For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ simultaneously, as the “A” salvo, and then, 10 seconds later, having made some arbitrary corrections to line or range, we’d fire the other three, which would be termed the “B” salvo. That gave you a better idea of how you were getting on than if you just had one great clump of shells landing at longer intervals.

      Well anyway, we are now in the very early morning on 9 April somewhere south-west of the Lofoten Islands, steaming rather slowly north-east, keeping our speed down because the destroyers were astern and they couldn’t really go very fast in that sort of sea. At about 3.50 in the morning, people on Renown’s bridge sighted one and then two warships to the eastward, quite a long way away in a clear patch between snow squalls. The eastern horizon was just then beginning to get light as dawn was breaking. At first it was thought that it might have been Repulse, our fellow battlecruiser on this operation, plus somebody else with her. We did not know quite where Repulse was, but we did know that she was at sea somewhere off the Norwegian coast. Anyway, we increased speed and turned to a parallel course while we tried to identify these vessels, and then a little later we made a positive identification that the leading ship was the German fast battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and we thought that the ship next astern, the second ship, was probably a ‘Hipper’ Class cruiser. All the German naval ships looked extraordinarily alike. Accordingly, we turned on to a parallel course, which was about north, and we were all at action stations already. What we did then was to bring the main armament to the ready, checking receivers, testing firing circuits, usual drill before a shoot, and then the order came through to load the main armament with 15-inch armour-piercing shells on full charges.

      My memory of time is a little uncertain, but some 20 minutes after we sighted the ships we decided to engage. The Captain, Captain Simeon, at this point turned Renown slightly away from the enemy, in order to bring their return fire further aft on a relative bearing, because we only had 6 inches of side armour and that wouldn’t stop an 11-inch armour-piercing shell, certainly not a German one. I should say here that we could not place the enemy’s range by our optical range-finders because they were so full of salt water from heavy spray, so nothing could be seen through them. We had no radar. So the Gunnery Officer, who was up in the main director, estimated the range at 18,000 yards, which was not a bad guess at all; in fact, it was only 1,000 yards out. One of our first two salvos was reported spotted short and that was passed down to me and I then took over the range spotting. So for third and fourth salvos, the next pair, I ordered an up 400 ladder, up 400 for the first salvo, our number three, and then up another 400 for the next one, and then we waited for those to arrive. In retrospect, it is quite clear that, on such scanty information about the enemy’s range, 400-yard steps was a bit too conservative. It would have been prudent to have gone up in two steps of 800. Well, we waited for those second pair of the up ladder to fall, and they were both short and this had me slightly worried. Anyway, I ordered another up 400 ladder, hoping to hell that this would cross the target and do the trick, because it is necessary to cross the target, to bracket the target, and the smaller the bracket the better, and then you can start filling in the gap. Well, at this point we got our first salvo away, which was number five of the shoot, and I was waiting to see the gunnery lamps come on for the second salvo, and that never happened for quite a while. Apparently they had quite some trouble in the turrets; the violent motion of the ship due to the heavy seas resulted in water coming down the spouts of the for’ard turrets. So I waited and then the first salvo fell, and to my relief it fell over, so then I was able to take off the last up 400 correction and come down 600 in order to push the middle of the bracket we had now achieved, so we got that one away and we waited for that one to arrive, and that, to everyone’s astonishment, hit the leading ship, which happened to be the Gneisenau, not the Scharnhorst, and that was Admiral Lutjen’s flagship. That was seen to produce an orange glow in her for’ard superstructure, which was a hit straight in their sort of tower mast which those ships had, just abaft the bridge. On top of that was their Main Armament Control Tower Director.

      After that Gneisenau’s shooting was considered to have gone a bit ragged and uneven and erratic. Then we fired about half a dozen more salvos and we got two more hits on Gneisenau. One hit its for’ard turret and put that out of action, another hit arrived somewhere amidships – people up top saw a flash and clouds of smoke.

      After this Gneisenau turned away to the north-eastward and her next astern, which we thought was Hipper, actually Scharnhorst, which was the other half of that dangerous pair, came across her stern and we shifted fire on to Scharnhorst. We never got a chance to sort of settle down for a shoot at her before she turned away, following Gneisenau away to the north-north-east. They went off at very high speed. We turned to follow and from time to time they were obscured by more snow squalls, but occasionally we had a good sight of them. We were only able to fire our two for’ard turrets at this stage, because we were more or less end on to the enemy and two gun salvos don’t get you very far if you don’t get a hit. Gradually they drew away and, after about 20 minutes of pursuit, obviously we weren’t going to catch up with these people. Because of the damage due to bad weather, we could only make 26 knots and, for firing, we had to come down to about 23, because when we went into that sea an awful lot of water came down the spouts of the 15-inch guns, making loading quite difficult. So after about 20 minutes of ineffectual shooting by us and plenty of ineffective shooting by them, they finally disappeared into a snow squall. So after that we finally gave up the pursuit, came back, found our destroyers and in due course made our way back to Scapa.

      We discovered afterwards that we’d been hit a couple of times; one shot went through the foremast and broke all the radio aerials, stopping our enemy reports in the middle. The Admiralty were reading them with a great deal of interest, saw our signals break off and feared the worst. We also got another one through the hull aft; it came in abaft of the main armoured belt and it came in under the quarter-deck, through the midshipmen’s berth and then went down through the unarmoured bit of the main deck there, through a baggage store at F deck and out through the other side, below the water line, without exploding. If it had burst inside the ship it would have done considerably more damage. As it was, we didn’t discover that until after the action, when the damage control parties opened up the watertight doors to see what was what, and when they got down there they were met with a wall of water, so they shut it fairly quickly. That was the end of the Norwegian campaign as far as we were concerned.’

      After this the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took refuge in Brest in March 1941, having spent two months in the Atlantic where they had destroyed over 80,000 tons of Allied shipping. They had been blockaded there for nearly a year when Hitler decided to bring them, together with the cruiser Prinz Eugen, back to Germany through the English Channel. On the night of 11 February 1942 they slipped out of Brest and, because of a series of circumstances unfortunate for the British, succeeded in reaching their bases in Germany by the morning of the 13th. However, both battlecruisers had been damaged by mines, which put the Scharnhorst out of action for six months and the Gneisenau for the remainder of the war. Their Channel dash had been threatened, but not seriously impeded from the air.

      Pilot Officer John Checketts, RNZAF, who went to Britain in September 1941 and was posted to a Hurricane Training Unit at Sutton Bridge, has memories of the brave but largely futile attacks made from the air:

      ‘Halfway through the course we were hastened to finish the training and we did so in a matter of three weeks. We were posted at the completion of the training to various squadrons throughout England. My posting was to Royal Air Force Squadron 485, which was manned by New Zealanders operating from Kenley, south of London.

      An interesting battle during this first period on operations was the escape in February 1942 of the German ships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen from Brest through the English Channel to their home ports in Germany. The weather was extremely bad with snow, hail, rain, wind and fog. The Germans successfully evaded detection until they were seen by Group Captain Victor Beamish. They escaped detection until that time by virtue of a series of misadventures by the British intercepting people. The submarine which was to keep СКАЧАТЬ