Hood fired first from its two forward turrets but stupidly it was aiming at the Bismarck’s escort ship. The Prince of Wales got the right target but missed. The German escort ship fired back, hitting the Hood but not badly. Then the British fired again, and again and again. A good rate of fire, but lousy accuracy. All of the shots missed.
And then it was the Bismarck’s turn. Its first salvo also missed, and it must have seemed at this point that the outcome would be decided on which ships were the toughest and which navy had the most accurate guns. One thing was for sure: this was to be a long day.
But it wasn’t. On just its fifth salvo the Bismarck hit the Hood, which blew up, split in two and within three minutes had sunk. All but three of its 1,419 crew were killed.
Then the Bismarck turned its fearsome armoury on the Prince of Wales, which was hit and damaged. It turned away from the fight.
For the first time a battleship had proved its worth in a battle. But in doing so it had also exposed its biggest weakness… It could never, in a thousand years, be allowed to get away with it.
Back at home Churchill knew what effect the destruction of the Hood would have on morale. Yes, the loss of life had been horrific, but the loss of the ship was somehow worse. The Hood had been a battlecruiser rather than a battleship, but it was the pride of the fleet nevertheless because it was still a dreadnought. Even the Germans on board Bismarck had been scared of it.
So the Royal Navy was ordered to find the Bismarck and extract some payback. The damaged Prince of Wales tracked the mighty German while the most extraordinary hunting party was assembled. The battlecruiser Renown, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the cruiser Sheffield were dispatched from Gibraltar. The battleship Ramillies was released from convoy-escort duties and the Rodney, with its forward-facing guns, was sent from its station just off Ireland.
Then you had the original search party, which was also ordered to seek and destroy. The battleship King George V, the fleet carrier Victorious and the battlecruiser Repulse.
All that… to get one ship.
The first attack from a torpedo-carrying Sword-fish biplane failed to dent the enormous battleship and the second was even more useless, since it was launched in error against the British ship Sheffield. But the third struck home and the Bismarck’s rudder was damaged.
Helplessly steaming in circles, the poor old thing could only wait for the pack to descend, and descend they did, like a pack of wolves.
Early on the morning of 27 May the King George V and the Rodney opened fire, and in 90 minutes turned the enemy into an inferno. But still she wouldn’t sink. So torpedoes were launched from the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire, which had been called in as well the previous day, to finish her off. The pride of the German Navy sank at 10.36 a.m. just off Ireland.
She was killed but I don’t think this could be called a defeat. I mean, she had killed first, taking out one of the most-loved ships in the Royal Navy, and then she had tied up a simply enormous amount of the British fleet for days.
When it came to wasting the enemy’s time though, Bismarck’s sister ship, the Tirpitz, was even more successful.
Fourteen times the Royal Air Force launched massive bombing raids to destroy her while she was still being built. But none was successful and on 25 February 1941 she was commissioned into service.
Just three months later the Bismarck was sunk and the Germans had to think hard about the role of their new big boy. They decided when she became operational in January 1942 that they really couldn’t afford to lose her. So she was sent to Norway, where she spent most of the war hiding in a fjord.
Sounds pathetic, but there was method in their madness. They knew the British and the Russians couldn’t afford to just ignore the hulking presence. They knew the Allies would stop at nothing to get her, and that this would tie up a simply vast amount of resources. Resources that otherwise might be used in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.
This was the joy of a battleship. It was more of a prize than Hitler himself.
The plan worked like a dream. Just two weeks after she first arrived in Norway, seven Stirlings and nine Halifaxes were sent in on bombing raids. Poor weather caused the attack to be aborted. The weather also caused another, much larger raid to be halted two months later. But in April the skies were clear enough for 30 Halifaxes and 11 Lancasters to get through. The ship escaped unharmed. And it wasn’t scratched the next night either when 32 British planes attacked.
The attacks then stopped so the Tirpitz nosed out of the fjord and went in search of convoys. Almost immediately a Russian submarine pounced and slammed a torpedo into her side with such force that the crew on board said they never felt a thing. Happily, she failed to find any merchant ships to destroy but this foray did at least remind the British she was still around.
In October we were back with a plan to use human torpedoes. But this went awry in the North Sea so we tried again with midget submarines, using six big subs to tow them over there. They did manage to lay mines under her keel and two went off with devastating force. A normal ship would have succumbed to the blasts but Tirpitz was not normal. Yes, her hull was damaged and, yes, there was severe damage to her rudders and turbines. But she remained afloat.
While she was being repaired the Russians mounted an air raid, which was unsuccessful, and then it was our turn to get serious. On 3 April 1944 41 Barracudas swooped out of the sky and this time, finally, an air raid worked. Fifteen bombs hit home. Incredibly, though, Tirpitz survived this and the next three air raids and just three months later put to sea.
For two months we threw just about everything at the damn thing until eventually, in October, a Lancaster found the bow with a bomb and Tirpitz was brought to her knees. With her top speed down to just ten knots she headed for the protection of Norway where, on 12 November 1944, 31 Lancasters using Tallboy bombs blew her to pieces.
She listed to port and rolled over so quickly that nearly 1,000 men were drowned.
And then just three years after the war finished she was bought by a salvage company for a mere 100,000 Norwegian Kroner and broken up for scrap. A sad end for a ship that sank nothing but possibly tied up more resources than any single weapon in the history of warfare.
I’d like to say Tirpitz was the greatest of all the battleships. But I think the best has to be the biggest. The Yamato.
Tirpitz had weighed 41,000 tons and was considered to be vast. Yamato weighed 68,000 tons and that’s just hyperbolic.
She was a tough old bird too with armour plating eight inches thick in weak places and a full 22 inches thick where it mattered. In fact her armour alone weighed more than the total weight of the world’s second-biggest battleship. This was her raison d’être. To startle and shock and terrify. We had a ship called the Invincible. They had a ship that really was.
She was Japan’s third island, with 1,147 compartments. She was so big that she could and did carry seven aircraft. And yet despite all this size and weight, she could blat along at 27 knots. That’s faster than most modern jet skis.
Oh, and to protect her from air attack while she was busy pounding the main enemy to pieces she had 141 anti-aircraft guns.
But these were an amuse-bouche compared to her main 18-inch weapons, which were simply humungous. Each one could fire a 1.3-ton shell 25 miles. Yup, that’s right. 1.3 tons and 25 miles. And she had nine of them.
Now the British had once mounted one gun of this size on the Furious. But it was always felt that it would do more damage to the ship from which it was fired than the ship it was aiming at.
One of the crew members on Furious remembers a test firing, saying, ‘I think it had a range of something like 30 miles and I don’t imagine it would ever have found the right target but it was certainly very spectacular. The recoil was tremendous. Every time she fired it was like a snowstorm in my cabin but instead of snowflakes it was sheared rivet heads coming down from the deckhead and partition.’
In other words, one 18-inch gun used
to tear the Furious apart every time it was fired. And remember, the Yamato had nine. NINE!
Once I stood next to a tank that fired its miserable shell and the blast damn nearly knocked me off me feet. So God alone knows what it would have been like if the pride of Japan’s navy had ever fired all its main guns at once. They’d have heard the roar on the other side of the world. There’d have been tsunamis and hurricanes. It would have been biblical. Real, genuine ocean-parting ferocity. And then some.
And what would the recoil have done when twelve tons of high explosive was launched out of those barrels? She was built by Mitsubishi but it’s hard to imagine even their legendary build-quality was up to the task.
Then there was the man in charge of this awesome firepower, Admiral Yamamoto, a man who didn’t like the war. He was immortalised in Tora! Tora! Tora! and again in Pearl Harbor as the old sage who said, ‘I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant.’
He also didn’t like battleships, realising that while they could tie up an enemy they weren’t much good at fighting, for all the wrong reasons: i.e., they cost too much.
Sure enough, his massive charge had a fairly undistinguished war, cruising around the Pacific a lot and mostly staying out of harm’s way. Her moment of triumph, the moment when she was elevated to greatness, came on 7 April 1945, during an operation called Ten Go. It was an operation designed specifically to kill her and it was mounted by the Japanese themselves.
By this stage the war was lost. The US forces had reached Okinawa and Yamato was the only big ship Japan’s navy had left. So she was given just enough fuel for a one-way trip and ordered out on a suicide mission against the invading Americans.
The Americans knew it was coming and were well aware by then just how devastating kamikaze raids could be. So they took the threat seriously, sending no fewer than 400 aircraft to deal with it. And in case this failed, six battleships were put on standby as well.
In the course of the war, the Americans had torpedoed the Yamato once, but little damage was done. They’d bombed it too, with even less effect. They had also been on the receiving end of those gigantic guns so they knew full well it wasn’t going to be stopped easily. But even in their wildest dreams they couldn’t have imagined how much punishment this truly breathtaking ship would take.
The carrier-based planes quickly took out the Yamato’s little escort ships and in the next hour hit the main prize with a staggering twenty torpedoes. And still she sailed on, bringing her 141 antiaircraft guns to bear. Only after she’d been hit by seventeen heavy bombs did she finally roll to port and explode. Beneath a mushroom cloud 1,000 feet tall the greatest battleship ever built sank in two pieces in 1,000 feet of water.
Very quickly after the war people began to question the wisdom of these dreadnoughts. Few had been lost to fire from other battleships and the number of ships they’d sunk was minimal. They’d been used to bombard shore defences, but frankly aircraft carriers were much better at that sort of thing.
And so it was that aircraft carriers became the new flagships.
The last British battleship, HMS Vanguard, was removed from service in 1960, while the Americans hung on gamely until 1998 before turning their last one, the USS Missouri, into a floating museum off Hawaii. Today there are none.
This is sad, because I’ve been on a Nimitz Class carrier, and while its nuclear power plant only needs refuelling once every millennium and its planes can reach targets even further away than a battleship’s guns and it can do an amazing 33 knots it’s a bit of a brute. Ugly too.
And that’s a charge that could never be laid at the door of the battleship, especially the Yamato.
Some might say that no machine conceived only to kill could ever be called beautiful. Magnificent maybe, and awesome perhaps. But not beautiful. The thing is, though, that in the battleship’s short life of just 90 years it turned out to be a less effective killing machine than almost any other weapon of war. All they did was steam around the oceans, making the people who paid for them feel good.
So I do consider them beautiful and I consider Yamato to be the most beautiful of them all.
Spitfire
In 1940 everything was tickety-boo for the Germans. They’d strolled into Poland and France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and Czechoslovakia with no real problem at all and almost certainly thought the British would be another walkover. Mop us up. Bish bash bosh. And off we go to Moscow. Unfortunately, however, their plans were spoiled by one thing.
Since the Second World War ended – and we won, by the way – pundits have queued up to explain what, in their opinion, was the single most important weapon in the arsenal that brought us victory. Patton said it was the Willys Jeep. Many scientists say it was the invention of radar. The Great British public like to heap praise on the drunken Kurd-killer, Winston Churchill. Me though? I think it was the Spitfire.
Aaaargh, say those of a planespotting disposition. It is impossible, say the anoraks, to single out one fighter from this period as ‘the best’. The P-51 Mustang, they argue, had a far greater range than the Spit and, in 1942, the pride of the Royal Air Force was definitely outclassed and outgunned by the Focke-Wulf 190.
Then there are those who claim that, actually, since there were more Hurricanes than Spitfires in the War this was the plane that won the Battle of Britain and therefore meant our little island could be used as a springboard by the Americans in 1944. Yes, they say, the Hurricane was the one true champion. The greatest of the great. The finger in the dyke that held back the menace of Nazism.
Bollocks. The only reason why we’re free to discuss the matter in books and internet chat rooms is because of Reginald Mitchell’s Spit.
Reg worked for a company called Supermarine, which before the war made all sorts of ungainly flying machines like the Walrus. However, the company was also heavily involved in the fabled Schneider Trophy. Established in 1913, it was effectively an international race for seaplanes.
A simple concept but flawed, because the instigator, Frenchman Jacques Schneider, said that if one country won the event three times on the trot, the Trophy would be theirs for good. Well, Supermarine won it for Britain in 1927, then again in 1928 and then again, in front of 250,000 spectators, in 1929.
In doing so, the company learned a great deal about aerodynamics while Rolls-Royce, who made the engines, learned all about superchargers and power. So, when the government finally realised Germany was becoming a threat, and decided to give the RAF some new fighters to replace their ageing biplanes, Supermarine was in an ideal position to help out.
The company had been founded by a genuine British hero, Noel Pemberton-Billing. He was a yachtsman and racing driver, and decided in 1913 he should learn to fly. But being double barrelled, he wasn’t going to take his time. In fact he bet a friend £500 he could get an aviator’s licence not in a day – but before breakfast. And he did.
However, it was his chief designer, Reginald Mitchell, who came up with the Shrew, or the Shrike. Two names that were considered before everyone agreed that it’d be better if the new plane was called Spitfire.
I‘d love to say at this point that he drew a vague shape in the sand while walking on a beach and the world’s greatest fighter was born. But in fact it was one of the most complicated and difficult labours in the history of aviation.
Famously, the first pilot ever to fly the prototype climbed out afterwards and said, ‘I don’t want anything touched.’ History has taught us that he meant he was perfectly happy with the performance but this wasn’t so. He was actually telling his ground crew not to change any of the components so that he could do another test in the same circumstances later. Actually, the plane was a bit of a dog.
Half the problem was that, despite the lessons learned in seaplane racing, and despite the astonishing 27-litre Merlin engine, it just wasn’t fast enough.
After a great deal of fettling and tweaking they got it up to 335 mph, but this was only 5 mph faster than Hawke
r’s much simpler and cheaper Hurricane. So, being British, the engineers took their pipes to the potting shed and realised that the propeller’s tips were encountering Mach problems. They were changed and whoomph – the speed shot up to 348 mph.
Great, but the new-found speed was likely to be lost on production Spitfires since they would be held together not with the smooth rivets used on the prototype but with cheaper dome-headed rivets. To find out what effect this would have, they glued split peas to the wings and fuselage. That is the most British example of ingenuity I know.
It turned out that when the peas were fastened in place, the speed fell by a staggering and totally unacceptable 22 mph. But providing they were arranged in straight lines, the aerodynamics remained unaffected and so did the precious top speed.
Better still, Rolls-Royce were beavering away with the engine. They found that by pointing the exhaust outlets backwards they could use ejected gases to provide 70 lbs of thrust. The speed increased again, to 380 mph.
But as the performance increased, more problems came along, chief among which was the death of the Spitfire’s creator, Mitchell, from cancer, at the age of 42.
He left his colleagues with an inspired design that was riddled with difficulties. For instance, the rear-facing exhausts glowed red, and with the blue flames coming out of them the pilot couldn’t see a damn thing after sunset.
I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Page 14