Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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(as we had opened our distance as it became lighter) to the southward’. The sight of the British ships was ‘a great relief … it meant that our main job was completed successfully and that there was little likelihood of the German ships turning round and engaging us – always a distinct possibility whilst we were shadowing’. Collett, in his air defence role, had a station on the upper works with all-round vision. It gave him a grandstand view of what happened next.
As dawn came up on 24 May, Prinz Eugen and Bismarck emerged at high speed from the southern end of the Denmark Strait. Hood and Prince of Wales were closing with them from the east at an angle. At 5.35 a.m. a lookout in the crow’s nest of the Prince of Wales saw smoke on the north-west horizon and yelled down the voice pipe to the bridge that the enemy was in sight. Seven minutes earlier the Prinz Eugen had already spotted distant ships off her port bow. The two forces plunged towards each other on a converging course and at 5.52 a.m., at a range of over thirteen miles, Hood, in the lead, opened fire with four shells from her 15-inch guns. Holland gave the order to engage the left-hand ship. He had picked the wrong one. It was Prinz Eugen, a much less dangerous adversary than Bismarck. Captain John Leach in Prince of Wales did not make the same mistake and engaged Bismarck. The Hood’s salvoes missed their target. Prince of Wales’s 14-inch guns scored three hits on Bismarck, the last bursting through the hull below the water line and doing considerable damage.
Lütjens, on Bismarck, held his fire. Then, at 5.55 a.m., he ordered both ships to aim at Hood. At least one shell hit her, starting a fire. Hood and Prince of Wales now turned to port to bring their main aft guns to bear. As they did so a salvo from Bismarck crashed around Hood amidships. One shell appeared to hit just behind the mainmast. Collett, watching from Suffolk, saw ‘a terrific sheet of scarlet flame suddenly reach up high into the heavens … and then die down to be followed by billowing clouds of thick black smoke’. He knew at once that a magazine had gone up and that ‘this must be an end to her’.4
So it was. On board Prince of Wales a young midshipman, G. P. Allen, was at his station in the Upper Plot, the chart room just below the bridge. His duties including recording events in the ship’s log as they were called down on the voice pipe from above by the navigator. He remembered later how ‘the Hood was only a few cable lengths away on our port bow when at 06.02 I heard “Hood hit,” at 06.04 I heard “Hood on fire” and at 06.05 “Hood sunk.”’5 As Allen, whose nineteenth birthday it was that day, struggled to absorb the information a shell impacted a few yards over his head, smashing into the bridge and killing two of his fellow midshipmen. The Upper Plot was connected to the bridge by a funnel through which the captain could peer down to check the ship’s progress on the chart stretched out below. The shell had blown the top off the funnel and ‘blood began to drip steadily onto the chart table. We caught the drips in a half-empty jug of cocoa.’ The Prince of Wales was by now in no fit state to fight back. She had been hit seven times by the German ships. Two of her ten 14-inch guns were out of action – not because of the damage wrought by the German ships but because they were still not properly installed when the order came to sail. Captain Leach ‘very wisely’ in Allen’s view decided that he risked losing his ship without any chance of damaging the enemy. He turned her away, made smoke and ran for safety.
The loss of the Hood was heard with disbelief among the rest of the fleet. One minute it had been on the surface firing its guns. The next it had disappeared along with all but three of its 1,419-strong crew. The ‘mighty Hood’ as she was known to the Royal Navy was the symbol of Britain’s maritime power, whose appearance in the great ports of the world on flag-flying visits sent a message that, despite the challenges from rising powers, the navy still ruled the waves.
The catastrophe sent a shudder through the surrounding ships. Patrick Mullins, an ambitious and well-read young ordinary seaman with the Home Fleet on board Repulse, wrote later that it was ‘difficult to comprehend the effect that the sudden loss of this great, glamorous and handsome ship had [on us]. Suspension of belief was the first reaction, followed by awe and then by the realization that now it was up to us … suddenly our side did not look nearly so strong.’6
Tovey, aboard King George V, heard the news in a stark signal sent from the Norfolk stating simply, ‘Hood has blown up.’ Soon it reached the Admiralty who passed it on to Chequers. ‘Pug’ Ismay was woken by the sound of voices and got out of bed ‘to see the Prime Minister’s back disappearing down the corridor’. Averell Harriman’s bedroom door was open and Ismay went in. He was told that Churchill had arrived a few minutes before ‘in a yellow sweater, covering a short nightshirt, his pink legs exposed’, muttering ‘“Hell of a battle. The Hood is sunk, hell of a battle.”’7
The news should not have come as such a great surprise. Hood was bound to come off worst in a contest with a strongly armoured opponent whose guns could comfortably outreach her own. She was a battle cruiser not a battleship, and now, at the age of twenty-one, a relatively elderly one at that. Her 42,100-ton displacement made her the biggest ship in the navy. But at the time she was designed, the existing technology did not allow her to carry eight 15-inch guns as well as heavy armour. Subsequent refits had failed to add adequate protection. Her deck armour was an inch thick in places and only three inches thick over the magazines where the shells and charges were stored. Bismarck’s deck was plated all over with between 4.2 and 4.7 inches of Krupp steel. Hood was highly vulnerable to Bismarck’s shells, especially if they were fired at a high trajectory. It was recognized that ‘plunging fire’, as it was called, would slice easily through her armour decking. Holland had known this better than anyone. Yet he had chosen to gamble at intercepting his adversary sideways-on, laying himself open to the battleship’s broadsides rather than getting ahead of the German force and confronting it head-on – which would have reduced the size of the target he presented.
The battle, though, had not been altogether one-sided. The three shells that Prince of Wales managed to land on Bismarck knocked out one of her electrical plants, flooding a boiler room and rupturing fuel tanks. She could now only manage a maximum speed of twenty-eight knots, trailing an iridescent banner of spilled oil in her wake. In this state a prolonged raiding expedition was out of the question.
Lütjens was faced with two choices. He could turn round and go home, having scored a memorable victory, and await further chances for glory. Or he could hold course and seek the safety of the French coast to recuperate. It was a desperate dilemma. If he carried on, he knew that his ships were in a race against the avenging forces of the British fleet, and that the chances of interception were high. Turning back was equally perilous. The navy would be alerted and waiting. So, too, would the air force, whose bombers were within easy reach of his homeward routes. He chose to press on, aiming to run for St Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, where there was a dry dock big enough to carry out repairs.
The Brittany ports were still nearly two thousand miles away and two enemy naval forces were converging on the German ships. Trailing doggedly in their wakes as they pressed on southwards were the Suffolk, Norfolk and Prince of Wales. By now, Tovey and the Home Fleet were hurrying south-west on a course which he hoped would place his ships in a position to cut off Lütjens’ retreat at about 9 a.m. the following day.
Bismarck ploughed on through worsening weather. Her bows were 3 degrees down in the water, the result of a hit in the foredeck from a shell fired by the Prince of Wales. The Prinz Eugen, though, was unscathed. As long as she was tied to Bismarck her chances of remaining so diminished. On the afternoon of the 24th, Lütjens decided to set her free. He signalled her commander Kapitän zur See Helmuth Brinkmann his intention to take advantage of the next squall to turn to westwards in the hope of shaking off Suffolk and Norfolk. The Prinz Eugen was to carry on the Atlantic raiding mission alone. Bismarck briefly turned on her pursuers to buy time for her consort while she got away.
That evening she was butting westwards through heavy weather when Tovey decided to throw the aircraft aboard the carrier Victorious into the hunt. At 10 p.m. a small force of Swordfish torpedo bombers and Fulmar fighter reconnaissance aircraft flew off into a storm-swept night. Despite the conditions they tracked down the Bismarck 120 miles ahead. One Swordfish got off a torpedo that struck the hull. The point of impact was at the thickest part of the armoured belt and the damage was slight. The explosion, however, shook loose the collision mats