“She did put in a satisfactory exercise this afternoon,” said Brind.
“That she did, but I wasn’t comforted with the conversation we had with their Senior Squadron Commander. Those men are raw fruit. Never landed on the deck of a carrier before their arrival here. And they’ve no experience making torpedo attacks either. I’m not sure what good they’ll be to us in a situation like this.”
“Yet having a carrier with us, even with a very few planes, could prove useful,” said Brind. “We can fly them off in air search missions—extend our eyes should Bismarck manage to slip out. It’s a big ocean out there and we’re stretched all too thin.”
“I suppose you have a point in that,” said Tovey. “Very well. Victorious will come along then. I want to be ready to sail just after midnight.”
“Aye, sir. I’ll see that the orders are sent.”
“By lamp,” said Tovey. “We’re to observe strict radio silence from this moment on. No use letting the Germans know we’re on to Bismarck, eh? I had a hunch that devil had put out to sea. Only I didn’t think we’d possibly get confirmation for another day or longer. With this news we’ve saved at least 24 hours. I don’t know who this Lonesome Dove is, but I’m glad he flew my way. Let’s get to sea!”
Hood and Prince of Wales threw off their moorings, slipped out though the anti-submarine netting and were out to sea in short order. Tovey would follow with the rest of Home Fleet four hours later. Word went out to all cruisers on patrol to be especially vigilant, then orders were given to enforce radio silence unless any cruiser had a confirmed enemy sighting. In the meantime, it was incumbent upon Admiral Tovey to get heavy assets into a position to intercept the German task force at the earliest opportunity. Bismarck would be sailing with the eight inch gun cruiser Prince Eugen, and together they would prove a formidable battle force. Though the great German battleship had yet to fire her main 15 inch guns in anger, her design and specification, as known to Tovey at that time, were ominously impressive.
It was therefore his intention to send no less than two capital ships against her in any engagement. His own flag ship was a modern design, one of the fleet’s newer additions, built with the prospect of a second war in mind and launched in February of 1939. Most of the Fleet still sailed in ships dating back to the First World War, however. In fact the old lady, HMS Hood, had her keel laid in 1916 and launched two years later. While she was the pride of the fleet, she had been built with considerable firepower while sacrificing armor for speed. She could run out to 31 knots in her early sea trials, but by 1941 her best practical speed was 28 knots, still fast for a vessel carrying eight big 15 inch guns. Yet her deck armor was thin, less than an inch in some places and no more than three inches at best.
Tovey also had another old battlecruiser in hand, the HMS Repulse, two years older than Hood, and carrying 15 inch guns, but only six of them, paired in three turrets. Among the fastest ships in the world when she launched, Repulse could still easily run out to 28 knots, and then some if needed, though her engines and plants were showing their age.
The ships that followed these venerable battlecruisers into service had been powerfully built and well armored battleships, the Rodney and Nelson. Their design was unlike anything else in the fleet, with nine heavy 16 inch guns, all mounted in three forward turrets. The unusual arrangement allowed her to present enormous firepower as she approached a target, but she could only run out to 21 knots. If these ships had been built to chase down enemy battleships, their sluggish speed made them completely unsuited to the task.
So it was that the Royal Navy decided to fill the need for a truly modernized battleship with the newer King George V class. The designers wanted the speed to catch anything they set their sights on, the power to hurt and sink it, and the armor to stand with the best the enemy could throw back at them. King George V was not a perfect design, but she answered those three requirements well enough. Her guns were slightly smaller than Hood, just 14 inchers, but she carried ten of them in an unusual configuration. One turret with four guns each was placed at her bow and another at her stern. Then a second, smaller turret with two barrels was mounted above and behind the forward guns. This gave her six barrels in her forward arc of fire, four aft, and a broadside of ten. Her armor was better than either Hood or Repulse, approaching 15 inches in thickness at the belt, with deck armor up to 5.4 inches, twice the thickness of Hood. And she could run out to 28 knots in speed, giving her a potent combination of firepower, protection, and vital speed.
In making his deployments Tovey had paired two capital ships in each task force. Hood was stronger than Repulse, so Admiral Holland made his flag there and sailed with the latest addition to the fleet, another KGV class ship, the Prince of Wales. This ship was inexperienced, still beset with mechanical problems, and put to sea with repair crews aboard to work the bugs out of her firing turrets. In setting these two ships off together, Tovey hoped the experience of Hood would augment the youth and rawness of Prince of Wales, and together they could turn 18 big guns on any enemy they did battle with.
For himself, he set his flag here aboard King George V and would order the battlecruiser Repulse, now at anchor in the Clyde, to join him once he put to sea. Each ship had experienced crews, though they had slightly less firepower together than Holland had, being two guns short on Repulse.
Still, it was a sound deployment, thought Tovey. Bismarck had only eight 15 inch guns, even if she was fast and very well armored. He still reasoned that either of his heavy task forces would outgun her, and the lighter 8 inch gun cruiser Prince Eugen would not be a significant threat if they could get some early hits on the larger battleship.
So it was that he put to sea just after midnight as the 21st of May slipped away to a new day. It would be a momentous time, he thought. He could feel it in his bones, smell it on the cold night mist over the Flow. One task force or another was going to find and confront the German behemoth, and the outcome would decide the course of the war in the North Atlantic for some time to come.
But which would it be, Tovey wondered? Would Bismarck make for the more distant, yet narrow passage of the Denmark Strait, or the closer and more direct passage between Iceland and the Faeroes? That choice would determine who fought her, and hundreds of miles away, Admiral Lütjens was considering that very question aboard the most powerful ship in the German Navy.
Chapter 14
Norwegian Sea, Battleship Bismarck, 21 May, 1941
Coming to Bergen was a mistake, thought Ernst Lindemann, Kapitan of the Bismarck, but Admiral Lütjens must have had some reason to delay here. Was it only to provide time for the new paint? The deck crews had been busy the whole day, painting over the dazzle ship camo scheme and covering up the prominent swastikas on the decks with canvass. The ship would get a new coat of “battleship gray,” which was much more suitable given the steel gray sky and waters of the Norwegian Sea.
Perhaps it was Prince Eugen, he decided. The smaller ship had been ordered to take on fuel from the tanker Wollin, but we could have just as easily steamed directly to the Weissenburg, another tanker on station in the Arctic Sea. It did not surprise him when a lone RAF Spitfire overflew the harbor at 1100 hours that morning, photographing Bismarck riding boldly at anchor right under the curious and astonished noses of the local sheep farmers.
Strange that the Admiral seemed to feel no need to refuel Bismarck. True, she had much greater range than the cruiser, but the ship was already 200 tons light due to a faulty refueling hose, and they had already burned that much again just to reach this place.
The Admiral came in to the ward room, and Lindemann gave him a brisk salute.
“It’s good to be underway again,” he said. “I trust you are ready for some exciting days ahead, captain.”
“To put it lightly, Admiral. Have you given further thought to our course?” The decision as to which passage they would take was crucial now, but Lütjens pursed his lips, as though the matter was still troublesome in his min
d.
Günther Lütjens was a tall, aristocratic seaman, a career officer with a long and distinguished record. The navy had often insulated itself against the encroaching ideology of the Nazi party, and Lütjens was a perfect example of that. He was definitely not a party man, and believed the appalling treatment meted out to the Jews was a stain on German honor. He provided aid to certain Jewish associates, and also refused to dismiss any valuable staff member simply because there was a suspicion of Jewish blood in their genealogy. More than this, he went so far as to make a formal written statement protesting the atrocities of Kristallnacht against the Jews, and when Hitler had come to tour the Bismarck just before its launch, the Admiral boldly greeted him with a standard navy salute, and not the stiff armed salute of the Nazi Party.
With nearly 30 years in naval service, he had early experience on fast torpedo boats before landing his first command on the Karlsruhe in 1934. After that he commanded many of the newest German raiders, including both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the recent Norwegian campaign, as well as the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper the previous year. Now he set his flag on the Bismarck for operation Rheinübung, or “Exercise Rhine” as it was to be called. His mission was to break out and strike the convoy system, and this time the presence of a single battleship as escort for the slow fat prey would not give him pause.
First, however, he had to choose the best route into the Atlantic, and get by the Royal Navy screens. There were four possible routes, but the first two he discarded immediately, being too close to British air assets and their Home Fleet at Scapa Flow. He knew he would most likely have to fight his way out, but there was no sense thumbing his nose at the British by trying to race for the Orkney or Shetland Island passages. No, it would come down to the Faeroes or the Denmark Strait.
The more distant passage was a narrow channel, with one side choked with sea ice and the other often shrouded in fog and mist. Far from enemy planes, it had been used successfully time and again by the raiders which had broken out earlier. Admiral Sheer and Hipper had used it, as well as Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, both now laid up in the French port of Brest for repairs.
That was the problem, he thought. Once a ship did break into the Atlantic it would find few friends and many enemies. The Germans had positioned weather ships and oilers to resupply the raiders, and of course there were packs of U-Boats here and there, but with a speed of no more than 15 knots they were too slow to keep up with the fast raiders, and could only pose a temporary threat to pursuing British ships, or temporary reinforcement should any be in the vicinity of a surface engagement.
“If it’s Denmark Strait we should have taken on more fuel as well,” said Lindemann, and he reminded the admiral about the faulty hose.
“Don’t concern yourself with such details,” said Lütjens. “Look at the big picture. Once we break out they will have fits trying to find us, and stopping us is out of the question.”
“I would like to be of the same mind, Admiral, but they managed to bottle up Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.”
“Those ships don’t compare to Bismarck,” said Lütjens—but at that moment there was a knock on the door and a midshipman made a crisp salute when Lindemann let the man in.
“Signal from Group North, sir.” He handed the captain a decoded message, saluted again, and left.
Lindemann read the note, a look on his face that spoke the misgivings in his mind without a single word. “Home Fleet has sailed from Scapa Flow,” he said quietly. We got a Heinkel in for a look three hours ago. All the major vessels have put to sea.”
Lütjens was not happy. “How did they manage that?” he said.
“There are enemy coast watchers everywhere, sir,” said Lindemann. “We would have done better to have stayed well away from the Norwegian shore, and lingering in a fiord, even for the few hours we spent here to refuel Prince Eugen was almost certain to stir up interest. Our new paint job may come at a high price.”
Lütjens nodded grimly and moved ahead in his thinking. He turned to the stolid captain, his hands clasped behind his back as he considered. “Your thoughts, Lindemann?”
“Let’s put on speed and get well out in the Norwegian Sea,” he said. “We can make the decision later. If we remain undiscovered, all the better. But if they find us first our choice may be forced upon us. For now we should get as far from British air cover, and the watchful eyes on this coastline, as possible.”
“I agree,” said Lütjens. “The British have occupied the Faeroes, but intelligence has seen no sign of an airfield there yet.”
“But there is a carrier at Scapa Flow, sir—or there was. It’s more than likely put to sea with the British Home Fleet.”
“Something to consider, but not to fret about, Lindemann. British carrier power is weak and over rated. “If we could have finished up Graf Zeppelin and brought her along with us we would be all but invulnerable, but if wishes were horses…” He was referring to the sole German aircraft carrier, a ship still fitting out after construction had been halted and her AA batteries cannibalized for duty in Norway. If the Germans had known how important carriers would eventually be to the outcome of the war, they might have given the ship top priority. As it was, naval strategy in the Atlantic was still dominated by the deployment of battleships. The era of the dreadnought had not yet come to an end.
“Steer 315 degrees northwest, and increase speed to 28 knots,” said Lütjens. “We’ll make a brisk run out to sea, then slow to 24 knots while we re-assess the situation. And one of us had better get to the bridge with that order.”
“I’ll go, sir,” the captain offered. “You rest and join me in the morning. I’ve managed to get a little sleep as we came north.”
“You are too kind,” said the admiral. “Very well, but inform me at once of anything important.”
A half hour later Lütjens was resting in his quarters, his mind still rolling with the increasingly heavy seas. The entire Home Fleet had sailed, which meant enemy intelligence was much more persistent than he imagined. Was he being too careless? Lindemann’s warning, first about the need for additional fuel, and then about Bergen and the Norwegian coast had already been proven wise. That damn fuel hose, he thought. Yet if they held this present course for a few more hours he could still steer north to rendezvous with the oiler Weissenburg. It would be his last chance to top off his tanks before he sailed south.
The thought also passed his mind that this was only postponing the inevitable. He could waste as much fuel going north and back again as he might gain. Why not simply turn south west and make a run for it? With two ships he could blast his way past any opposition. The British could not possibly concentrate the whole of their fleet against him. They had to plan for every eventuality, and would be spread like too little butter over bread. Yet, knowing the British, they would scrape up enough of a battle force to make a credible showing.
He thought about the problem, considering the ships that would sail to meet him. There were two old ladies, Hood and Repulse. Old, yes, but dangerous nonetheless. Then there were two newer battleships, King George V and Prince of Wales. One was seasoned, the latter barely off the fitting docks. Neither should be dismissed lightly, he thought, though he had every confidence Bismarck would prevail against any of these ships. In fact, with Prince Eugen at his side the odds were in his favor even if he met two of these ships together. But if he met three?
He gave a moment’s thought to the carrier Victorious, then put that ship out of his mind. Her puny aircraft, few in number, would pose no real threat. They were slow, single engine biplanes from a bygone era, and no match for the Bismarck’s considerable anti-aircraft guns. He would blow them out of the sky, even if they were to be so lucky as to even find his ships.
Again the question returned to his mind. Will it be the Denmark Strait or the Iceland Faeroes Gap? He had taken Scharnhorst and Gneisenau through the former easily on his last outing, but consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds, he thought. Would the British b
e expecting him there again?
Sleep eluded him, and he rested fitfully that night, though there were no alerts, and thankfully no air raids. His task force remained undiscovered when he arose the following morning to join Captain Lindemann on the bridge.
“Good morning, captain, any developments I should be aware of?”
“One signal intercept,” said the captain. “We’re observing radio silence and so I did not acknowledge it.”
“And what was the subject?”
“It seems we have a list of the dinner guests,” said Lindemann. “Hood and Prince of Wales are steaming together and heading for the Denmark Strait. The remainder of the fleet is following four hours behind, but it is my assumption they will be watching the Iceland Faeroes Gap.”
“I see,” said Lütjens, considering. “How did we come upon this intelligence, I wonder?”
“We must have a man on Iceland,” said Lindemann. “It seems there is a lot of activity—preparations for refueling operations, and the name Hood was heard at the docks. Group North was not specific, but they seem to have the matter in hand.”
“Very well,” said Lütjens. His mind seemed much clearer now, in spite of the long, restless night. He decided. “I want to come about to 225 degrees southwest,” he said flatly.
Lindemann hesitated. “Then we are turning now, sir? You don’t want to rendezvous with Weissenburg?”
“We’ll steer for the Faeroes Gap at once,” said the Admiral. “Our fuel should be more than adequate, even at high speed.”
“I see,” said Lindemann. “Are we prepared to take on the Home Fleet?”
“That is not the question, Lindemann.” The admiral gave him a shrewd smile. “The question is whether they are prepared to take on Bismarck. Now, if you would be so kind…” He gestured toward the ships navigation station.
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