Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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СКАЧАТЬ in the water, at the mercy of any prowling U-boat. Churchill’s response, passed on by Pound, was that ‘Bismarck must be sunk at all costs and if to do this it is necessary for the King George V to be remain on scene then she must do so, even if it subsequently means towing King George V’. Tovey was to describe this later as ‘the stupidest and most ill-considered signal ever made’,14 and the exchange deepened the mistrust developing between the two men.

      Churchill broke the news to the nation in dramatic style. He was on his feet in Church House, where House of Commons business was conducted while bomb damage to the Palace of Westminster was repaired, describing the battle raging in the Atlantic when there was a commotion and a messenger handed him a piece of paper. He sat down, scanned it and got up again. ‘I have just received news that the Bismarck is sunk,’ he announced and the assembly erupted in a roar of applause.

      There was much to celebrate. Hood had been avenged and a serious threat to Britain’s war effort neutralized. While the nation savoured the victory, satisfaction in the Cabinet and the Admiralty was tempered by the understanding that it had been a close-run thing, revealing many weaknesses in the navy’s armoury.

      It had taken six battleships and battle cruisers, two aircraft carriers, thirteen cruisers and twenty-one destroyers to bring the Bismarck down. Most of the torpedoes of the Fleet Air Arm’s obsolescent aircraft had bounced off her and it was a lucky strike that doomed her. Of the 2,876 shells fired by the fleet, only 200–300 hit the target. Even when utterly at the mercy of her pursuers, Bismarck had proved extremely hard to kill. What, then, would it take to seal the fate of her surviving sister, Tirpitz?

       Chapter 4 Trondheim

      Flight Lieutenant A. F. P. Fane was turning his Spitfire for home after a frustrating reconnaissance flight over the eastern end of Trondheimsfjord in central Norway when he glimpsed a large shape in the confused pattern of grey seas, dishcloth clouds and white-capped hills below. ‘I saw something like a ship hidden in the shadow of the far end,’ he recorded in a neat, pencilled hand in his diary. It was so large that he thought he was mistaken and it ‘must be an island’. He went down for a closer look. ‘By God it’s a ship – it’s the ship,’ he wrote. He ‘rolled onto my side to have a good look and remember saying out loud, “my God I believe I’ve found it!” I couldn’t believe my eyes or my luck.’1

      Fane’s delight at his coup wore off as he struggled to reach home. The cloud pressed down to 600 feet and he was flying into ‘a hell of a wind from the south’. Twenty minutes after he should have landed he was ‘getting really worried’. There was still no sign of land and he was down to his last twenty gallons of fuel – less than half an hour’s flying time. Then a gap appeared in the cloud and he recognized Scapa Flow. He turned south and scraped down at Skitten, a satellite field near Wick. A little later he was back at base telling his flight commander Tony Hill that ‘I’d thought I’d found the old Rowboat but could not believe it’. He ‘hopped about on one foot then the other waiting for photos to be developed. When film was ready tore in to look at negatives.’ He was still worried that ‘maybe I’d missed the b––– thing. NO! there it was – no doubt now, it was the TURPITZ [sic] all right.’

      Fane, a dashing thirty-year-old who was a Grand Prix racing driver before the war, had been sent with C Flight of No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) to Wick on the north Scottish coast on 21 January 1942 with the specific job of searching for Tirpitz. Now, only two days later, he had found her, tucked into Faettenfjord, a finger of deep water forty miles from the open sea.

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      Flight Lieutenant A. F. P. Fane

      Churchill received the news with great excitement. He immediately ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans for Tirpitz to be bombed. ‘The destruction or even the crippling of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the present time,’ he told them. ‘No other target is comparable to it.’ A successful attack would mean that ‘the entire naval situation throughout the world would be altered’, freeing the Royal Navy to assert itself in the Pacific against Japan, which had now entered the war. He concluded: ‘The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this ship, which is holding four times the number of British capital ships paralysed, to say nothing of the two new American battleships retained in the Atlantic. I regard the matter as of the highest urgency and importance.’2

      The dramatic tone of the memo made it apparent that the removal of Bismarck had done nothing to diminish Churchill’s concern about Hitler’s remaining battleship. During the second half of 1941, the PRU had kept a continuous watch on Tirpitz, flying regular reconnaissance missions over Kiel, her home port for the period. Failure to spot her, during one of her frequent excursions on sea trials, generated a flurry of alarm. Even when safely in view, she still exercised a peculiar menace. At the beginning of August, Churchill set off on board HMS Prince of Wales for his first wartime conference with President Roosevelt at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. A surveillance flight had located Tirpitz at Kiel on 6 August, much too far away to pose any threat, yet speculation persisted that she might attempt an ambush. Colonel Ian Jacob, an astute staff officer on board Prince of Wales, noted in his diary that ‘the Prime Minister did not seem to worry in the least, and he is secretly hoping the Tirpitz will come out and have a dart at him’.3

      As the summer turned to autumn, worry about the battleship’s whereabouts and intentions continued to distract the navy, tying up, as the Prime Minister noted in his memo to the Chiefs, a disproportionate number of capital ships, as well as part of the American naval task force which, from September 1941, was based in Iceland to assist the Home Fleet. The Admiralty believed that three battleships were needed on standby to overwhelm Tirpitz were she to break out. Churchill thought the caution overdone, complaining to Pound that this was an ‘excessive provision’ and ‘incomparably more lavish than anything we have been able to indulge in so far in this war’.4

      He was nonetheless impressed with the influence Tirpitz was able to assert. This attitude led to what can be counted as Tirpitz’s first indirect success of the war – a result that was achieved without her having to leave port. During the 1930s Churchill had paid little attention to the maritime threat posed by Japan, despite the fact that it was in the process of building a powerful fleet. He continued to underestimate the danger until early 1941when he first admitted, in a letter to Roosevelt that ‘the weight of the Japanese Navy, if thrown against us, would confront us with situations beyond the scope of our naval reserves’. As the year advanced and this dire prospect grew more likely, he considered moving a battleship of the most modern King George V [KVG] class to the East to deter Japan. The hope was that it would exercise the same mesmeric effect on the Japanese navy as Tirpitz did on the Home Fleet. ‘Tirpitz is doing to us exactly what a “KGV” in the Indian Ocean would do to the Japanese Navy,’ he wrote to Pound on 29 August 1941. ‘It exercises a vague, general fear and menaces all points at once. It appears and disappears, causing immediate reactions and perturbations on the other side.’5

      By October he had settled on sending the Prince of Wales and in the War Cabinet discussion of 17 October he again cited the ‘example of the battleship Tirpitz which … compelled us to keep on guard a force three times her weight in addition [to the] United States forces patrolling the Atlantic’.6

      Prince of Wales was duly dispatched to Singapore on 23 October, over the strong objections of the Admiralty, which feared that Tirpitz might attempt a breakout at any minute. She sailed first to Ceylon where she met up with the ageing battle cruiser Repulse. On 2 December they arrived in Singapore. Their deterrence mission was long obsolete. Five days afterwards the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and launched an invasion fleet towards Malaya. Prince of Wales and Repulse set out to intercept it. On 10 December, both ships were sunk within an hour of each СКАЧАТЬ