by John Nichol
The massive flood wave as the Tirpitz turned turtle had helped to wash Johannes Ullrich and other lucky survivors to the shore, but many of the men clinging to the hull and floundering in the icy water of the fjord drowned or died of exposure. The ship was still ablaze, and burning oil spreading across the surface of the water was an added hazard for the terrified seamen swimming for their lives. A woman living on the shores of the fjord, Thordis Ryeng, had hidden in a barn with her children during the raid, watching the walls shaking ‘like a ship on the water in a stormy sea’ as the huge bombs detonated. When the bombing stopped they went outside and heard ‘many screams and shouts’ from German crewmen ‘in the most terrible pain. Two words were screamed over and over again “Mutter” [mother] and “Hilfe” [help]. The ship was covered by smoke and the water seemed to be burning, and in this inferno, men were swimming.’52
* * *
A slick of oil was spreading across the surface of the water. Survivors, barely recognisable as human beneath the thick black oil, struggled through it, but many others were floating face down, drowning or already dead. Klaus Rohwedder had climbed onto the hull of the ship as it rolled over and then jumped into the oil-covered water. He does not know how long he was swimming through it. ‘I just thought, now I shan’t see father and mother again. But you’re so scared, you can’t really think.’ He managed to cling to a piece of floating debris until he reached the shore of Haakøy Island, then sheltered in a barn with other shivering survivors until rescued by German sailors in a Norwegian fishing cutter.53
Inside the upturned hull, the emergency lighting came on automatically, but lasted only four hours, after which the survivors were plunged into darkness, straining their ears for any sound that might indicate help was at hand. Alfred Zuba and the others trapped inside the hull tried to remain calm: ‘None of us wants to show the others what he fears.’ As the hours passed, they found some stale bread, cigarettes, a bottle of cognac and a tin of coffee beans. One man began to panic and was hurriedly silenced. Another said it was his birthday, and many of them, says Zuba, ‘must have thought, “Let us hope your birthday is not your death day as well!”’ Another man declared that if he got out alive, he would get married at once. The survivors began talking about their plans for the future, the sound of their voices perhaps helping to mask the hiss of rising water pouring into their refuge. The radio operator kept asking, ‘Is the water rising? Shall we get out of here?’ He too was told to be silent. They consoled themselves that the water in the fjord was only 17 metres deep, so a part of the ship must still be above the surface.
Some of the crew of the Tirpitz
Suddenly they heard a knocking sound from somewhere: ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ They picked up a fire extinguisher and banged back. They shouted and were answered by another group of survivors trapped in one of the switch rooms, but after a while they became hoarse and the answering voices grew weaker and fell silent. After that, Zuba and his comrades just tapped out SOS: three short taps, three long, three short.
One of them said he could hear the hissing sound of cutting gear, but as the rest strained their ears, all they could hear was the rush of water. Another then used the fire extinguisher to smash through the metal wall of their compartment, battering it until it gave way, but beyond that was only the armoured steel of the ship’s hull. Soon afterwards, they heard the hissing sound again, stopping and starting and accompanied by banging and crackling sounds. They resumed their banging with the fire extinguisher, spurred on as the water continued to rise, spilling through the hatch. Now they began shouting, ‘Hurry up! The water is getting higher. We need help!’
The hissing sound was louder now and the steel wall faintly warm to the touch. A red dot appeared on the wall and smoke and sparks poured into the compartment. ‘For us, these red sparks are the light of life.’ Smoke and fumes filled the air. Eyes streaming, gasping for breath, they clamped wet clothing against their faces, watching the red line eating through the steel. It cut a small opening, but then it stopped. They heard voices receding and then deathly silence. The opening was too small for anyone to squeeze through. They shouted and screamed, pounding on the steel wall, but only echoes answered as the water continued to rise.
At last they heard the sound of men returning and the sparks began again. They watched as the red line advanced and eventually a piece of metal clattered to the floor and faces appeared at the hole. It was so cramped that some of them could only get through with the rescuers pulling them while their comrades pushed from behind. The passage beyond was only 40 centimetres wide, then they climbed a ladder and pushed their way through another hole, this time cut through the actual hull of the ship. As Zuba squeezed through it, he could see the sky above him: ‘The stars are sparkling. I will never forget that moment.’54
Soon after the sinking, rescue parties, including some of the survivors from the wreck, had climbed onto the outside of the hull and begun painting marks where they heard the sound of people knocking from inside. However, their welding equipment couldn’t cut through the 13-inch steel armour plating and they had had to wait for more powerful oxyacetylene torches to be brought. All the time the tide was coming in and the water was rising inside the ship, filling the compartments. They heard the faint sound of some of their comrades singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ but then the voices fell silent one by one. They managed to speak to one man who told them there were another twenty in the compartment with him and begged the rescuers to help them escape the rising waters, but when the tide reached its highest point, his voice fell silent and he and his comrades all drowned. Zuba asked about the fate of a friend of his who, he was told, was still alive, but trapped with fifty others deeper inside the ship. The next day he was told that all of them had suffocated before they could be rescued.
Klaus Rohwedder was among 200 men who had reached the shore of Haakøy Island unaided or been rescued from the freezing water when the Tirpitz went down, and, like Zuba, another eighty-four men trapped in air pockets inside the ship were brought out alive over the following two days as rescuers cut more holes in the exposed hull. Attempts at further rescues were then abandoned, although local people claimed to have heard tapping sounds from the hull for another week before the battleship at last fell silent. At least 971 crewmen lost their lives.
The fury of German commanders at the failure to defend the jewel of their navy, a ship launched four years earlier in the presence of the Führer himself, saw the Luftwaffe commander at Bardufoss, Major Heinrich Ehrler, court-martialled and jailed for three years with hard labour, after an inquiry revealed a tangled tale of negligence and incompetence among the air defences. Ten officers from the anti-aircraft units were also imprisoned. Although radar stations had picked up the first traces of the raiders at 8.00 that morning, confusing reports suggesting that British aircraft had been spotted making for Russia well to the south of Tromsø, and of others well to the north, meant that the alarm was not raised at Bardufoss until 8.18, nine minutes after Tirpitz’s own radar had detected the Lancasters and its commander had issued a request for fighter cover.
Flying in their familiar ‘gaggle’ formation, the Lancasters had passed due east of Bardufoss at 8.24, but it was not until 8.30 that the fighters, already scrambled in response to the alarm raised at 8.18, began to move off. They had to taxi the length of the airfield before they could take off, and were then held up even further as the runway controller made them wait to allow an incoming transport plane to land. ‘We had to wait for a Ju 52 to land down the hill,’ one of the fighter pilots, Kurt Schultze, complained, ‘so there was another five minutes lost.’55
It was later claimed that the fighter force had not even been told where the Tirpitz was anchored, other than that it was somewhere in the Tromsø area, and, according to one of the Tirpitz’s officers, at least some of the fighters had flown to its old anchorage in Kaa Fjord at Alta. It has also been suggested that a German radar officer with secret pro-British sympathies may have delayed
raising the alarm to Bardufoss, but in truth, the level of miscommunication, misinformation and general incompetence among the defenders makes it unnecessary to add treachery to the mix. Whatever the reason for the delays, when the last Tallboy was being dropped, the fighter squadron was still three minutes’ flying time away, and by the time they at last arrived, the Lancasters were speeding for home at low level, the skies were empty and the pride of the German Navy was already at the bottom of the fjord.
A Norwegian boy was arrested for clapping his hands at the news of the Tirpitz’s sinking and, if more discreetly, most Norwegians were delighted at the news – ‘It was the happiest day in Tromsø,’ one said.56
After the war, the Tirpitz was broken up for scrap where she lay – a perilous operation because the ship was still full of oil and unexploded ordnance – but much of the more accessible cabling and pipework had already been harvested by enterprising Norwegians.
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German fighter pilot Kurt Schultze and 617 Squadron pilot Tony Iveson met many years after the war, and once they had overcome what Schultze described with a smile as Tony’s initial reluctance to meet ‘a damn German pilot’, they became good friends. ‘We, as human beings, finally came through,’ Schultze said, ‘seventy years after the politicians did with us whatever they wanted and we just said, “Yes, sir.”’
Tirpitz anti-aircraft gunner Klaus Rohwedder feels ‘deep respect for the crews of those planes, because flying into a wall of fire and then getting your bomb on to the target – it takes something to do that.’ But although he too gives great credit to 617 Squadron for dropping those massive bombs from 15,000 feet with such phenomenal accuracy, Kurt Schultze cannot forget that almost 1,000 Germans died in that attack. ‘It gets to me now,’ he said, wiping away a tear. ‘I was pretty tough once, but now it’s all gone.’57
By contrast with that horrific death toll on the Tirpitz, 617 suffered no losses, and once clear of the Norwegian coast and the threat of German fighters, the long flight home was ‘pretty damn boring’, as one of Jack Sayers’ crewmen remarked, ‘life became pure tedium.’ There was little chat or exultation among the aircrews on the flight back to Britain. ‘Coming back from a trip there was always a great feeling of it’s over! But this time it was all pretty quiet on the way back,’ Tony Iveson said. ‘We were all tired, we had been airborne for twelve and a half hours, and after the excitement and tension leading up to the actual attack there was a natural quietness on the way back, a release from all the tension; we’d got away with it again! I think my bomb-aimer even went to sleep down at the front!’
However, Sayers’ crew soon found a way to enliven the journey:
The purists would have been horrified if they could have seen inside our aircraft. Vic Johnson, the engineer, was at the controls and Ernie Weaver and Jack Sayers, the bomb-aimer and pilot, were in the bombing hatch with the cover removed, popping away with Smith and Wesson six-shooters at startled petrels and albatrosses. The birds were fairly safe from these inexpert marksmen, but the North Atlantic was subjected to a terrible pounding!58
The 617 Squadron crews landed back at Lossiemouth or one of the neighbouring bases between 2.45 and 5.00 that afternoon, and by six o’clock they were in the Lossiemouth Mess. Although they were all dog-tired, they decided to have ‘a bit of a party’ but, knowing that they still had to fly back to Woodhall and ‘couldn’t get too sloshed’, they contented themselves with just a few celebration beers.
At eight that evening they received the news from the recce Mosquito that the Tirpitz was upside down in Tromsø Fjord. ‘There was a cheer,’ Sydney Grimes recalls, ‘but the biggest emotion was a great sense of relief we wouldn’t have to go back again! Our luck at not being attacked by fighters surely couldn’t last!’ ‘Of course the party really got going then,’ another aircrewman remembered, ‘but after a short time I felt so tired that I went off to bed and slept for ten or twelve hours solid’.59
They flew back to Woodhall Spa the following day. ‘As soon as we stepped out of the Lanc next evening at Woodhall Spa, we were besieged by photographers,’ Arthur Ward, Willie Tait’s wireless operator, remembers. ‘Cameras clicked left, right and centre (incidentally none of those photos came out, it was too dark). When we reached the control tower, the funniest happening of all, the Station Commander had roped in the Staffordshires’ Regimental Band and they were all formed up, blowing their heads off when we drew up in Willie’s car.’60
The serious partying then began, and it also became a send-off for Keith ‘Aspro’ Astbury, though he first had to sit still for a roasting from the Station Commander, Group Captain Monty Philpott, after he discovered that Aspro had again gone AWOL to join the attack on the Tirpitz. With that formality out of the way, the aircrews sent the ever-popular Aspro on his way on a tide of beer and bonhomie. For the next few months aircrews could always get a rise out of Philpott by claiming to have spotted Aspro in some far-flung corner of the base or the Petwood Hotel.
John Bell had left the squadron before the Tirpitz op, but he’d returned for a visit just after the final raid that sank the battleship:
I really wanted to get back and see the chaps. I suppose I was missing it all really. They were all in the Petwood and it was great to catch up with them. They were on a real high and I was really sorry I’d missed it. I suppose I had a loss of purpose; I missed the squadron, the camaraderie, the action, the buzz, just being involved with the group. I was no longer part of the battle, but life had to go on.
Bruce Buckham’s camera plane had had enough fuel left after filming the sinking of the Tirpitz to make a direct flight back to his base at Waddington, where he arrived after another fourteen-hour flight. His debrief was conducted by 5 Group commander, Air Vice Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, in person. Undeterred by Cochrane’s seniority, Buckham’s opening statement was the informal but accurate comment, ‘Well, we won’t have to go back after this one; Tirpitz is finished.’61
As soon as he received the news, Winston Churchill wrote to Stalin, ‘RAF bombers have sunk the Tirpitz. Let us rejoice together.’ At first, the reaction of some of the 617 Squadron crews to the news that the Tirpitz had finally been sunk was rather more matter-of-fact. ‘We were pleased, of course,’ flight engineer Frank Tilley said, ‘it meant we wouldn’t have to go back again,’ but he remembers no big celebration beyond the usual post-op beers. Tony Iveson thought it ‘a special target and we were congratulated by everyone, the King and Eisenhower and Harris. We felt we had really achieved something, done something that many others had tried to do over about three years – we finished Tirpitz off. It was another reason to be proud.’
Like his predecessor, Guy Gibson, after the Dams raid, 617’s commander, Willie Tait, was summoned to London for a press conference and an interview with the BBC, as the Dambusters’ latest triumph made fresh headlines worldwide. Bruce Buckham was also interviewed. That night, as every night, his wife Gwen, back in Sydney, was listening to the BBC World Service. The headline report was of the sinking of the Tirpitz and fears that some aircraft were missing. ‘I didn’t know if Bruce was on that mission or not,’ Gwen Buckham later said. ‘We never knew.’ Then, at the end of the bulletin, she heard her husband’s voice as he was interviewed about the sinking. ‘That was the only time I knew that he was still alive,’ she said. ‘It was the first time I had heard his voice in almost two years.’62
The rest of Tait’s crew decided to escort him to London, and after a celebration dinner they left Willie at the Savoy with his mother and fiancée and, ‘gatecrashed a few nightclubs … After an argument at the door we were made guests of [bandleader] Harry Roy at the Milroy Club. We got awfully tight and sang our squadron song with the band.’ They went to bed at 4.30 a.m. but had to be up again two hours later to drive back to Woodhall Spa – ‘two hours’ sleep after a night like we’d had!’ as one of Tait’s crew complained63 – to be congratulated by the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair. Only when both 617 and 9 squadrons were paraded for
the ceremonial visit did Frank Tilley realise that ‘we’d done something newsworthy, perhaps something remarkable. Here was a VIP congratulating us on our job. It was a bit strange really; we hadn’t really thought about “pride” before then.’
‘There was plenty of congratulations and backslapping,’ Sydney Grimes says, ‘but the best thing was that after his speech, Sir Archibald Sinclair gave us forty-eight hours’ leave, so I managed to get home for Iris’s twenty-first birthday.’ Frank Tilley and his navigator Basil Fish spent their leave in London. They went to see the famous wartime comedian Tommy Trinder at the Palladium and when Trinder cracked a joke about the sinking of the Tirpitz, ‘we just sat still,’ the modest Tilley says. ‘We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. But when we told the story back on the squadron, Willie Tait’s rear gunner said, “You bloody fools, you should have told the management and they would have had you up on stage!” but we didn’t want anything like that!’64
Back at Woodhall Spa, there were more celebrations on 23 November as Bill Carey, who had crash-landed in Swedish Lappland after the second Tirpitz raid, and had at first been feared dead, returned to the base.
Bruce Buckham was among many aircrew decorated after the raid. He was awarded the DSO and his five crew received the DFC. Bobby Knights won a DSO, Pilot Officer Norman Evans a DFC, and Willie Tait – despite his later, characteristically self-deprecating view that the sinking of the Tirpitz had ‘not contributed much to the Allied victory’65 – was recommended for a Victoria Cross. In the end he was not given a VC – the top brass may have felt that after VCs for his predecessors, Guy Gibson and Leonard Cheshire, 617 Squadron had already had its fair share – but he was awarded a third Bar to his DSO; he also had a DFC and Bar.