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.
Early on the twenty-second, the escort destroyers dropped away from the far swifter Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. Alone now, Lütjens steamed north until the early afternoon, when he turned northwest in readiness for the run down the Denmark Strait, fog-bound at this time of year and full of newly calved icebergs. Just before midnight, the German ships turned into the strait. If his luck held, Lütjens would break out into the Atlantic in about thirty hours. This was the most dangerous part of the venture; the navigable part of the channel was at most only thirty miles wide at this time of year, narrow enough that if the British were lucky, their naval radar—limited in range to about twelve miles, and unreliable—could pick up the German ships, that is, if the British had vessels on station. They did. Two cruisers, Norfolk and Suffolk, positioned themselves in the lower part of the strait. Neither was a match for Bismarck or Prinz Eugen. Their job was to spot the Germans and shadow them until the battle cruiser Hood and Britain’s newest battleship, Prince of Wales, appeared on the scene. Prince of Wales carried ten 14-inch guns and was built to hunt and kill almost anything afloat. Hood—the Mighty Hood to Britons—was twenty-two years old, armed with eight 15-inch guns, and the pride of Great Britain, feared even by German sailors. When Churchill learned that it was to be Hood that would give battle to Bismarck, he retired to bed content.270
Hood and Prince of Wales departed Scapa Flow a few minutes after midnight on the twenty-second, dispatched by Admiral Sir John Cronyn Tovey, commander in chief of the Home Fleet. They made for the Denmark Strait on a course that would take them across the other three exit points into the Atlantic. Had Lütjens elected to make his run through one of them, Hood would cross his path. If not, the Germans and British would likely meet and fight at the southern end of the Denmark Strait. When he received the baleful report from the lone Spitfire, Tovey put his flag aboard the new battleship King George V and sallied out of Scapa Flow with the aircraft carrier Victorious, four cruisers, and seven destroyers. Tovey intended to straddle the three exit routes east of Iceland. Somebody was bound to run into the Germans. Such was the plan.
If Bismarck avoided the net, Churchill would need help from Roosevelt. Accordingly, he cabled the president: “Should we not catch them going out, your Navy should surely be able to mark them down for us” and “Give us the news and we will finish the job.” That request, to act as Britain’s eyes in the Atlantic, created a diplomatic problem for the Americans, for Grand Admiral Raeder had made clear his intentions to shoot any American warship he thought “committed an act of war” by reporting to the British the position of German ships on the high seas. Raeder had a point. International law demanded that neutrals on the high seas mind their own business. But in early April, Roosevelt—in yet another tentative step toward hostilities—declared that American warships would henceforth patrol to twenty-six degrees west longitude, roughly from between Iceland and Greenland south to Brazil. He also declared that if American ships spotted German warships, they would broadcast their location on an open frequency, fully realizing that doing so might trigger an act of war on Germany’s part, which presumably (Churchill hoped) would trigger a declaration of war by America. Yet Roosevelt knew that America was not yet prepared in either martial spirit or armaments to carry through on such a declaration. His initiative had been largely bluff, though it had elated Churchill. Colville and Harriman were at Chequers when the news arrived. When Colville asked Harriman if this might mean war, Harriman replied: “That’s what I hope.”271
Churchill would have welcomed a crisis on the seas, and, in fact, he soon tried to engineer just such an incident. Roosevelt’s declaration meant that American warships patrolled east almost to the Azores and north to Greenland but not into the hottest battle zones, within one thousand miles of Britain, thereby lessening the chances of running into Germans. Roosevelt had struck a deal with the Danish government in exile to build airbases on Greenland. Had the bases been operational by late May, they might have benefited Churchill in his search for Bismarck; but they were not. In any case, the Denmark Strait went unobserved by the U.S. Navy as Bismarck slipped through. Churchill’s ships would have to find Bismarck on their own.
Suffolk did just that. She spotted the two German ships in the early evening of May 23 and signaled the contact before running for cover in a fogbank. Norfolk, also hiding in the fog, picked up Suffolk’s report. Admiral W. F. Wake-Walker, directing the action of both ships from Norfolk, and eager to make visual contact, ordered Norfolk to the edge of the fogbank, directly under Bismarck’s fine optical sights. Bismarck loosed its first ever shots in anger, which straddled Norfolk. Walker fled back into the fog. It would fall to Hood, guided by Suffolk and Norfolk, to sink the Bismarck.
Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, second in command of the Home Fleet, was on board Hood, about three hundred miles away and closing at such high speed that his escort destroyers gave up the chase and dropped back. At about 8:00 P.M. Hood’s captain, Ralph Kerr, told his crew that the Germans had been sighted in the strait. All hands were ordered to ready their battle gear—life jackets, flashlights, helmets—and were reminded to change into clean underwear, to prevent infection from shrapnel wounds. The ship was darkened, battle flags run up the masts. Shortly after midnight—it was now the twenty-fourth—the crews of Hood and Prince of Wales manned their battle stations. Bismarck was now about 180 miles to the north, her bottleneck into the Atlantic corked.
Churchill, dining at Chequers, demanded that all news be immediately brought to his attention. The evening’s dinner was, as usual, an “entirely male party,” Colville noted, consisting of Churchill’s brother, Jack, Colville, Harriman, and Ismay. Although the awful news from Crete weighed on Churchill and his guests, the conversation at the table, recalled Ismay, “was confined almost exclusively to the impending clash at sea.” They sat up until after 3:00 A.M., late even for Churchill, with hopes of getting some further news from the Admiralty. None arrived. Churchill recalled, “There was nothing for me to do and I went to bed… so well tired with other work that I slept soundly. I had complete confidence in The First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound, and liked the way he was playing the hand. I awoke in peaceful Chequers about 9 A.M. with all that strange thrill which one feels at the beginning of a day in which great news is expected, good or bad.”272
While Churchill slept, the last great duel of battleships in the Atlantic Ocean began. It was over in less than eight minutes. Just before 6:00 A.M., Prince of Wales and Hood maneuvered to bring themselves east and south of Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, such that the rising sun brought the approaching German ships into sharp relief. Prinz Eugen came along first in line, which confused the British, for Bismarck, the logical leader, was trailing behind and appeared to be the smaller of the two ships. Prince of Wales, much of its crew green, and Hood, plagued by ineffectual range-finding radar, opened fire on Prinz Eugen, to no effect. Bismarck, meanwhile, took leisurely aim at Hood. One of Prinz Eugen’s eight-inch shells scored a hit amidships on Hood, igniting a fire that popped off ammunition kept at the ready. Captain Kerr ordered his crew to let the fire burn itself out and to take shelter near the superstructure. Kerr, realizing he had shot at the wrong target, ordered a turn to port, in order to reduce Hood’s profile and to bring its four 15-inch bow guns to bear on Bismarck. The turn came too late.
Bismarck’s first salvos had straddled Hood. Now Bismarck had Hood’s range. She fired another salvo. An officer on Prinz Eugen saw the shell splashes and thought that this salvo, too, had missed. But at least one shell had found its mark, possibly beneath the waterline. Within a second or two,
a great shaft of flame shot straight up from Hood’s midsection, high into the morning sky, followed a few seconds later by a catastrophic explosion. Hood disappeared for a few moments in the smoke, but large pieces of the ship were seen lofted high into the air. Within a few minutes, the smoke drifted off. Hood was gone. Three of her crew of 1,412 bobbed alive in the water. They called out until they found each other amid the oil and debris and dozens of inflatable life rafts, all of which were empty. Hood, its stern blown off, its bow broken off, took Admiral Holland and Captain Kerr and every other crewman down with her. Churchill awoke at Chequers to this worst possible news: Hood was lost and Bismarck was on the loose. He wandered into Harriman’s bedroom. Harriman bolted awake to behold an apparition dressed in a yellow sweater over a short nightshirt, his pink legs exposed. “Hell of a battle going on,” Churchill mumbled. “The Hood is sunk, hell of a battle.”273
Gloom descended upon Chequers that morning, but Churchill shed no tears at the news of Hood. His tears flowed when sentimentality was in the air—a christening, the prospect of casualties among the creatures confined in the London zoo, the recounting over brandy of long-past heroic deeds. The sight of bombed-out civilians brought tears to his eyes; they were innocents. News of the death of soldiers or sailors in battle moved him to resolve, often to anger, sometimes to impetuous decisions, but not to tears. Upon learning of Hood’s demise, he came downstairs to find Clementine, Sarah, and Vic Oliver in a parlor, Vic at the piano, tapping out on the ivories a few measures of Beethoven, which Churchill took to be a funeral march. “Nobody plays the Dead March in my house,” Churchill growled. All in the room but Churchill laughed—a mistake, followed by another. “It’s not the Dead March,” said Oliver. “It’s the Appassionata Sonata.” Churchill glowered. “You can say what you like, I know it’s the Funeral March.” Vic then made a final error, by playing a few more chords from the Appassionata. Churchill erupted. “Stop it! Stop it! I want no Dead March, I tell you!” Only when Sarah rushed to the piano and advised Vic to play another piece did the moment pass. Vic at least had had the good sense not to whistle the tune.274
Churchill learned later that morning that Prince of Wales had taken several hits. One shell from Prinz Eugen passed without exploding clear through the gunnery plotting station in the superstructure, killing most of the plotters and knocking Captain Leach senseless. Still, Prince of Wales let loose four more salvos before withdrawing. Churchill fumed to Colville that the retreat was “the worst thing since Troubridge turned away from Goeben in 1914.” Churchill berated the Admiralty, the first sea lord, and, when his criticism of the Atlantic action waned, berated Cunningham in the Mediterranean for not risking his ships to block the invasion of Crete. Churchill demanded risk, not caution, from his naval commanders. Yet Cunningham had risked his ships, and he had scattered the German invasion fleet. Cunningham had put thousands of British troops on Crete, and by the twenty-fourth, with his ships under constant attack, he was preparing to get them off. His losses were horrific. Cunningham’s place in Royal Navy history was secure. Churchill, in his memoirs, finally gave him his due, and he included an anecdote that captures the spirit of the admiral. When an officer protested the risk to the fleet in getting the survivors off Crete, Cunningham responded, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship; it will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.”275
It was May 24, Empire Day,* when millions of schoolchildren throughout the Empire were granted a school holiday to celebrate their monarch, salute the Union Jack, and sing patriotic songs. A generation of children had heard inspirational speeches and listened to tales of heroic deeds from the imperial past, tales of Clive of India, Wolfe of Québec, and “Chinese Gordon” of Khartoum, Marlborough, and Nelson. Empire Day 1941 passed without celebration. Churchill would have to impart the news of Hood to the Commons the following week, but first a new diversion was to be unveiled that night at Chequers. The Old Man had recently insisted the great house be outfitted with a movie projector. His mood improved somewhat that evening as Marlene Dietrich, starring in Seven Sinners, made her Chequers premier.
But he continued to spread his anger between Cunningham and the admirals pursuing Bismarck. “The loss of half the Mediterranean fleet,” he snapped to Colville, “would be worthwhile to save Crete.” In fact, with Cunningham’s mounting losses off Crete, about half the Mediterranean fleet had been lost since the start of the year. Churchill was incorrect in ascribing hesitancy—cowardice by any other name—to Cunningham, and he was wrong about Admiral Wake-Walker on board Norfolk and Captain Leach on board Prince of Wales. Leach was correct in withdrawing Prince of Wales, damaged, outgunned, her range-finding radar useless. Wake-Walker and Leach ran, not for lack of fighting spirit, but to live to fight another day. It was the correct decision.276
Churchill did not at all see things that way. Livid, he wanted to welcome the two commanders home with courts-martial, but Admirals Pound and Tovey insisted the officers on the spot had acted correctly. Years later, his wrath softened by the passage of time, Churchill wrote in his memoirs that Wake-Walker had been “indisputably right” in his decision.
Prince of Wales had put at least three 14-inch shells into Bismarck, and as a result the German ship suffered a serious fuel leak and loss of rudder control. The Admiralty did not yet know this. But Lütjens now knew his decision to not refuel at Bergen was fatal. Bismarck, wounded and lacking the fuel to make a run for home, had to run for a port in occupied France. Prinz Eugen, undamaged, ran for Brest. Rheinübung was finished. It remained to be seen whether Bismarck was as well. That night, Churchill was told that the Royal Navy would give battle the following morning, but in the early hours of the twenty-fifth, Bismarck vanished from Suffolk’s radar. Colville recalled that this dashing of Churchill’s hopes caused the entirety of the twenty-fifth to be passed as “a day of fearful gloom.” Over the next two days and across 1,200 nautical miles, a truly epic naval chase took place on the high seas. Churchill dearly would have loved to be in on the chase and particularly the kill, but he had to satisfy himself with observing from the Admiralty War Room, where he meddled. The “former naval person” had never heard a naval gun fired in battle. His had been an administrative naval career consisting in large part of sticking pins into his wall maps at the Admiralty. On this day, he made a nuisance of himself.277
On the morning of Monday, May 26, having vanished for more than thirty hours, Bismarck’s position and heading were at last confirmed by an RAF Catalina flying boat, piloted by an American. Tovey, on board King George V, gave chase, with Bismarck now 130 miles ahead of him. The older battleship Rodney joined the hunt. Churchill, ensconced in the Admiralty War Room, oversaw a riotous scene of charts spread across old oak tables, pins marking known positions, admirals demanding information from subordinates, and Churchill needling them all. He pressured Pound to order Tovey to keep up the chase even if it meant King George V had to be towed to port for lack of fuel. Pound needed no encouragement; he was an old seadog who believed a captain’s place was on the bridge.278
Late on the twenty-sixth, Swordfish torpedo bombers from HMS Ark Royal scored a crippling hit on Bismarck’s rudder. Lütjens radioed the homeland with a last message: “Ship out of control. Will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer.” Early on the twenty-seventh, as Tovey ran in for the kill, he flashed a message to his ships that lives on in Royal Navy lore: “Get closer. Get closer.” Bismarck, unable to steer, was doomed, but she could still shoot, her final salvos straddling both Rodney and King George V. The British poured hundreds of shells into the wounded ship, its guns now silent. It burned furiously, the hellish glow of the fires belowdecks visible to British gunners. Slowly, it began to settle by the bows. But it would not go down. Its crew attempted to scuttle her; still the great ship remained afloat. The battle, if it could be called that, had lasted for more than six hours. At around 10:30 A.M. the British cruiser Dorsetshire, already having fired 250 shells at a range of just three miles—p
oint blank in naval terms—ran close in and finished Bismarck with two torpedoes. Lütjens, his premonition fulfilled, died along with 2,100 of the 2,200 men on board. The sinking of Bismarck, ironically, bolstered the old timers’ case that battleships still ruled the seas. It had taken a task force of carriers, battleships, destroyers, cruisers, submarines, aircraft, bombs, shells, and innumerable torpedoes to sink the great ship, even as it limped along, crippled.279
British destroyers conducted a brief search for survivors, but fearful of lurking U-boats they soon departed, leaving hundreds of Germans behind in the water. Or so went the official explanation. Word had already arrived from Crete that the Luftwaffe had bombed and strafed defenseless British sailors whose ships had been sunk from under them; Dickie Mountbatten soon confirmed the rumors to Churchill. Both sides, it appeared, had jettisoned any pretense to gentlemanly rules of engagement. Late in the day a Spanish cruiser came upon Bismarck’s final position and found only hundreds of bodies bobbing on the greasy gray swells.280
There would be no sugar for the birds when Churchill addressed Parliament that day. Crete was on the brink; Cairo and the Suez Canal lay exposed. The Vichy government in Syria was thought to be welcoming German military advisers. Rommel appeared unstoppable. The ports and London had taken fierce hits since March. Leslie Hore-Belisha, a Liberal and former member of the Chamberlain government who fancied himself better qualified than Churchill to run the war, had made unflattering comments to the press concerning the “tempo of our war effort.” The old Marxist Harold Laski had lauded Churchill as a “war leader.” But Laski—whose bushy eyebrows, plush mustache, long nose, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses qualified him as a double Marxist—cited production bottlenecks and lack of adequate evacuation plans in case of invasion as evidence of Churchill’s failings as prime minister and chief administrator. The Daily Mail put it bluntly: “When are we going to see an end of masterly retreats? Something is wrong. Britain needs new ideas. She certainly needs a radical shake-up on the home front.” Churchill needed a victory, and the sinking of Bismarck had given him one, or so he thought.281
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