Why had Lutjens been so sure that capital ships of the Royal Navy were bearing down on them? In the first place, wrongly believing that he was still being trailed by the Norfolk and Suffolk, he naturally assumed that they were guiding the British battleships to the scene. Secondly, the Bismarck had just been in wireless contact with the German Admiralty—who, says von Mullenheim, were unaware of the true position—and had just received from them, doubtless on the basis of reports from Doenitz’s U-boats, information about the whereabouts of her hunters which was not only misleading in itself but made doubly so by errors in transmission. British battleships were reported to be in the close vicinity and, acting on this false information, Lutjens ordered alterations in course which lost the Bismarck those few irreplaceable hours that were to make all the difference between life and death.
The Bismarck’s radio transmissions were picked up by listening posts in Britain, and the bearings taken. The Admiralty’s incredulity that the Bismarck should thus suicidally break radio silence and betray its position—they didn’t know, of course, that the Bismarck still thought she was being shadowed—was equalled only by their immense relief and the alacrity with which they sent these bearings to their Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Tovey.
By an ironic and amazing coincidence—and it happened almost exactly at the same time—just as Lutjens aboard the Bismarck had received a completely misleading report on the position of the enemy, so did Tovey on the King George V. In Tovey’s case, however, the bearings had been correctly transmitted but were wrongly worked out on the plot of the battleship. The result, however, was the same. Both admirals were misled, and misled at a vital moment.
The calculations made on the King George V showed that the Bismarck was north, instead of, as expected, south of her last reported position. This could mean only one thing—she was headed for Norway and home, instead of Brest, as everyone had thought. There wasn’t a moment to lose—even now it might be too late. Tovey at once ordered his far-scattered fleet to turn in their tracks and make for the North Sea.
This every ship did—with the major exception of the Rodney. Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton on the Rodney doubted that the Bismarck was, in fact, making for the North Sea and as he was then sitting nicely astride her escape route to Brest he decided to remain there. Some time later the Admiralty, too, sent him a signal to the same effect, but Dalrymple-Hamilton ignored it, backed his own judgment and stayed where he was.
Later in the afternoon, in an atmosphere of increasingly mounting tension and almost despairing anxiety, further Bismarck position reports came in to Tovey that made it clear that the previous estimated Bismarck positions had been wrong and that she was indeed heading for Brest. Tovey was deeply worried, for the Admiralty, he knew, had the same information and yet were acquiescing in the Home Fleet’s search to the north-east. It is now obvious that some powerful person in the Admiralty—we shall probably never know who it was as their Lordships can hardly be accused of garrulity as far as the admission and explanation of their mistakes are concerned—was going in the face of all the evidence and backing his wildly wrong hunches.
Admiral Tovey backed his own hunch, decided he could not wait for the Admiralty to make up its mind and turned his fleet for Brest. Or, rather, such as was left of his fleet, for, apart from his own ship, the Norfolk, the Rodney, the Dorsetshire coming up from the south, and the Renown, Ark Royal and Sheffield of Force H, all the others were one by one being forced to retire from the chase by reason of the Admiralty’s non-existent fuelling arrangements.
The Bismarck, too, was now short of fuel—desperately short. Through some almost unbelievable oversight or carelessness she had left home 2,000 tons of fuel short, and when the Prince of Wales shell, during the action with the Hood, had smashed into her bunkers, many hundreds of tons more had been lost, either directly to the sea or by salt water contamination. She had hardly enough oil left to reach Brest, even at an economical steaming speed—at a moment when she needed every knot she possessed.
The crew knew this, as crews always get to know these things, and to counteract the breaking morale and steadily mounting despair reports were circulated that an oil tanker was already en route to refuel them, and that, before long, the seas around them would be alive with their own U-boats and the skies black with the bombers of the Luftwaffe, to escort them safely into harbour.
But the oil tanker never came. Neither did the U-boats nor the Luftwaffe. What came instead, after thirty-one hours of increasingly frantic searching by British planes and ships, was a long range Catalina of the Coastal Command. At 10.30 on the morning of 26 May, the long wait was over and the Bismarck found again, her last hope gone. She was then about 550 miles west of Land’s End, and heading for Brest.
An illuminating comment on the state of the morale at that moment aboard the German battleship is provided by Baron Mullenheim, who says that the Bismarck had all prepared for instant use a dummy funnel and set of Naval code recognition signals. But, so frustrated and self-defeated—von Mullenheim’s own words—were the crew that neither of these were used at the very moment when it might have been the saving of the Bismarck.
Sir John Tovey’s relief, just as he was convinced that the enemy had finally escaped him, must have been immense—but it was shortlived. His ship and the Rodney, with whom he was now in contact, were, he soon realized, much too far behind the enemy to cut him off before he reached Brest. Neither the Norfolk, the Dorsetshire nor the five destroyers under the command of Captain Vian on the Cossack, recently pulled off a southbound convoy, could even hope to stop the Bismarck— they would have been blown out of the water before they had even begun to get within gun or torpedo range. The last remaining hope of stopping the Bismarck lay with the aircraft of the Ark Royal, approaching rapidly from the south.
Accordingly, at 3 p.m. in the afternoon of the 26th, torpedo carrying Swordfish took off in what was regarded at the time as a last desperate effort to stop the Bismarck. In the words of the official communiqué, ‘the attack proved unsuccessful’. This was hardly surprising in view of two facts that were not mentioned in the Admiralty’s communiqué—many of the torpedoes, fitted with experimental magnetic warheads, exploded on contact with the water, which was just as well as, by what might have been a tragic mistake in identification, the attack was directed not against the Bismarck but their own escorting destroyer, the Sheffield.
Admiral Tovey was now in despair. There was, he felt, no stopping the Bismarck now. Both he and the Rodney, by that time desperately short of fuel, would have to turn for home in only a matter of hours and allow the Bismarck to continue unmolested to Brest. It would have been the cruellest blow of his long and illustrious career.
The blow never fell. Sir John Tovey, and, indeed, the entire Royal Navy, were saved from this bitterest of defeats by a handful of young Fleet Air Arm pilots on the Ark Royal, who were desperately determined to redeem their ignominious blunder of that afternoon.
And redeem it they did. In almost a full gale, in rain squalls and poor visibility, they somehow, miraculously, took off from the treacherously wet, plunging, rolling flight deck of the Ark Royal, sought out the Bismarck in appalling flying weather and pressed home their attack, in face of intense antiaircraft fire, with splendid gallantry. Only two torpedoes struck home—von Mullenheim says three, but the number is unimportant. Only the last torpedo counted, and that one, exploding far aft on the starboard quarter, buckled and jammed the rudders of the great battleship. The Bismarck circled twice, then came to a stop, unmanageable and dead in the water, 400 miles due west of Brest. The long chase was over and the Bismarck was at bay.
PART THREE
Thus, with the crippling of her steering gear by the torpedo bombers of Ark Royal, began the agonizing last night of the brief life of the Bismarck.
The greatest battleship in the world was about to go to her death, and it was almost as if nature knew that nothing could now stay her end, for the weather that night was in dark and bitter h
armony with the moods, the thoughts, the bleak and sombre despair of the hundreds of exhausted men who still kept watch aboard the Bismarck.
The wind blew hard, the cold, driving rain lashed pitilessly across their faces, the waves ran high and rough and confused and the darkness was as absolute as darkness ever becomes at sea: there was no moon that night, and even the stars were hidden by the scudding rain-clouds.
Dead in the water, engines stopped, the Bismarck lay in the troughs between the great Atlantic combers rolling heavily, continuously, while the engine room crews worked frantically to free the jammed rudders. Their lives, the life of every man in the ship, depended on the success or failure of their efforts: Brest and safety were only twelve hours’ steaming away, even six hours would have taken them under the protective umbrella of their own Luftwaffe, and there no British battleship would dare venture. But with steering control lost, they were helpless.
One rudder was freed and centred, and there it jammed, but even that was a major step forward: if the other could be freed, or even centred so as to eliminate its drag, there would still be hope, for the battleship could be steered by varying the relative speeds of the two great propellor shafts to overcome the contending forces of wind, wave and tide. But the rudder, buckled and twisted by the impact of the torpedo explosion, remained far over at its acute angle, immovably jammed.
The situation was desperate. Time was running out, and the engineers, haggard, exhausted men who had almost forgotten what sleep was, were now all but incapable of any effort at all, mental or physical: with the interminable plunging of the wildly rolling ship and the fumes of diesel oil seeping back from ruptured fuel tanks even the most experienced sailors among them were almost continually sick, many of them violently so.
It was announced that the man who succeeded in freeing the rudders would be awarded the Knight’s Insignia of the Iron Cross—the highest award Germany can bestow. But there is no place for dreams of glory in the utter wretchedness of a seasick man, and even had a diver gone over the side into that black and gale-wracked sea he could have achieved nothing except his own death, and that in a matter of moments as the great ship, wallowing wickedly in the troughs, crushed the life out of him.
The engineer commander approached Captain Lindemann with a counsel of desperation—they should try to blow the rudder off with high explosive. Lindemann, who had had no sleep for six days and six nights replied with the massive indifference of one who has taken far too much and for whom nothing now remains, ‘You may do what you like. I have finished with the Bismarck.’ These, surely, are the most tragic words that have ever been uttered by the commander of a naval vessel, but it is impossible to blame Captain Lindemann: in his hopelessness, in his black despair and utter exhaustion, he was no longer in contact with reality.
The order was given—it may have been by Admiral Lutjens himself—to get under way, and slowly the Bismarck gathered speed until she was doing almost ten knots. With no steering control left, she yawed wildly from side to side, but her general course was north—towards the coast of England. This was the last thing Lutjens wanted, but there was no help for it: with the constant lifeless rolling in the great troughs, the turret crews had become so seasick that they were unable to fight their guns, and the ship itself had become a most unstable firing platform. More important still, a ship lying stopped in the water was a sitting target for any torpedo attacks that might be delivered in the darkness of the night.
And, inevitably, the torpedo attacks came. All night long the Bismarck was harassed by a group of British destroyers, who, with their vastly superior speed and manoeuvrability, circled it like a pack of hounds waiting to bring down and finish off a wounded stag. But the Bismarck, as the destroyers found, was not to be finished off so easily. Time and again, as a hound darts in to nip the stag, a destroyer raced in and loosed off its torpedoes, but soon discovered that this was an unprofitable and highly dangerous proceeding. Somehow, somewhere, the Bismarck’s gun crews—and they were, after all, the pick of the German Navy—had found their last reserves of spirit and energy and drove off the British destroyers with heavy and extremely accurate radar-controlled fire from their 15-inch turrets.
During the running and intermittent battle, in the intervals between the crash of the gunfire and the momentary glaring illumination of the ship and sea around as the white and orange flames streaked from the mouths of the big barrels, a German naval officer, intent on boosting the morale of his men, kept up a commentary of the fight over the Tannoy system. ‘One British destroyer hit…One hit and on fire…Ship blowing up and sinking…’
(In point of fact, none of Captain Vian’s destroyers were hit, far less sunk, during the night. It is as well to remember, however, that all the inventiveness was not on the German side. The British destroyers claimed, a claim that was backed by the official Admiralty communiqué, that the Bismarck had been torpedoed several times during the night: the truth is that the Bismarck wasn’t hit even once by a torpedo.)
Early on in the night, the Fuehrer himself sent a personal message to the Bismarck: ‘Our thoughts are with our victorious comrades’ to which he received a reply, ‘Ship completely unmanoeuvrable. Will fight to the last shell.’
It is difficult to imagine which of the two messages had the more dismaying effect. Probably the latter. For doomed men to be addressed as ‘victorious comrades’ is irony enough, but for Hitler to learn that all hope had been abandoned for the magnificent ship he had visited only a week or two previously and called the pride of the German Navy must have been a shattering blow.
As Lutjens said, the ship was completely un-manoeuvrable. The long dark night wore on, and in spite of every effort it proved impossible to bring the Bismarck round on a course for Brest. For her own safety she had to keep moving, and with the set of the wind and the sea, there was only one way she could move—north.
Dawn was coming up now, a bleak, cheerless dawn with driving rain clouds and a grey and stormy sea. There was no longer any hiding from the crew the course they were steering, and the despair and the fear lay heavy over the Bismarck. It was almost certainly to counteract this that an official message was passed round to the men at their stations—those who still fought off exhaustion and remained awake at their stations—that squadrons of Stukas had already taken off from Northern France, and that a tanker, tugs and escorting destroyers were steaming out to their aid. There was no word of truth in this. The Luftwaffe was grounded by the same high wind and low, gale-torn rain clouds as were sweeping across the Bismarck, the tugs and tanker were still in Brest harbour and the destroyers never came.
There came instead the two most powerful battleships of the British Home Fleet, the Rodney and the King George V, beating up out of the west so as to have the Bismarck between them and the lightening sky to the east. The men of the Bismarck knew that there would be no escape this time, that the promised Stukas and destroyers and U-boats would never come, and that when the British battleships, bent on revenge for the sunken Hood, finally turned for home again they would leave an empty sea behind them. The Bismarck made ready to die.
Over the guns, by the great engines, in the magazines and fire-control rooms, exhausted men lay or sat by their posts, sunk in drugged uncaring sleep. On the bridge, according to the testimony of one of the few surviving officers, senior officers lay at their stations like dead men, the helmsman was stretched out by the useless wheel, of the Admiral or any member of his staff there was no sign. They had to be shaken and beaten out of the depths of their so desperately needed sleep, awakened to the cruellest, the most bitter dawn they had ever known: and, for all but a handful, it was their last awakening.
Even before they were all roused, closed up at their battle stations and ready to defend themselves, the Rodney, no more than four minutes after she had first been sighted, opened up with her great 16-inch guns. For the waiting men on the Bismarck, the spectacle of a full-scale broadside from the Rodney, with her three massive triple turrets al
l ranged together on her tremendously long fore-deck and firing simultaneously as they did later in the battle, was an impressive and terrifying sight: but no more terrifying than the express train shriek of the approaching salvo, the flat thunderclaps of sound as the shells exploded on nearby contact with the water, the waterspouts erupting two hundred feet up into the leaden sky.
But this first salvo missed. So, almost immediately afterwards, did the first from the King George V. And now the Bismarck retaliated and concluding, probably rightly, that the Rodney was the more dangerous opponent, directed the first salvo at her. It fell a long way short, but the Bismarck’s reputation for gunnery of a quite extraordinary accuracy, a reputation achieved in only four brief days, was solidly founded in fact: almost immediately she started straddling the Rodney, which took swift avoiding action.
But still the Rodney was firing from every gun that could be brought to bear, and the King George V, temporarily ignored by the Bismarck, was arrowing in head-on, her six big for’ard 15-inch guns firing time and again, as quickly as they could be reloaded. The Norfolk, too, the cruiser that had doggedly followed the Bismarck all the way from the far-distant waters of the Denmark Strait, now joined in the fight and shortly afterwards the Dorsetshire, who had taken a severe hammering all night long as she had raced north through galewinds and heavy seas, appeared on the scene. Within fifteen minutes from the beginning of the action, the Bismarck was being subjected to heavy and sustained fire from two battleships and two cruisers.
The odds were hopeless. Even for a ship capable of high speed and rapid manoeuvre, and with a fresh and confident crew, the sheer weight of enemy shells would have proved far too much: and the Bismarck could now move only at a relative crawl, manoeuvre of any kind was impossible for her and her crew were exhausted, hopeless and utterly demoralized. In retrospect, over the gap of seventeen years, our sympathies tend to lie with the Bismarck, a sitting target lying increasingly helpless in the water, being mercilessly battered into extinction. But there was no thought of mercy at the time, only of revenge and destruction, and understandably so: only four days had elapsed since the Hood and fifteen hundred men had gone to their deaths—and the Stukas and U-boats might appear on the scene at any moment.
The Lonely Sea Page 7