The Lonely Sea

by Alistair MacLean

  Even the one chance in a thousand had gone. There could be no escape now and the two pocket battleships, Kennedy knew, could pound his fragile vessel to death in a matter of minutes. There wouldn’t even be a semblance of a fight. Captain Edward Kennedy could have placed scuttling charges, surrendered with honour, and, had he succeeded in reaching Britain again, would almost certainly have been given command of another vessel straight away.

  But scuttling charges had never played any part in the Kennedy family’s long and honourable two hundred year association with the Royal Navy, and Kennedy was certainly not the man ever to think of such things now even although he, probably above all captains, most certainly owed nothing to a Navy and an Admiralty that had courtmartialled him in 1922 on a grotesquely unfair charge and, brilliant officer though he was, had axed him from the service in the following year, calling him back only in their hour of need in 1939. But whatever he thought at the time we can only guess at: all we know is what he said as he watched the two pocket battleships bear down on him: ‘We’ll just fight them both.’ As a death sentence for a great ship and hundreds of men, this must rank as the most laconic ever.

  And fought them both he did. Three times the Scharnhorst ordered him to abandon ship, and on the third time it had its answer—a salvo that fell just short. At the same time, a salvo from the Rawalpindi struck the Gneisenau amidships, and almost together the two German battle cruisers replied with heavy, accurate and devastating close-range fire.

  The first salvo from the Scharnhorst crashed into the Rawalpindi’s high superstructure, wrecking the boat-deck and killing almost everyone on the bridge: but Captain Kennedy survived. Almost immediately, another salvo of 11-inch shells, this time from the Gneisenau, crashed into the main control room of the Rawalpindi, and turned it into a lifeless shambles: all semblance of concerted fire now ceased, but the seven guns—one had already been destroyed—fought on independently.

  The fires amidships were already beginning to take hold as yet another salvo sliced through the tissue-thin sides of the liner and exploded deep in its heart. One of these blew up in the engine room, completely destroying the dynamos, and this was the blow that effectively carried into execution Kennedy’s sentence of death. With the dynamos gone, the electricity supply was destroyed: and the shell hoists from the magazines were worked by electricity.

  Kennedy, still fighting with his wrecked ship, from the twisted wreckage that was all that was left of his bridge, issued instructions that every available member of the crew should assist in manhandling shells up from the magazines and rolling them across the heaving, shell-swept deck towards those guns that still kept firing: there were only five left now.

  That exposed deck of the Rawalpindi, raked by screaming shrapnel and jagged twisted steel, became a blood-soaked abattoir for those who fought to reach the empty breeches of the waiting guns. Some carriers were killed outright, and their shells rolled from side to side with the movement of the ship, through the ever-growing flames and over deck-plates beginning to glow dull red from the heat of the internal fires. Other men were wounded, but ignored their agony: one incredibly gallant man, both legs smashed, wounded to death, and with a shell clutched in his one sound arm, dragged his way along the deck, groping blindly for the breech of the gun that he could not see, swearing that he would get them yet.

  The battle was grotesquely one-sided. Shells still crashed into the dying Rawalpindi and the end could not be long delayed. Loose ammunition was falling into the fires and exploding far beneath. The entire ship, excepting only the poop and fo’c’sle, was a leaping, twisting map of flame. One by one the guns fell silent, as the enemy destroyed them, as the crews died beside them and the supply of ammunition, cut off by walls of flame, finally stopped altogether.

  As a fighting unit the Rawalpindi was finished, beaten into silence and submission, all but dead in the water. But the sixty year-old Captain Kennedy was a man who was literally incapable of conceiving of the idea of defeat. He left his shattered bridge, groped through the blazing ruins of the superstructure and along the deck towards the poop: if he could only drop some smoke floats, he thought, he might still sail the Rawalpindi to safety. His ship was holed and sinking, damaged beyond help or repair and visibly dying: his guns were gone, his crew was decimated, but still he fought for survival. Such indomitable courage, such unyielding tenacity of purpose when all reason for purpose has long since vanished lies barely within the realms of comprehension.

  Captain Kennedy vanished into the smoke and the flame, and died.

  He was not long survived by his ship or by all except a tragic minority of the crew that had so magnificently served both himself and the Rawalpindi. Another shell from the Scharnhorst brought the coup de grace—a tremendous roar and a column of white flame lancing high into the gathering gloom of the evening as the erupting main magazine blew out through the sides and deck and burning superstructure and almost severed the Rawalpindi in two.

  The guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau fell silent: every salvo now could only be so much wasted ammunition. For the handful of men still left alive aboard the Rawalpindi nothing could be achieved by remaining where they were but a death swifter and even more certain than that offered by the ice-cold waters slowly climbing up the rent and gaping sides of the sinking ship.

  Miraculously, almost, two of the lifeboats had survived the ferocity of the Germans’ shells, and those few men—twenty-seven in all—who were able, slid down the falls and pulled desperately away from the blazing Rawalpindi: at any moment an explosion might reach out and destroy them, or destroy the ship and pull them after it as it sunk swiftly down to the deep floor of the ocean.

  These men, picked up by the German ships, were the only survivors apart from a handful rescued the following morning. Most of the others had been killed by shell-fire, burnt to death or trapped below decks and drowned in the rising waters. Some men who could not reach the lifeboats, jumped into the sea, searching frantically for broken bits of boats, oars, wreckage, anything that would offer even a passing moment’s security before the numbing cold struck deep and their hearts just stopped beating. And many there were, scattered here and there over the decks and in passages and compartments below, too desperately wounded either to move or to call out, who just sat or lay waiting quietly for the end, for the blessing of the freezing waters that would bring swift release from their agonies.

  Two hundred and forty men went down with the Rawalpindi, and, in light of the fanatical courage with which they had served both their ship and their commander, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that some of those who were still alive when the waters closed over them at 8 o’clock that evening may have derived no little consolation from the thought that if they had to go down with their ship, they could have asked no greater privilege than to do so in the incomparable company of Captain Edward Kennedy.

  The Sinking of the Bismarck

  PART ONE

  Far south of the Arctic Circle, along the great trade routes of the Atlantic, westerly gales die away to a whisper and then the warm sun shines on the long gentle swells. Far to the north, in the numbing cold of the Barents Sea, stretch away the immense reaches of an almost miraculous calm, the sea milk-white from horizon to unbroken horizon for day after endless day. But between these two vast areas, along the belt of the Arctic Circle itself, lie the most bitter seas in the world: and no part of it more bitter, more hostile to man and the puny ships that carry him across the savagery of its galetorn waters than that narrow stretch of ocean between Iceland and Greenland that men call the Denmark Strait.

  From the far-ranging Vikings of a thousand years ago to the time of the modern Icelandic fishermen, ships have sailed through this narrow passage, but they sailed always at their peril, only when necessity dictated, and they never lingered long, never a moment more than they had to. No man, no ship, has ever waited there from choice, but, at rare intervals, some few men and ships have had to do it from necessity; just seventeen
years ago this month, two ships, with the hundreds of men aboard them, were just coming to the end of the longest vigil man has ever kept on these dark and dangerous waters.

  The ships’ companies of His Majesty’s Cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk were tired, tired to the point of exhaustion. They had kept their vigil far too long. Even one winter’s day in the Denmark Strait, with twenty hours of impenetrable darkness, driving snow, a sub-zero wind knifing off Greenland’s barren ice-cap and the ship rolling and plunging steeply, sickeningly, incessantly, is a lifetime in itself, a nightmare that has no ending. And the Norfolk and the Suffolk had been there for months on end, had been there all through the grim winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941, suffering incredible hardships of cold and discomfort, always watching, always waiting. The strain of watching never ceased, the tension of waiting never ended.

  But now summer, or what passes there for summer, had come to the Denmark Strait, and the struggle merely to exist was no longer an all-exclusive preoccupation. True, the cold still struck deep through the layered Arctic clothing, the packice stretching out from the shores of Greenland was only a mile or two away and the rolling fog banks to the east, off the Icelandic coast, no further distant, but at least the sea was calm, the snow held off and the darkness of the long winter night was gone. Halcyon conditions, almost, compared to those they had so recently known: even so, the strain was now infinitely greater than anything that had ever gone before, the tension bow-tautened almost to breaking point.

  At that moment, just after 7 o’clock on the evening of 23 May, 1941, the strain, the tension bore most heavily on one man and one man alone—Captain R. M. Ellis, on the bridge of his cruiser Suffolk. He had been there, on his bridge, for two days now without a break, he might be there as long again, even longer, but it was impossible that he relax his unceasing vigilance, even for a moment. Too much depended on him. He was not the senior officer in the area: Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker was in his flagship, the Norfolk, but the Norfolk, though not far away, was safely hidden in the swirling fog. The ultimate responsibility was that of Captain Ellis, and it was a crushing responsibility. He could fail in what he had to do, he could all too easily fail through no fault of his own, but the disastrous consequences of any such failure were not for contemplation. Britain had already suffered and lost too much: one more defeat, one more blunder and the war could well be lost.

  The war was in its twentieth month then, and Britain was alone and fighting for its life. Twenty dark, gloomy and tragic months, a gloom only momentarily lifted by the shining courage of the young pilots who had destroyed the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, but now the road ahead was more dark, more hopeless than ever before, and no light at the end of it.

  The Wehrmacht’s panzer divisions were waiting, the threat of invasion still a Damoclean sword. We had just been driven ignominiously out of Greece. In that very week, Goering’s Eleventh Air Corps, whom Churchill called the flame of the German Army, had launched a ruthless and overwhelming attack on our forces in Crete, and the end was only a matter of brief time. Six million tons of shipping had been lost at sea, 650,000 tons in that April alone, the blackest month of the war, and May might prove even more terrible still, for at the moment when Captain Ellis was patrolling north-east and south-west through that narrow lane of clear water between the Greenland ice and the Icelandic fogs, there were no fewer than ten major freight convoys and one large and vital troop convoy, far scattered and for the most part only thinly protected, sailing over the face of the broad Atlantic.

  And what part, people were asking bitterly, was Britain’s mighty Home Fleet playing in all this. Our first line of defence, our last hope in the darkest hour, why wasn’t it throwing all its great weight into these life and death battles? Why wasn’t it patrolling the North Sea and the English Channel (where the Stukas and the Heinkels could have destroyed it between dawn and sunset on any given day) ready to smash any cross-Channel invasion? Why hadn’t it helped in the evacuation of Greece? Why wasn’t it north of Crete, breaking up the seaborne reinforcements without whom Goering’s paratroopers could not hope to complete their conquests? Why wasn’t it at sea, bringing its great guns to bear for the protection of these threatened convoys in the submarine infested waters to the west? Why was it lying idle, powerless and useless, in its retreat in Scapa Flow? Why, why, why?

  The Bismarck was the reason why: an overpowering reason why.

  Laid down in 1936, launched from the Blohm and Voss shipyards in Hamburg on 14 February, 1939, in the presence of no less a person than the Chancellor of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler himself, the Bismarck was something to haunt the dreams—or nightmares—of foreign navies the world over. Hitler had a genius for exaggeration, but there was no hint of exaggeration in what he said to its crew when he visited the battleship again in early May, 1941, only the simple truth. ‘The Bismarck,’ he told them, ‘is the pride of the German Navy.’

  She was indeed. She would have been the pride of any navy in the world. Built in cynical disregard of the 35,000 tons treaty limitations, with an actual tonnage somewhere in the region of 50,000, she was unquestionably the most powerful battleship afloat. She was fast, her speed of over 30 knots a match for any British capital ship: she had an immense beam—far greater than that of any British ship—which provided a magnificently stable firing platform for her eight 15-inch and twelve 6-inch guns—and the German gunnery, far superior to ours, was legendarily accurate under any conditions: and with her heavy armour-plating, double and triple hulls and the infinitely complex sub-compartmentation of the hull itself achieving a hitherto impossible degree of watertight integrity, she was widely believed to be virtually unsinkable. She was the trump card in Admiral Raeder’s hand—and now the time had come to play that trump.

  The Bismarck was out. There could no longer be any question about it. First reported by reconnaissance as moving up the Kattegat on 20 May, she had been photographed in the company of a ‘Hipper’ class cruiser, by a Spitfire pilot, in Grimstad fjord, just south of Bergen, on the early afternoon of the 21st; at 6.00 p.m. the following day, a Maryland bomber from the Hatston naval air base in the Orkneys, skimming low over the water in appalling flying conditions, flew over Grimstad and Bergen and reported that the Bismarck was no longer there.

  The Bismarck was out, and there could be no mistake where she was going. There were no Russian convoys to attack—Russia was not yet in the war. She could be racing only for the Atlantic, with the ‘Hipper’ cruiser—later identified as the Prinz Eugen—as her scout, there to savage and destroy our Atlantic convoys, our sole remaining lifelines to the outer world. The ‘Hipper’ itself, only a 10,000 ton cruiser, had once fallen upon a convoy and sent seven ships to the bottom in less than an hour. What the Bismarck could do just did not bear contemplation.

  The Bismarck had to be stopped, and stopped before she had broken loose into the Atlantic, and it was for this single, precise purpose of stopping her that Admiral Sir John Tovey, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, had so long and so doggedly held his capital ships based on Scapa. Now was the time for the Home Fleet to justify its existence.

  Admiral Tovey, a master tactician who was to handle his ships impeccably during the ensuing four days, was under no illusions as to the grave difficulties confronting him, the tragic consequences were he to guess wrongly. The Bismarck could break south-west into the Atlantic anywhere between Scotland and Greenland—a bleak, gale-ridden stretch of fully a thousand miles, with the all-essential visibility more frequently than not at the mercy of driving rain, blanketing snow and great rolling fog banks.

  He had to station two squadrons, with two battleships in each squadron—he had no faith in the ability of any one ship of the line to cope with the Bismarck— at strategically vital positions some hundreds of miles apart, the Hood and the Prince of Wales south of Iceland, and his own flagship, the King George V, the Repulse and the carrier Victorious west of the Faroes, where, he hoped, they would be most favourably situated to mov
e in any direction to intercept the Bismarck.

  But they couldn’t move until they knew where the Bismarck was, and Admiral Tovey had had his watchdogs at sea for a long time now, waiting for this day to come. Between Iceland and the Faroes patrolled the cruisers Birmingham and Manchester, while up in the Denmark Strait the Suffolk and the Norfolk were coming to the end of a long long wait.

  7.20 p.m., 23 May, 1941 and the Suffolk was steaming southwest down the narrow channel between the ice and the fog. If the Bismarck came by the Strait, Captain Ellis guessed, she would almost certainly come through that channel: the ice barred her way to the west, and, over on the east, no captain was going to take the risk of pushing his battleship through a dense fog at something like thirty knots, especially a fog that concealed a known minefield forty miles in length. If she were to come at all, that was the way she would come.

  And that was the way she did come. At 7.22 p.m. the excited cry of a sharp-eyed lookout had Captain Ellis and all the watchers on the bridge peering intently through their binoculars out over the starboard quarter, the reported bearing, and one brief glance was enough for Ellis to know that their long exhausting wait was indeed over. Even for men who had never seen it, it was almost impossible to mistake the vast bulk of the Bismarck anywhere. (Or so one would have thought—it was to prove tragically otherwise less than twelve hours later.)

  Captain Ellis was not disposed to linger. He had done the first—and most important—part of his job, the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen, he suddenly realized, were only eight miles away, the Bismarck’s guns were lethal up to a range of at least twenty miles, and there had been nothing in his instructions about committing suicide. Quite the reverse—he had been ordered to avoid damage to himself at all costs, to shadow the Bismarck and guide the battleships of the Home Fleet into her path. Even as the Suffolk’s radio room started stuttering out its ‘Enemy located’ transmissions to Ellis’s immediate commander, Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker in the Norfolk and to Sir John Tovey in his battleship far to the south, he swung his cruiser heeling far over in a maximum turn to port and raced into the blanketing safety of the fog that swirled protectively around them only moments after they had entered it.