Unlike Holland, Liitjens correctly concentrated all his gunfire on the lead British ship. Despite their delay in entering the fight, the German gunners in both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen found the range to Hood almost immediately. Prinz Eugen scored first with an 8-inch shell from her second salvo that struck Hood’s shelter deck near the mainmast, causing a fire that set off explosions of ammunition in nearby storage lockers. As chaos gripped Hood’s crew, who were struggling to douse the fire whilst crewmates lay dying and ammunition exploded around them, Bismarck’s first gunnery officer Adalbert Schneider saw that his aim was on target and ordered ‘full salvos good rapid’.
By 6 a.m., the range between the ships was down to about 14,900 metres and Hood was making one last twenty-degree turn to port to bring her course near parallel to Bismarck’s and allow her gunners to fire full broadsides. She was no more than half a minute away from correcting her tactically unfavourable position and being able to fight on an even basis when a shell from Bismarck’s fifth salvo slammed into her starboard side, triggering a catastrophic explosion deep within her aft magazines. The entire structure of the ship shuddered violently and she slowed as if someone had slammed on the brakes. A second or two passed before a fierce pillar of flame shot from the ship, rising some 600 feet into the air. Inside the magazines, 112 tons of cordite ignited instantly, causing enormous explosive pressures that ripped the hull apart and fed the ‘Vast blowlamp’ seen by those on the other ships watching in stunned silence. At the seat of the explosion decks lifted and debris as large as entire 15-inch gun turrets was flung high into the air before raining down in gigantic splashes.
Once stopped, Hood began a sickening roll to port from which recovery was impossible. Any of her men who were not killed outright knew instinctively that the ship they considered home was finished. No order to abandon ship was given, but none was needed. On the compass platform where Ted Briggs was on duty as a signalman, there was no panic or raised voices as the men made their way to the exits. As for Holland, he was last seen slumped defeated and dejected in his chair, fully aware of the horrific outcome of his decisions and seemingly resigned to going down with the ship. Remarkably, amidst all the carnage, there was a final act of gentlemanly conduct, as Commander John Warrand, the squadron navigating officer, politely gestured for Ted to pass ahead of him as they made their escape from the rapidly sinking vessel.
And with that the Mighty Hood was gone. Within scarcely a minute, 46,680 tons of machinery and steel disappeared from the surface of the Denmark Strait, dragging 1,415 men to the cold black depths below. The Prince of Wales, stationed four cables behind, was forced to alter course to avoid the remains of the ship, which included the three survivors, Briggs, Dundas and Tilburn, who apparently owed their good fortune to a large bubble of air escaping from the wreckage, propelling them back to the surface. Momentarily safe from the certain death inflicted on their shipmates, the three men, covered with oil, were able to find a three-foot-square Carley raft, which supported them during the desperately long two and a half hours they floated on the life-sucking seas until the destroyer HMS Electra arrived and was able to pluck their frigid bodies out of the water.
Having destroyed the Hood, Bismarck shifted her main and secondary armament fire to the Prince of Wales, and immediately scored several hits, including a 15-inch shell on the lightly armoured compass platform that killed nearly all personnel there except the commanding officer, Captain J. C. Leach. Without Hood, Leach was in a single-handed fight against two superior German ships that he knew he couldn’t win. Assessing the desperate situation, he decided to break off the action and turn away.
Bismarck’s ruthless destruction of Hood in an artillery fight that lasted just five minutes sent shockwaves throughout Great Britain and beyond. The 1,415 men killed represented the single largest loss of life in Royal Navy history and came during a particularly dark period of World War II, which counted May 1941 as the worst month ever for naval casualties, with 3,780 officers and ratings killed. The news that Hood was sunk genuinely caused the public to fear the war could be lost. Winston Churchill, now prime minister, who had been closely monitoring the battle with telephone updates from the duty captain in the Admiralty, was grief-stricken and deeply depressed by such a significant loss to the country. His mood wasn’t helped when he was told that the Prince of Wales had broken off from the action and that contact with Bismarck had been lost. This was the nightmare scenario: the navy’s most powerful warship seemingly easily destroyed in the same way as the Jutland battleships; two dangerous enemy raiders loose in the Atlantic, free to wreak havoc on British convoys; and the Admiralty, in Churchill’s opinion, being overly timid in their actions to avenge the loss of Hood. If the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were allowed to make it to a German or French port to be received as conquering heroes, the propaganda value to Hitler would be incalculable.
Despite Churchill’s misgivings, the navy weren’t about to let Bismarck escape their clutches. By the time the prime minister’s message to ‘Sink the Bismarck’ was relayed to Admiral Sir John Tovey at 11.37 a.m. on 27 May, the British Home Force had already destroyed the German battleship and her remains had come to rest at the base of an extinct undersea volcano nearly 5,000 metres below the surface. Bismarck and her men had left their mark on naval history by defeating the mighty Hood, but she threatened no other ships during her last three days afloat, and in the end her dramatic victory led to her own cataclysmic destruction, which in turn caused Hitler to withdraw from committing surface ships of the Kriegsmarine to raiding actions in the Atlantic for the remainder of the war.
The pursuit and sinking of Bismarck was an epic operation that involved some twenty Royal Navy warships and waves of land- and carrier-based aircraft. Tovey, the Home Force fleet commander, who marshalled these overwhelming forces, saw to the killing of Bismarck once the wounded ship was finally caught, but it was the actions of two small aircraft and the fuel leak caused by the Prince of Wales that proved to be most significant.
Assessing the damage to his own ship, which included its bow being flooded with 2,000 tons of seawater, and 1,000 tons of fuel oil being put out of use, Lütjens knew that Operation Rhine was over before it had truly started. His new priority was to make it to the port of Saint-Nazaire in France for repairs, but first he would have to lose the British ships shadowing his every move. That was proving especially difficult because of the determination of the radar operators on Suffolk not to lose contact, and because wherever Bismarck turned, a long slick was trailing in her wake from the oil leaking out of her hull. Eventually Liitjens was able to lose his tail and make a beeline for Saint-Nazaire, leaving Churchill to fume once more at the apparent incompetence of the navy.
Tovey was completely flummoxed by Bismarck’s disappearing act, but he caught a huge break when on the morning of 26 May a Catalina reconnaissance plane piloted by a US Navy observer spotted the ship heading south-east towards the coast of France. This crucial sighting allowed Tovey to concentrate his forces onto Bismarck’s position, which set the stage for a second aircraft to write its page into history. This time it was a Swordfish torpedo bomber, launched from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which scored a one-in-a-million strike on the one vulnerable part of Bismarck’s 251-metre-long hull. Flying at nearly wave-top height to avoid the Germans’ intensive anti-aircraft fire, the Scots pilot John Moffat dropped his single torpedo into a wave trough and watched it run true towards Bismarck’s port side. Forced to turn away before it struck, he was unaware that the profound damage he had caused had probably changed the course of history.
Moffat’s torpedo exploded against Bismarck’s unarmoured stern, causing severe structural damage that left the ship’s twin rudders permanently jammed in a twelve-degree turn to port. Despite the herculean efforts of the crew, the damage couldn’t be repaired nor the steering controlled. Bismarck was literally left turning in circles. By reducing speed to less than seven knots, some manoeuvrability was regained, but the course ine
xorably reverted to the north-west, away from the safety of France and directly towards the pursuing British attackers. In the evening of 26 May, Liitjens sent a series of radio messages that summed up the ship’s dire predicament and his own resignation to their fate:
20.54 Attack by carrier aircraft.
21.05 Have torpedo hit aft.
21.15 Ship no longer steerable.
21.40 Ship unable to manoeuvre. We will fight to the last round. Long live the Führer.
Throughout the early hours of 27 May, the Kriegsmarine sent Lütjens promising messages about various aircraft and ships that were being dispatched to assist him. Although these messages bolstered crew morale, in reality Bismarck was too far away for any friendly forces to reach her in time. She was heading into battle, and certain defeat, with nothing more than the good wishes of Adolf Hitler to lift Lütjens and the crew:
01.53 All Germany is with you. What can be done, will be done. Your performance of duty will strengthen our people in the struggle for its destiny.
03.51 The Führer has bestowed Knight’s Cross on you [first gunnery officer Adalbert Schneider] for sinking the battle cruiser Hood. Hearty congratulations.
On the morning of 27 May, Bismarck’s meandering course brought her right into the path of the British ships that had been chasing her relentlessly for the past two days. In her crippled state, she was effectively a sitting duck for the British guns that opened fire at 8.47 a.m. Rodney’s forward 16-inch guns rang out first, followed by the 14-inch guns on the King George V a minute later. Tovey, who was flying his flag on the King George V, was finally face to face with Lütjens and firmly pressed his advantage by closing the range in order to achieve maximum hits and damage. The heavy cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire, each with 8-inch guns, joined the attack, ensuring that every side of Bismarck was being hit.
After half an hour of action, Tovey observed that ‘Bismarck was on fire in several places and virtually out of control. Only one of her turrets remained in action and the fire of this and of her secondary armament was wild and erratic. But she was still steaming.’ Although the four British ships fired a total of 2,876 shells, with an estimated 300 to 400 hits, Bismarck’s flag was still flying and she stubbornly refused to sink, much to Tovey’s annoyance. Seeing the futility, and brutality, in continuing to shell the defeated and defenceless ship, the British resorted to torpedoes to finish her off.
On board Bismarck, the decision to scuttle the vessel had already been taken to prevent it from falling into British hands, and the few men who were still alive were preparing to abandon ship. Shortly after the last torpedo exploded against Bismarck’s port side at 10.36 a.m., she heeled over to port and started to sink by the stern. By 10.40, the ‘Invincible’ Bismarck, like Hood, was gone.
Of Bismarcks 2,246 men, just 115 were rescued from the sea, making the loss of personnel an even greater blow to the Kriegsmarine than that suffered by the Royal Navy. Whether many more Germans could have been rescued before the British ships left the scene for fear of being attacked by U-boats was a question that didn’t sit well with some of those who survived. Tragically, some several hundred men were left to perish in the unforgiving storm-tossed sea. The loss of Hood was avenged, and despite the great price paid by the navy and by all those who gave their lives, Hood’s actions in defeat, together with those of the Prince of Wales, had stopped Operation Rhine in its tracks and led to the removal of Germany’s most powerful naval asset.
On a chilly but bright February morning in 2001, I had a remarkable meeting at Channel 4’s offices on Horseferry Road in London that instantly made the previous six years of mostly frustrating inaction regarding the Hood search a thing of the past. Sitting across from me was Tim Gardam, at the time C4’s director of programming, and one of the few television executives in the UK with the power to green-light programmes on his say-so alone. The meeting was only minutes old when Tim began laying out what he called his ‘bona fides’ for why he was prepared to back a search for Hood. Remarkably, his family had had relatives on board both HMS Rodney and the Bismarck, so he intuitively understood both sides of the story and the sensitivity the project required. Having tried, and failed, to obtain funding for a search from numerous other sponsors over the years, I had come prepared to sell Tim on my ability as a shipwreck hunter, but was amazed to find that he was the one selling me. Even when I presented various budget options, ranging from £1 million to £1.5 million, figures that normally caused people to flinch, Tim was undeterred in his commitment and ambition to make the search a television event like nothing else seen in the UK since the live broadcast of raising the Mary Rose in 1982.
Four frenetic months after the C4 meeting, I was on a ship leaving Cork for the outer Bay of Biscay. In the intervening time I’d had to hire a survey ship, deep-water search and ROV contractors and navigation equipment, arrange for government permissions, commission memorial plaques and take care of an impossibly long list of other items. Normally twice as much time would be needed to get all this done, but our schedule was being driven by the tempestuous North Atlantic weather, which would only allow search and ROV operations during a short summer window, with July being the best month statistically. The other important driver was that 2001 was an important anniversary – the sixtieth – of the battle between Hood and Bismarck, and the producers at C4 were keen to take advantage of the increased public interest, which they knew would result in a much bigger television audience – but only if we were successful in finding and filming the shipwreck.
The other challenge the producers had set for me was that in addition to finding the Hood, they wanted me to find the Bismarck as well. They also wanted to broadcast live underwater video from the wreck sites for both television and the internet. At the time, this was a radical idea that had never been attempted before, relying on a novel satellite communication system called SeaCast and a huge dose of luck. The idea, in theory, was simple enough: to find and film both the Hood and the Bismarck in a single thirty-five-day expedition so that their respective stories could be independently told in a series of high-quality documentaries; and to broadcast special reports live from the expedition ship for the main evening news programme anchored by Jon Snow. In practice, however, what we were trying to pull off was devilishly complex.
Normally I would never guarantee that a wreck could be found, but that was exactly what I did with Bismarck. I told Tim Gardam that while there was a small chance we wouldn’t find the Hood, there was no such risk with the Bismarck, for the simple reason that the wreck had already been located years before by Bob Ballard of Titanic fame. We’d still have to conduct a search, because Ballard and his investors had decided to keep the precise coordinates secret, but if I based my plans on the information that Ballard had used – basically the logs and radio messages of the British ships that had witnessed the Bismarck go down – I was confident that I would find the wreck. Because the Ocean Explorer 6000 search system I planned on using was many times more efficient than the equipment Ballard had had to work with, I knew it was only a matter of time.
My guarantee to Tim was absolutely crucial to C4’s decision to fund the search. In return for their million-pound-plus investment, they expected several hours of TV programming about the two famous shipwrecks, so as a minimum I had to guarantee that our expedition would deliver high-quality underwater footage of at least one of the wrecks, and ideally both. In the ultra-competitive world of TV broadcasting, a factual documentary covering a shipwreck search that didn’t show any footage of the shipwrecks would be a sure ratings disaster. So Bismarck was my banker, but I was under no illusion that Hood was the real target, and thus the true measure of success would be whether I could find her or not.
There were thirty-five people on board our expedition vessel, the MV Northern Horizon, when it left Cork, but I was the one who carried the full weight of people’s expectations and hopes. Everyone from Ted Briggs to Tim Gardam to all the people and organizations who had lent their support to my a
mbitious vision for the project were counting on me to deliver. My natural inclination was to turn that pressure into excitement, and what could be more exciting than going out to uncover history hidden away in the deepest depths of the ocean?
An essential part of our plan was to involve Ted Briggs in the expedition as much as possible. Ted had recently turned seventy-eight, and although his health was generally good, he did suffer from high blood pressure and could become anxious when recalling his experience of Hood blowing up, leaving him clinging for his life to a float. Although he had continued serving on ships during his thirty-five-year career in the navy, including a stint on HMS Ceylon during the Korean War, I personally suspected that he was still suffering from a form of posttraumatic stress disorder. He would sometimes talk about nightmares and flashbacks, especially of Hood’s upended bow sliding beneath the fiery sea, just one of several horrific images seared into his mind. While it was painful for him to relive these memories, I think he did it out of a sense of duty to his shipmates and the friends he had lost. More than anyone, Ted wanted to make sure their sacrifice was not forgotten, and for that reason he agreed to visit us in Cork to see the search equipment we’d be using and to wish us luck.
Having moved from America to England at the end of 1995 to permanently join Blue Water Recoveries as their director of research and survey, I had grown closer to Ted and was able to see him much more often. By now he trusted me to handle Hood’s legacy with care, but it was my wife Sarah who really gave him confidence that the wreck could be found. At a pub lunch months before the mobilization in Cork, perhaps sensing Ted’s uncertainty about the search plans, she spoke directly to him in a way that reassured him far better than I ever could: ‘David will find your ship, Ted; if anyone can find the Hood, it is David.’
The Shipwreck Hunter Page 15