The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  Buoyed by their technical achievement, the various partners of the John Barry project decided to go into the salvage business on a full-time basis, and with that Blue Water Recoveries was born. For me, BWR was an important new client as they would be continuously on the hunt for multiple shipwrecks rather than looking for just one wreck at a time like other groups I had worked with in the past. I also knew the main players involved, and they knew me, as I was part of the team that had filmed the wreck of the John Barry and searched for its rumoured silver treasure during an earlier expedition. Although Mark and Bob were the named directors of BWR, the financial impetus came from a secretive UK-based businessman named Tim Landon. It was Tim who had primarily bankrolled and overseen the John Barry project on behalf of the Oman government, whose permission was required before the salvage could proceed. He was an extremely close confidant and trusted adviser of Oman’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos, owing to his involvement in a bloodless coup that had allowed Qaboos to overthrow his own father in 1970. He was also a natural risk-taker and liked the idea of being involved with a company working at the forefront of an exciting and innovative new industry.

  This visit to the UK happily coincided with the ceremonies and events held annually to mark the loss of Hood. After I’d energized him with my idea to search for Hood’s wreck, Rob White had gone quickly to work and got us invited to both the annual dinner of the official HMS Hood Association and the commemoration service held the following morning in the Church of St John the Baptist in Boldre, near Lymington. The first surprise of the dinner was that Rob and I were at the top table; the second was that I was the main guest of honour, seated directly between the association’s chairman, John R. Williams (JR), and its president, Ted Briggs. I wasn’t expecting such special treatment but was relieved I had prepared well by visiting the National Archives in Kew the day before to consult the Official Boards of Inquiry and other records relating to where Hood was sunk. If I was to get the approval of the Hood Association for the search, especially from Ted Briggs, I needed to be super-confident that I knew where to look.

  Ted’s approval was crucial because he was the last living survivor of the three who miraculously escaped the ship when it sank with 1,415 of their shipmates. While Bill Dundas preferred not to revisit the tragic consequences of 24 May 1941, both Bob Tilburn and Ted joined the HoodAssociation and served as president. Sadly, Bob had died just three months before the dinner and I never got to meet him. Because Ted had served in the navy for thirty-five years and of the three lived the longest, he was the person most commonly associated with Hood. This meant that for every media request, church service, naval ceremony or event of any description connected directly or indirectly with Hood, he was called – and expected – to participate. The demands and pressure of carrying the memory of such a momentous and horrific event was at times a huge burden on Ted, and in the years to come I saw the toll it took on his health and his relationship with his wife Clare. Nevertheless, on the night of the dinner I was yet another person seeking his approval.

  I felt it was fundamentally important that the Hood Association embraced my idea of the search and gave it their formal consent. In my mind it was the association, composed of men who had previously served on Hood and the relatives of the 1,415 who perished within her, who had the overriding moral authority to decide on any proposal connected with the shipwreck. Without their backing, I believed there was no way we could secure the wider level of government and public support I knew we would need to mount such a search, not to mention the large amount of funding that would be required. A lesson I had taken from Derbyshire was how much power the DFA families had in forming opinions and in determining the final course of events. The two searches would be for completely different reasons, but without the DFA the wreck of Derbyshire would never have been found, and I instinctively felt that the Hood Association would hold the same power somewhere down the line.

  At the dinner I saw how Ted was a bit shy and reserved, whereas JR was a far more gregarious character, quick to tell a joke or make some pointed comment, generally at the expense of his ex-shipmates. There was a great camaraderie amongst the men and the evening was full of good-natured banter in all directions. The next morning it was left to JR, a senior figure amongst his shipmates in every way, to give Rob and me the first indication that the association was on our side. Standing in the sunlit churchyard at Boldre after the commemoration service, he announced that he thought our idea was a fitting way to pay tribute to Hood and those who died serving on her. Based on the number of heads nodding in agreement, I knew that other association members were in agreement and that we had a small but extremely significant measure of support for our plan.

  It took a little longer to completely convince Ted Briggs; or more accurately, for Ted to become comfortable with the idea in his own mind. With all due respect to the others who served on Hood, Ted had a unique memory seared into him that made his perspective on the ship different. Whilst the others were able to remember the good times they’d had on board what was generally considered a happy ship, Ted could never forget his final view of Hood’s fractured bow sliding beneath the flame- and oil-covered waves at a sickening angle that told him all was lost, including the men he’d been standing next to just seconds before. His foremost concern, therefore, was a serious one born of his very personal perspective: that the wreck site was a massive war grave to be respected and left undisturbed. My own feeling was exactly the same, and I firmly rejected other people’s ideas to recover artefacts from the wreck, as I knew this would be highly controversial and undermine whatever support we were beginning to build. I coined the phrase ‘look but don’t touch’ for the policy of how we would approach any search, and I know Ted drew great comfort from my commitment to this pledge.

  A month later, a fax arrived on my desk in America from Rob. It contained a letter on official HMS Hood Association letterhead signed by both J. R. Williams and Ted Briggs. Across the board there was approval for our plans to film the wreck for a TV documentary, conduct an investigation of the damaged hull and place a memorial plaque on the wreck on behalf of the association. The key paragraph stated: ‘Having met these two gentlemen, who discussed their plans at length, members of the association wholeheartedly support the expedition to locate and film the wreck of HMS Hood, and are confident that this will be conducted with the utmost sensitivity and respect for the site where she lies as a war grave.’

  Ted later explained his thinking in putting his name to this letter. While discussing his concerns a friend asked him, ‘What’s your objection about the wreck being a war grave? If you went into a graveyard and took a photograph of your mother’s grave, would you regard that as a desecration?’ This simple question got Ted thinking: what is the difference between a war grave on land and one at sea? Are they not fundamentally the same? People routinely visit war cemeteries and battlefields to pay their respects, and this is universally accepted as a good thing. If the technology is now available to find the wreck of Hood, and to use a camera to allow relatives the chance to make a connection — even in a virtual sense – to the last place their loved one was alive, surely that would be a good thing too. Once he had worked these issues through in his own mind, he became our biggest supporter.

  Looking back on the events of May 1941, it seems as though the Hood and the Bismarck were destined to meet in an epic encounter that would determine who would enjoy naval superiority throughout the rest of the war. Like two heavyweight boxers converging towards a title fight, the ships were being matched up beforehand in the minds and imaginations of their officers and crews. Hood had enjoyed the title of the world’s most powerful capital ship for over two decades, but she was at the wrong end of her career to face Bismarck, the newest and most technologically advanced battleship afloat. Hood was still longer and just as fast, but Bismarck was bigger and heavier where it counted, her beamier hull making for an extremely stable gun platform, and her thicker armour (40 per cent of total weight c
ompared to 33.5 per cent for Hood) able to shield her vitals from the most devastating blows. The name of the game in any big gun battle was to hit your opponent first while avoiding being hit in return, and Bismarck was blessed with the crucial advantage of targeting her fire very quickly and accurately.

  The expectation that Bismarck, or her sister ship Tirpitz, was ready to commence operations was anxiously felt at all levels in the Royal Navy, from the chiefs and directors poring over confidential intelligence reports in Admiralty offices in Whitehall down to the ordinary ratings on ships stationed at Scapa Flow, where less informed opinions were openly discussed on the mess decks. The success of the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau months earlier made the prospect of another German commerce raiding operation almost a certainty. Together these two battlecruisers, commanded by Admiral Günther Lütjens, had accounted for twenty-two ships and 122,000 tons of merchant shipping either destroyed or captured during Operation Berlin. Invigorated by his success, Lütjens tried to convince a reluctant Hitler that a repeat performance involving the more powerful Bismarck, which they had just inspected during a four-hour tour on 5 May, would inflict even bigger losses on the supply convoys criss-crossing the North Atlantic. Lütjens’ clear desire was to attack the British ‘wherever they showed themselves’, but Hitler remained unconvinced and non-committal.

  Hitler, a decorated army officer who reportedly had not seen the sea until he was over forty, was famously unsure about how to use the naval power within the Kriegsmarine (the navy of Nazi Germany). His feeble comment to Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, commander of the Seekriegsleitung (SKL), the overall maritime warfare command, when they abandoned plans to invade Britain by sea shortly after the successful blitzkrieg of Europe, summed up this lack of confidence: ‘On land I am a hero, at sea I am a coward.’ Although Lütjens was convinced that no single capital ship could trouble the Bismarck, Hitler was still wary of the numerical superiority of the British fleet. A great deal of Germany’s prestige was invested in the building of the Bismarck and Tirpitz, and his fear of losing either ship appeared to paralyse him into inaction. Unbeknownst to Hitler, however, Lütjens had no such fear and had already issued orders on 22 April for Operation Rhine, the next exercise in commerce raiding. This time the newest German capital ships, Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, would be let loose into the North Atlantic to destroy merchant vessels and cause havoc to the convoy system upon which Britain relied so heavily.

  Whilst the mission of Operation Berlin had been to attack unescorted convoys, the employment of Bismarck upped the stakes for Operation Rhine. Lütjens would now have a free hand to go after all convoys, including those escorted by British warships. The SKL directives still exhibited a high degree of caution about the use of Bismarck, however, warning that she should not be employed ‘to defeat in an all-out engagement enemies of equal strength, but to tie them down in a delaying action, while preserving her own combat capability as much as possible, so as to allow the other ships to get at the merchant vessels in the convoy. The primary mission of this operation also is the destruction of the enemy’s merchant shipping; enemy warships will be engaged only when that objective makes it necessary and it can be done without excessive risk.’

  When the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen departed Gotenhafen in the early hours of 19 May for Operation Rhine, it started the clock on the most momentous and dramatic nine days in the operational lifespan of any warship during World War II. By the time it was over, the two most feared and iconic warships in the world had been destroyed, 3,546 men were dead and the fate of big-gun capital ships had been ruthlessly exposed by a surprising adversary: the torpedo bomber. The breakout was meant to be secret – even Hitler was unaware until 22 May that the ships were at sea – in order to give the raiders the best chance of arriving in the North Atlantic undetected. But that wasn’t to be, and a report by a Swedish ship that Bismarck was on the move was later confirmed when the German battleship was photographed at anchor in a Norwegian fjord. When Hitler was finally informed that Operation Rhine was under way, he wasted no time in asking Grossadmiral Raeder whether it was possible to recall the ships. When Raeder admitted that it wasn’t, Hitler’s reply was eerily prescient: ‘Well perhaps now you have to leave things the way they are, but I have a very bad feeling.’

  Despite Hitler’s overt pessimism, the opening act of this three-part drama started extremely well; almost unbelievably so for Germany. Of the three possible routes into the North Atlantic, Liitjens chose the most northern, with his task force steaming into the Arctic Circle west of Norway, above and around Iceland and thereafter skirting the pack ice of Greenland through the Denmark Strait. Using the Norwegian fjord sighting to their advantage, the British Home Fleet laid on an ambush that relied on the speed of Hood and her consort, the battleship Prince of Wales, to intercept the German squadron before the breakout was complete. Two County-class heavy cruisers, HMS Norfolk and Suffolk, were also on the hunt, using their radars to track Bismarck and relay positions to the British commander, Vice Admiral Sir Lancelot Holland, who was flying his flag in Hood. Holland was intent on cutting off Bismarck’s escape and forcing her into an engagement that – remembering the SKL directive – Liitjens was under orders to avoid. At 5.53 a.m. on Saturday 24 May, Holland caught up with his prey and put Liitjens to the sword.

  Steaming into battle at 29 knots, the Hood and Prince of Wales were the first to fire their 15-inch and 14-inch guns, respectively, on the lead ship of the German pair, assumed to be Bismarck. Holland’s battle plan was to concentrate their big-gun attack on the more dangerous battleship and leave the Prinz Eugen to the trailing Norfolk and Suffolk. At the opening range of 24,230 metres, it would have taken about 47 seconds for the British shells to strike Bismarck, but a misidentification meant that only the Prince of Wales had fired at the correct ship. What Holland didn’t know was that a damaged forward radar set on Bismarck had forced Liitjens the day before to order a ‘number change’, which meant that the Prinz Eugen, and not the Bismarck, was in the lead position to scan for threats ahead.

  Holland’s other problem was his angle of attack. In going for an immediate strike rather than risk allowing the Germans room to slip away, he placed his ships in a distinctly unfavourable position whereby they were unable to fire all their guns in full salvos and also presented a bigger target for the enemy to hit. His only choice was to close the distance to Bismarck as quickly as possible, which he needed to do in any case as the Hood, because of her inadequate horizontal deck armour, was especially vulnerable to plunging fire at long ranges. If he could get close enough to turn on a parallel course with Bismarck, he would be able to fight a more even broadside battle with the full eighteen guns (eight on Hood, ten on Prince of Wales) at his disposal.

  As the fire bellowed out from the British guns, and shells splashed all around his position, Liitjens seemed stunned by his predicament. No doubt he was thinking of Hitler’s reluctance to risk Bismarck and the SKL’s directive not to take on enemies of equal strength. Initially he had thought that the Prince of Wales was the better-equipped battleship King George V, which would have made his situation even worse, but there was no mistaking the Hood: the enemy they feared the most and the ‘terror’ they pictured during war games training, according to Baron von Miillenheim-Rechberg, the eldest surviving officer from Bismarck. No one will ever know whether Liitjens’ despair was because Operation Rhine had been rumbled or because he was facing not one, but two enemies of equal strength. Whatever unpleasant thoughts were circulating in his mind caused him to freeze. Two interminably long minutes passed before it was left to Captain Lindemann to give the order to return fire, whilst muttering: ‘I will not let my ship be shot out from under my ass.’ Fortunately, for Liitjens’ sake and the sake of his increasingly agitated crew waiting for this order, all the British shells missed. Holland wasn’t so lucky.

  Holland’s oblique angle of attack meant that only the forward ten guns could be used (four on Hood, six on the Prince of
Wales), which was further reduced to nine when one of the Prince of Wales’ guns malfunctioned after the first salvo. The Prince of Wales, having been recently completed, was still suffering teething problems and had technicians on board from Vickers Armstrong during the action to help the inexperienced crew. Yet another disadvantage for Holland was that he was steaming into the weather, with sea spray obscuring Hood’s main rangefinders, while the Germans had the wind at their backs. The net effect of all this was that he was essentially fighting partially sighted and with one hand behind his back. Having realized his initial mistake in targeting the Prinz Eugen, he did give the order to switch fire over to Bismarck, but the crucial advantage of having fired first combined with Liitjens’ inaction was squandered. In the end, none of Hood’s six salvos found their targets, though the Prince of Wales scored several hits on Bismarck, including one on her port bow that caused a troublesome fuel leak. In comparison, the German gunnery, once they did start firing, were deadly accurate.