The weirdness of the entire episode captured imaginations worldwide, just as it had captured Churchill’s. Days after Hess’s arrival, Roosevelt, dining with Sumner Welles, Harry Hopkins, and Robert E. Sherwood, asked Welles if he had ever met Hess. Welles had, and described Hess as fanatically loyal to Hitler and somewhat brutishly stupid. The men discussed Hess’s flight. Roosevelt fell silent for a moment. Then he posed the question everybody was asking: “I wonder what is really behind this story?” Stalin (who never trusted the British) asked both Beaverbrook and Churchill the same question months later. The whole thing was just too strange, and the obvious explanation—that Hess was crazy—seemed too pat. Churchill, or Hitler, or both, had to be up to something.257
Hess’s misadventure handed Churchill a grand opportunity to make mischief at Hitler’s expense. With Hess under wraps in the Tower of London and Hitler unsure of just what his protégé was saying to the British, Churchill told Roosevelt that “we think it best to let the press have a good run of it for a bit and keep the Germans guessing.” Hitler was not only guessing but sweating, from the moment he was apprised of Hess’s errand by two of Hess’s adjutants, who had the misfortune to deliver to Hitler a letter of explanation from Hess along with the news that Hess had already departed. They were immediately arrested. Hitler expressed to his personal architect, Albert Speer, his worry that Churchill might use the incident to pretend to Germany’s allies that the Reich had extended peace feelers toward Britain. “Who will believe me,” the Führer lamented to Speer, “that Hess did not fly there in my name, that the whole thing is not some sort of intrigue behind the backs of my allies?” Japan might change its policy. People would snicker. Hitler regained his buoyancy with the thought that Hess might drop into the North Sea and drown. After the news of Hess’s safe landing arrived, Hitler devised his official explanation: he declared that his old friend had gone mad. He also consulted his astrologer, who always divined happy portents from the tea leaves.258
Churchill, aware of Hitler’s use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what Hitler’s fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that “this is just between us.”259
Hess himself, cursed with good health, given his fate, lived on for another forty-six years, locked away in prison every day and hour and minute of them. His wife sued for divorce in 1944 on the grounds of “desertion and insanity.”260
Hess’s flight was one of two stories from overseas that year—until December 7—that held young American boys spellbound. The other was the hunt for the great German battleship Bismarck. The essayist and sportswriter Robert W. Creamer devotes almost as much ink to these two events as he does to Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak in his memoir of that memorable baseball season, Baseball and Other Matters in 1941. “Hess and the Bismarck served in my innocent mind, and in the minds of other half-thinking Americans,” wrote Creamer, “to counterbalance the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa.”
The morning after Hess landed, a fine Sunday morning of sun and blue skies, fires still burned in London from the previous evening’s air raid. Almost three thousand Londoners lay dead in the rubble, the deadliest one-night toll since the Blitz began nine months earlier. Services were canceled at Westminster Abbey. St. Mary-le-Bow was destroyed, its bells crashing down into the debris. The William Rufus roof of Westminster Hall was gone, the hall itself now a smoldering wreck. Colville watched from Westminster Bridge as fires burned all along the Embankment. Big Ben had been struck, but still tolled out the hours. The debating chamber in the Commons, at the northern end of the Palace of Westminster, had taken a direct hit and, to Churchill’s profound sorrow, “was blown to smithereens.” (The Lords’ chamber was undamaged; the House met there and at Church House for the remainder of the war.) In a letter to Randolph, Churchill mourned the loss of the chamber where he had served for almost forty years. He had once, during the Great War, called it the “the shrine of the world’s liberties.” Since September, MPs had prowled the darkened halls of Parliament by the light of hurricane lamps; the windows overlooking the Thames had long since been blown out and boarded up; the tapestries had been removed for safekeeping. Even the smoking room closed early so the attendants could get home to their families before the bombs came. The House chamber was destroyed, but Parliament, Churchill told his son, continued to function “undaunted amid the storms.” Days earlier he had ended an address in the old chamber with, “I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.” They were the last words he spoke there. A decade would pass before the Commons was rebuilt.261
As that Sunday evening came on, Colville noted yellow, smoldering bits of burnt paper from some wrecked Fleet Street publishing house raining down like leaves on a breezy autumn day. Hess was by then on his way to the Tower. Londoners waited in homes as dark as Hess’s prison cell for the expected nightly onslaught. It appeared obvious that Hitler was softening up Britain for the final attack. They imagined the worst was yet to come.262
Within days of Hess’s arrival, more critical events overtook Churchill. He had been partially correct when he told Wavell that he thought the invasion of Crete would afford a good opportunity to kill parachutists. When dropped behind, or directly onto, British positions, the German airborne troops would find themselves outnumbered and cut off from support. If the Royal Navy—protected by Air Marshal Longmore’s too-few aircraft—could keep the coast clear of German reinforcements, the parachutists would be doomed.
That hope was stillborn. Having left so many men and so much equipment behind in Greece, the British on Crete found they lacked the troops, anti-aircraft guns, and requisite radio communications between units to stop the Germans. The 30,000 Commonwealth and 10,000 Greek troops on Crete, though outnumbering the expected Germans by more than two to one, were at a disadvantage by having to cover all the airfields and ports along the length of the north shore, whereas the Germans could concentrate their forces at will, and with surprise. The British would have to react, and when they did, they’d face bad terrain and long distances along the single coast road. In essence, at any particular point, the Commonwealth forces would find themselves, as usual, outgunned. The situation in the air was even grimmer. Longmore’s air force on Crete consisted of fewer than a dozen Hurricanes and two dozen older planes. The air chief as well did not grasp the need to integrate air support with ground operations, a concept superbly practiced for two years by the Germans. Longmore’s few planes therefore did not coordinate with Freyberg’s infantry, rendering the former irrelevant and the latter exposed, as was the Royal Navy, which sailed without air protection. Churchill suggested that a dozen Hurricanes be sent from Malta. Such a pittance would have made no difference. The German air fleet assembling in southern Greece, fewer than 150 miles from Crete, was made up of more than 250 bombers, 150 Stuka dive-bombers, 200 fighters, 500 tri-motor Junkers Ju 52 transport planes carrying paratroopers, and 80 gliders carrying 750 airborne troops.263
The battle opened on May 19, with Stuka dive-bombers striking at British ships in Souda Bay; then the German fighters destroyed most of the meager British air fleet. Early the next morning, German paratroopers—almost four thousand strong—descended upon the Maleme airfield and the heights above Souda Bay. Sir John Keegan called it “the first great parachute operation in history.” Three battalions of New Zealanders, veterans of the desert and Greek campaigns, guarded the Maleme airfield. A New Zealand lieutenant recorded his thoughts as Germans drifted down: “Seen against the blue of the early morning Cretan sky, through a frame of grey-green olive branches, they looked like little jerking dolls” and “those beautiful kicking dolls meant the repetition of all the horror we had known so recently in Greece.” An Australian brigade guarded the Rethymnon airfield, seventy miles to the east and a little less than halfway to Heraklion, where just a few British
battalions prepared to defend that airfield.264
By late afternoon on the twentieth, another wave of almost four thousand paratroopers landed in the vicinity of the Rethymnom and Heraklion airfields. Within hours Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt: “Battle for Crete has opened well.” The battle had opened well, but that situation lasted for only a few hours. The Germans, dispersed and confused at first, rallied throughout the night. A New Zealand battalion inexplicably withdrew from a vital hill above Maleme. The Maleme airfield fell to the Germans on the twenty-first. Ju 52 transports began ferrying in the five thousand troops of the 5th Mountain Division, but at great cost: More than half of the Ju 52s sent to Crete never returned. British anti-aircraft guns accounted for only a few of the planes; most were lost while trying to land on beaches, on wrecked airfields, and in plowed fields in order to disgorge their cargoes of troops. The RAF was in far worse shape. By late on the twenty-first, the RAF had no planes on Crete. Freyberg’s ground forces were dispersed and unable to coordinate movements. On the night of the twenty-first, the Royal Navy turned away German transports—mostly commandeered Greek fishing boats and small coastal steamers—carrying seven thousand troops. But daylight on the twenty-second brought the Stukas. “A lot of ships lost,” noted Colville, “including [cruisers] Gloucester and Fiji.” More than seven hundred of Gloucester’s eight hundred crew members went down with the ship. In reply to Colville’s expression of grief at the naval losses, Churchill growled, “What do you suppose we build ships for?” The Royal Navy’s deflection of the German transports was welcome news, but those losses were not enough to keep the Germans off the island, because the Germans were coming by air. Less than thirty-six hours after telling Roosevelt the battle had opened well, Churchill was forced to inform the president: “Battle in Crete is severe.” “Severe” did not do justice to the circumstances. Another last stand was shaping up.265
The Germans fought as if Crete were a sacred Teutonic site, pressing the battle, Colville wrote, “with blind courage.” They fought with such fury because there would be no escape were they to fail. The British could always evacuate by sea in the event of defeat, and had in fact developed a talent for doing just that. The German paratroopers, on the other hand, were there to stay, one way or another. Their brethren in the Luftwaffe controlled the air, and the parachutists grabbed the airfields. The British had blasted the airstrips to rubble, but the Germans held and repaired the fields. Supplies and reinforcements were flown in during the next seven days, while Stukas riddled any British or Greek troops who tried any heroics. Once in possession of the airfields, the Germans were, in effect, in possession of Crete. But the cost of victory for Student’s paratroopers was extraordinary; five thousand out of nine thousand had been killed. Hitler told Student the cost was too high to justify ever staging another operation of that magnitude. The loss of so many of the Ju 52s—the workhorse of supply for the Wehrmacht—was also disturbing. Hitler would need all he could get to feed and arm his armies as they struck deep into Russia.266
As of the twenty-eighth, the port of Sphakia, on the island’s south side, was still held by the British, but in the end, it would serve as this battle’s Dunkirk and Narvik. That day Freyberg’s army began the trek over the mountains to Sphakia, with the German mountain troops in pursuit. By battle’s end, three days later, the army had lost more than 1,700 killed and 2,000 wounded. Almost 12,000 British and Anzac troops stayed behind as prisoners of the Reich. Just ten days after Churchill told Roosevelt that the battle was “severe,” Crete was lost, and the British again were forced to flee the scene of a disastrous defeat by sea. Mountbatten’s destroyer HMS Kelly was among the Luftwaffe’s victims. Captain Dickie survived, but more than half of the crew were lost when Kelly capsized and sank while plowing ahead at full speed. Between May 21 and June 2, the Royal Navy, pummeled from the air, lost three cruisers sunk and four damaged, six destroyers sunk and eight damaged, and more than 2,000 officers and seamen killed. The battleships Warspite and Valiant were damaged, as was the aircraft carrier Formidable. It was the Royal Navy’s most costly naval battle of the war. German aircraft—in daylight operations—had accounted for all the British ships. Göring had achieved over Crete what he had failed to achieve over Britain: air superiority. He had redeemed himself.267
On May 21, the second full day of the battle for Crete, other ominous news arrived at No. 10. It appeared Bismarck was preparing to make its run for the high seas. Surface raiders such as Bismarck and her sister ship, Tirpitz, if free to roam the Atlantic, were as equal a threat to shipping as, or greater than, U-boats. German submarines engendered a primal fear in the crews and passengers aboard their targets; they were the monsters under the bed, lurking unseen beneath the sea, their presence announced by a thunderous eruption of flame from the bowels of some unfortunate merchantman. Bismarck was a monster plain and simple. A tanker or freighter captain who espied Bismarck setting a course across his bow knew his ship was doomed. Convoy escorts (destroyers and corvettes) proved adequate at hunting and killing submarines, but their small guns and depth charges were useless against capital ships. Bismarck amok, undetected by RAF reconnaissance planes, which lacked the range to patrol to the vast reaches of the central Atlantic, could run down any convoy, immune to the minuscule fire of the escorts. Bismarck, if she chose, could ram her way through a convoy; a thin-skinned five-thousand-ton freighter would perish beneath her bows like a rowboat.
The January German sortie of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau resulted in the mauling of one convoy—ten ships were sunk in one day—and the loss of more than 115,000 tons of shipping. As a result, the British gained a great deal of respect for the lethality of the Kriegsmarine’s surface ships and now had a double-edged problem. Locating the German battleships was difficult enough, but what to do when they were located? Churchill faced two bad choices if Hitler let loose his surface ships. He could chase the Germans and expose the British coast or leave the Germans unmolested and expose the convoys. He lacked the warships to do both. It was an old predicament for the British, which, when Napoleon grasped its significance, led him to contemplate a naval feint in 1804. By sending a French fleet to the British West Indies, he hoped to lure the British Home Fleet into a wild goose chase, thereby allowing his main fleet to land an invasion force on British soil. Had Hitler studied Napoleon’s seafaring tactics or only his Russian escapades? Churchill also feared that the mere appearance of German capital ships on the high seas would dissuade America from risking its merchantmen to convoy supplies to Britain, let alone risk its outdated Atlantic fleet to protect those ships. He later wrote that a concentration of surface raiders “in the great spaces of the Atlantic Ocean would subject our naval strength to a trial of the first magnitude.” Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had in January given the trial’s opening arguments. Bismarck presumed to close the case.268
On the evening of May 21, Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escorted by six destroyers, slipped out of Bergen fjord in Norway under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens, a stern, humorless veteran of the Great War’s coastal gunboat battles, in which his willingness to attack superior forces and his skill at coming away victorious earned him a reputation as a brilliant and courageous tactician. He was Grand Admiral Raeder’s first choice to command Bismarck on this, her maiden operation, code-named Rheinübung (Rhine Exercise). Lütjens, prone to fatalistic premonitions, told fellow officers that Rheinübung was to be his “death voyage.” The admiral had secured his place on this mission by his superb command of the heavy cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during their murderous January spree. The original plan for Rheinübung called for these two ships to sail with Bismarck, but the British had driven them into French ports, where they were undergoing repairs. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen (named for Eugene of Savoy, Marlborough’s ally at the Battle of Blenheim) would conduct Rheinübung alone. Riding at anchor in Bergen fjord, the two ships made tempting targets for the RAF, as dusk lingers in late spring at those latitudes. Were the RAF
to appear overhead, Lütjens stood a fair chance of seeing his fatal premonition fulfilled before he even weighed anchor. But high clouds and clinging fog afforded the Germans a perfect opportunity to escape into the North Sea. Not willing to risk an improvement in the weather, Lütjens made his dash for the open sea. In his haste to depart Bergen, he failed to top off Bismarck’s fuel tanks.269
The British, expecting just such a rapid departure, hoped to shadow the German ships. If Bismarck and Prinz Eugen reached the North Sea undetected, the Royal Navy could then only guess which of four routes they would take to break out into the Atlantic. Two of the routes took the ships within British air-patrol range north of the Orkney Islands; the third ran between the Faroe Islands and Iceland, within range of British spotter planes stationed there. Lütjens’s fourth choice was the longest—to loop to the north of Iceland and run down the chute of the Denmark Strait, the ice-choked channel between Greenland and Iceland. This was the route he had taken in January. He chose to take it again. Everything was going his way. When the clouds broke over Bergen on May 22, a lone Spitfire, rigged for photo reconnaissance, roared up the fjord just a few feet above the waves and into the teeth of enemy fire. The pilot took a fast look around, turned hard for home, and radioed his message: Bismarck is gone.
This news troubled Churchill. Eleven convoys were at that moment on the open seas or preparing to depart British ports. One of them, escorted by two cruisers, both of which Bismarck could easily dispatch, was sailing south of Britain, destined for the Middle East with 20,000 reinforcements for Wavell. Were Bismarck and the troop transports to cross paths, Churchill’s war in Africa would be over. Bismarck had to be located, and sunk.
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