyers to plug the Faroes–Shetlands gap.
This was at first sight a formidable force. Hood was the biggest ship in the British fleet. Prince of Wales was brand new – so new that she had yet to complete working up and still had workers from Vickers Armstrongs on board when she sailed. On the evening of 22 May Tovey himself left Scapa Flow aboard his flagship King George V, and together with the aircraft carrier Victorious led the Home Fleet westwards.
With the assets at his disposal, Tovey had every chance of intercepting Bismarck and bringing her to action. It was a thrilling prospect. Great sea actions were rare, yet they were the unspoken end of all naval training and preparation. From early puberty, naval cadets were steeped in the legends of Trafalgar and the Armada. Below decks, the pride in tradition though more subdued was present nonetheless. An epic battle offered those who fought in it the chance of distinction and to those who directed it the prospect of greatness. Tovey knew that if he sank the Bismarck his place in the Royal Navy’s history was assured. He accepted, too, that his peers were harsh judges and failure would bring ignominy.
The odds on an interception were in his favour. Even so, there was still a good chance that Bismarck would reach the Atlantic unscathed. It had happened before. In February, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had evaded the Home Fleet to squeeze through the Faroes–Iceland gap to begin their Atlantic raid. If Bismarck repeated the feat, a ripe cluster of targets awaited her. There were eleven convoys plying the Atlantic, some of them perilously close to Bismarck’s likely point of arrival in the ocean’s northern reaches.
It was important for Hitler’s long-term war plans that the battleship made it through. He was about to turn his armies eastwards against the Soviet Union and he needed a cowed and docile Europe at his back. The war at sea presented the best chance of bringing his last enemy in the west to heel. The original operation, codenamed Rheinübung, or Rhine Exercise, had been correspondingly ambitious. Admiral Räder’s plan had been to combine his four biggest ships in a powerful task force that could, temporarily at least, cause a suspension of the convoys, cutting off Britain’s maritime life-support system. Bismarck and Tirpitz would sail from Germany, and meet up with Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, now lying at Brest on the French Atlantic coast. One by one, though, his force had been whittled away. A lucky torpedo dropped by a Beaufort of RAF Coastal Command had done Gneisenau enough damage to put her out of action for six months. Then it was discovered that the boilers powering Scharnhorst’s steam turbines needed replacing. The battleships would have to operate on their own. For both it would be their first operation.
There was one more blow to fall. Tirpitz’s progress from launch to commissioning had been slower than her sister’s. She had finally gone into service on 25 February that year. Spring sea trials in the Baltic had revealed numerous niggling mechanical difficulties. Räder decided he dare not risk her on a long and testing operation. The decision dismayed the crew and their new commander, Kapitän zur See Karl Topp. When Hitler paid a visit to the battleships as they lay at Gotenhafen, as the Germans called the Polish Baltic port of Gdynia, a fortnight before Rhine Exercise was to start, Topp begged him to overule Räder. Hitler refused. When Bismarck left Gotenhafen just before noon on 18 May, she had with her only a single big ship consort – the 14,000-ton heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen which, although new, had limited firepower and a short range.
The operation was led by Admiral Günther Lütjens, the commander of the German fleet. His reputation stood high. It was he who had led Gneisenau and Scharnhorst during their late winter rampage. Lütjens’ down-turned mouth and hard eyes seldom broke into a smile. He looked what he was – cold, proud and utterly confident of his abilities, rarely feeling the necessity to explain critical decisions to those above or below him. His abilities were tied to a strict sense of duty. He could be relied on to follow the spirit of his orders even when he doubted their wisdom. Lütjens was quite aware of the dangers ahead. His ship outclassed anything in the British fleet. But the task force he was commanding had shrunk to a fraction of its original strength. It seemed to him probable – even inevitable – that it would eventually be overwhelmed by weight of numbers. Before the start of Rheinübung he had called on a friend at Räder’s Berlin headquarters to say goodbye. ‘I’ll never come back,’ he told him, in a matter-of-fact voice.2
The mood aboard Bismarck, though, was buoyant. The ship thrummed with excitement and anticipation as she headed out towards the Norwegian Sea. At noon, over the loudspeakers, the ship’s commander, Kapitän Ernst Lindemann, at last told the 2,221 officers and men on board where they were going. ‘The day we have longed for so eagerly has at last arrived,’ he said. ‘The moment when we can lead our proud ship against the enemy. Our objective is commerce raiding in the Atlantic imperilling England’s existence.’ He signed off with ‘the hunter’s toast, good hunting and a good bag!’ There was to be nothing sporting about their methods, however. The orders Lindemann had been given included an instruction that ‘the work of destruction is not to be delayed by life-saving activities’.3
Two days later, Lütjens’ task force was two hundred miles off the Norwegian coast. Just after noon, ignoring the preferences of the headquarters staff who favoured the Faroes–Iceland passage, he decided he would take the long way round to the Atlantic. He ordered course to be set for the Denmark Strait, hoping that the fog, snow and rain that was gathering in the west would cloak his movements.
At 7.11 p.m. on 23 May, as the task force steamed at a brisk twenty-seven knots with the black peaks of Iceland to port and the antiseptic blue of the Greenland pack ice to starboard, lookouts picked up an ominous shape among the shifting banks of fog. It was the Suffolk. The flimsy hope of concealment was gone and, whether it came soon or late, everyone realized that a battle was now all but inevitable.
Suffolk’s lookouts had also sighted their enemy. The first reaction was alarm. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were only six miles away, and the battleship’s guns would make short work of her. It seemed to Charles Collett that ‘at that short range [she] could have blown us out of the water’. But nothing happened. Lütjens gave the commander of Prinz Eugen, Kapitän Helmuth Brinkmann, permission to fire but the target was too indistinct. Suffolk was able to turn away rapidly into the mist and wireless the momentous news. When it reached Tovey, he ordered the Home Fleet to alter course to the north-west to bring them to an intercepting point south of the Denmark Strait. Aboard the Hood, Holland had also picked up the sighting report. He, too, changed course and steamed at full speed on a line that he hoped would bring his ship and the Prince of Wales across the path of the raiders as they emerged from the Strait at about 5.30 on the morning of 24 May.
Throughout the night, Suffolk and Norfolk kept a high-speed tail on Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, helped by the Suffolk’s new Type 284 long-range search radar. It was a delicate business, requiring them to keep close enough to stay in radar range but beyond the reach of German shells. At one point the 15-inch guns of Bismarck flamed out of the murk sending five salvoes in the direction of Norfolk but they fell wide and she suffered only minor damage. There was a frantic ninety minutes when the cruisers lost the scent but then, Collett recorded, they were ‘rewarded in the early morning by seeing, mere smudges