Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

Чтение книги онлайн.

      More ships gathered and more torpedoes were fired at Bismarck but she did not sink. At 10.44 a signal from the C-in-C desperately commanded: ‘Any ships with torpedoes are to use them on Bismarck.’ Finally the Germans aboard decided to finish the job themselves. They exploded charges and all became ‘a blazing inferno for the bright glow of internal fires could be seen shining through numerous shell and splinter holes in her sides’. Only then did Bismarck die. ‘As it turned keel up,’ said a proud German survivor who was in the water, ‘we could see that its hull had not been damaged by torpedoes.’ The Germans never lowered their colours. At 11.07 HMS Dorsetshire made the signal: ‘I torpedoed Bismarck both sides before she sank. She had ceased firing but her colours were still flying.’ The Swordfish aircraft, which had not been permitted to participate in Bismarck’s end, now had to jettison their torpedoes, as it was too dangerous to land carrying them.

      Despite the concentration of so many British warships, the U-74 was determined to get to the scene in order to assist Bismarck, or take its log-book back to Germany. But the submarine arrived too late. Bismarck had sunk and the water was covered in its fuel oil, its debris and its men. The U-boat periscope was spotted by a lookout on one of the RN ships during the time it had stopped to pick up survivors. Immediately the warning was given, the British ships moved off leaving many Germans to drown. The U-74 rescued three men, and the RN saved 107. Another German ship, Sachsenwald, retrieved two more of the crew. Of a complement of about 2,400 men, all the others perished.

      At 1.22 pm German signallers at Naval Group Command West told Bismarck: ‘Reuters reports Bismarck sunk. Report situation immediately.’ But by this time Bismarck was resting upright on the sea bed 15,317 feet below water.

      Prinz Eugen reached Brest safely on 1 June. Bismarck’s fate convinced the German navy – and Hitler, who needed far less convincing – that the Atlantic was fast becoming an Anglo-American lake in which submarines might survive but surface raiders could not. In future all German shipbuilding facilities were to give priority to enlarging and repairing the U-boat fleet.

      The Royal Navy, ably supported by Britain’s Ministry of Information, pronounced the Bismarck episode a triumph. Others were not so sure. Churchill thought the Royal Navy had shown a lack of offensive spirit. He persuaded the first sea lord and chief of naval staff that the admiral in HMS Norfolk, as well as the captain of Prince of Wales, should be court-martialled for failing to engage Bismarck during the run south. The C-in-C Home Fleet blocked this⁸ and Churchill must have soon realized how damaging such proceedings would be for the British cause.

      Hitler became ‘melancholy beyond words’ at the loss of Bismarck. He was furious that the naval staff had exposed the mightiest warship in the world to such dangers. He had expressed doubts from the beginning and now he was proved right. The Führer complained of ‘red tape and wooden-headedness’ in the navy and said that the commanders wouldn’t tolerate any man with a mind of his own. From that day onwards, Admiral Raeder’s ideas were treated with suspicion: eventually command of the navy would be given to Dönitz, whose ideas were more in line with Hitler’s.

      The ‘hunting of the Bismarck’ certainly provided lessons for those who would learn them. The battleship admirals saw it as proof of the value of the big ship, and the way in which more big ships had to hunt for them. Such people stubbornly persisted with the story that Bismarck had been sunk solely by gunfire and denied that the Germans might have opened the sea-cocks. They were wrong: in 1981 the wreck was inspected and the German version of her sinking confirmed.⁹

      Hindsight shows that the real lesson was the importance of aircraft. A land-based Catalina had discovered the Bismarck; a torpedo-carrying Swordfish had crippled it and thus decided its fate. History provides no evidence that those in authority at the time were converted to this line of thought. The US navy continued to line up the big ships of its Pacific fleet in ‘battleship row’ Pearl Harbor until the bombers smashed them. Before the year was over the Prince of Wales, which had exchanged salvoes with Bismarck, would be sent to the bottom by Japanese aircraft. Those tempted by the ‘what if ?’ game asked what might have happened to the two German ships had Prinz Eugen been an aircraft-carrier.

      On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded Russia, and Churchill immediately declared Britain to be Stalin’s ally. Sorely needed Hurricane fighters and other war supplies were loaded and the first North Cape convoy departed for Murmansk in northern Russia in August. These tanks and guns and aircraft were all desperately needed elsewhere, and they would certainly make little difference to the outcome of Barbarossa, the most colossal clash of armed might in the world’s history. Perhaps it was a worthwhile gesture in propaganda terms, although Stalin made sure that his people heard little about it. As for the drain upon shipping that would come from sailing heavily escorted convoys so close to German bases in Norway, and mostly in cruel weather, this prospect must have filled the Royal Navy with gloom. It was a time when every ship was badly needed in the Atlantic.

       America loses her neutrality

      America’s neutrality had been defined by Congress and decreed in the Neutrality Act of 1937, but soon after Britain’s war began, the Act was modified to permit belligerent powers to buy war materials if they shipped them themselves: so-called ‘cash and carry’. This of course benefited Britain and France – whose navies dominated the North Atlantic – while providing no benefit to Germany.

      In July 1940 – as France collapsed – Roosevelt signed an act to provide $4 billion to build for America a two-ocean navy. It was an amazing sum of money by any standards. Yet there were many Americans wondering how soon the French fleet, and the British fleet too, would be taken over by the Germans. Meanwhile, in response to an urgent request from Churchill, Roosevelt exchanged 50 old United States destroyers for 99-year leases on naval bases in Newfoundland, British Guiana, Bermuda and islands in the West Indies. British sailors were hurried to Halifax and picked up the first of these ‘four-stackers’ on 6 September 1940. This was essentially a political action; a signal to friends and enemies that Roosevelt, if re-elected in November, would move closer to an endangered Britain. In the latter part of the year, the US navy began to escort its own shipping on ‘threatened transatlantic routes’.