Fairey Swordfish

      As Sunday, 25 May dawned, the Bismarck’s luck turned. Frantic work by the crew had restored some speed. Her pursuers, though, had been forced to slow down. On entering the broad waters of the North Atlantic, Suffolk and Norfolk began to zigzag to shake off any waiting U-boats. By 3 a.m. they had lost radar contact with their quarry. Without the tracking reports of the heavy cruisers to assist him, the great prize might slip from Tovey’s grasp. It was an appalling prospect.

      He had been asleep in his sea cabin on King George V, about a hundred miles to the south and east of where Bismarck was last sighted when he was shaken awake with the bad news. He climbed up through two decks to the plotting office for a staff conference. His ships were now widely dispersed and half of them were running low on fuel. The weather was bad and promised to worsen, cutting down the chances of either the aircraft aboard Victorious or coastal-based long-range reconnaissance planes spotting Bismarck.

      In the absence of real information about her condition, there were two eventualities to consider. Bismarck might be undamaged, in which case she would be heading west to carry out her raiding mission. Or she might be in trouble and heading east towards a French port. He decided to concentrate his forces on searching to the west. In the meantime, more ships were approaching from the south which could help comb the east.

      Force H, an ad hoc fleet which operated out of Gibraltar under the command of Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, had been ordered north to join the hunt. At its core were Somerville’s flagship, the ageing battle cruiser Renown, the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire and the light cruiser Sheffield. Most importantly for what was to come, it included an aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal, with twenty Swordfish torpedo bombers aboard, crewed by men who had seen much action in the Mediterranean.

      For a while it seemed the pursuers had regained the scent. Lütjens, unaware that he had shaken off the pursuit, radioed a situation signal to the Naval Group Command West headquarters in Paris. It was picked up by HF/DF receivers at British shore stations and, although it would take time for the code to be broken, it at least gave an indication of Bismarck’s whereabouts. She was somewhere to Tovey’s east but more than that was impossible to say. Tovey and his staff took the view that she was heading for home and hurried back on his own track away from his quarry.

      As the morning advanced, the level of desperation rose. The damp, showery weather over Buckinghamshire matched the grey mood inside Chequers. To Churchill, Bismarck’s disappearance was an avoidable disaster. She should have been finished off when the chance arose in the Denmark Strait. His anger fell on Admiral Wake-Walker, and Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales, who in Churchill’s opinion should have carried on engaging Bismarck even if to do so invited disaster. At around noon he returned to London and throughout the rest of the day made frequent, scowling appearances in the Admiralty’s Operational Control Centre, greatly intensifying the anxieties of the staff as they struggled to make sense of the situation.⁸

      For the rest of the day Bismarck’s chances improved with each passing hour. An increase in German naval and air force radio traffic along the Brittany coast eventually persuaded the Admiralty that the battleship was heading to Brest or St Nazaire, and orders were issued to change course, but hours of steaming time had been lost and one by one the British ships were breaking off the search as they headed off to refuel.⁹ Bismarck’s precise course was not known. Reconnaissance flights by RAF Coastal Command had turned up nothing and the weather was worsening, with thick cloud and low visibility forecast.

      By mid-morning on Monday, 26 May, Bismarck was only a day from safety. The mood on board was lightening. They might not have reaped the glory promised by Kapitän Lindemann at the start of the voyage, but they would be content with survival. Even so, there was no slackening of concentration among the ship’s anti-aircraft crews. At 10.30 they caught a glimpse of a large twin-engined aircraft through a hole in the blanket of cloud overhead. The alarm was sounded and the thud of outgoing flak could be heard over the rising wind.

      The aeroplane was a PBY Catalina long-range reconnaissance seaplane. It was operated by Coastal Command’s 209 Squadron and had taken off on a search mission from the base at Loch Erne in Northern Ireland at 3.45 that morning. The men at the controls, though, were not British but Americans. US Navy Flying Officer Dennis Briggs and Ensign Leonard B. Smith had volunteered to go with an assignment of Catalinas, supplied to Britain under the Lend-Lease agreement, to train up British crews. The mission went far beyond their supposed duties, but was in keeping with President Roosevelt’s determination to offer Churchill every assistance short of actually entering the war on Britain’s side.

      Smith had seen the ship through a patch of clear sky from ten miles away and he and Briggs had brought it in through the murk hoping to track it from a safe distance. Instead they had emerged directly overhead providing the anti-aircraft gunners with a few seconds of point-blank firing time. Bullets and shells punched through wings and fuselage and one shell punctured the floor of the pilots’ cabin. But then they were smothered once again in cloud, and radioing back the sensational news. Bismarck had been found and from now on she would be tracked by shadowing aircraft.

      For those on board there was still hope. They were 790 miles north-west of Brest at the time of the sighting and they did not need to reach port to find relative safety. The U-boats and the Focke-Wulf Condor bombers operating from the Brittany coast were daunting deterrents to the British pursuers. By now most of the heavy ships had departed in search of fuel, leaving only King George V and Rodney, and they were far away, too far to make an interception if Bismarck maintained her speed.

      That left Somerville’s Force H, which was approaching Bismarck from the south. The Ark Royal was less than a hundred miles from the battleship at the time of the Catalina sighting. Her Swordfish had been searching in the same area and soon sighted their quarry. There was no question of engaging. Somerville’s flagship, Renown, was an old-fashioned battle cruiser and no match for the Bismarck, even in her damaged state. Nor were the cruisers Dorsetshire and Sheffield. At noon, Somerville detached Sheffield to pick up Bismarck’s trail with instructions to follow her at a safe distance.

      He calculated that the best chance lay in an aerial attack that would slow her down and allow Tovey to catch up. ‘Slim’ Somerville was a popular commander, who sometimes took exercise before breakfast by rowing a skiff round his ships. His Fleet Air Arm crews thought he had a better understanding of the uses of aircraft than most admirals. He had learned to fly himself and sometimes flew as a passenger on training flights ‘just for fun’.¹⁰

      Perhaps his Swordfish, flimsy and insubstantial though they seemed against the power of the elements and the might of their opponent, might complete the job themselves. ‘With any luck we may be able to finish her before the Home Fleet arrives,’ he said in a message to the crews.

      At 2.50 p.m., fifteen Swordfish from 818 and 820 Squadrons took off to attempt an attack. The weather all day had been atrocious. Even the Ark Royal, which reared sixty feet above the waves in calm seas, had green water coursing over her bow. The crews stepped out onto the bucking deck and groped their way to their aircraft. ‘The after end of the flight deck … was pitching something like fifty feet up and down,’ recalled Sub-Lieutenant Charles Friend, an observer. ‘The take offs were awesome in the extreme. The aircraft, as their throttles were opened, instead of charging forward on a level deck were at one moment breasting a slippery slope and the next plunging downhill towards the huge seas ahead and below.’

      The force was led by Lieutenant Commander James Stewart-Moore, who flew as an observer. He was eager and confident as he prepared to take off. He admired Somerville and was anxious to do him proud as ‘he took good care of us and we did our best for him’.¹¹ The mission seemed ‘fairly straightforward’. One of the Swordfish in his flight was equipped with radar which would aid the hunt. At the pre-operational briefing he was assured that there were no British ships in the search area which was ‘a great help as it meant we did not have to identify the ships before we started our attack’.

      Despite the howling Force 8 gale all the aircraft got