Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop

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      Karl Topp (left) and Kurt Voigt

      He arrived on board at the end of September, as the ship stood off the Aaland Islands, the Baltic archipelago at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia. Tirpitz was the core of a force that included the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and four light cruisers. Since June, Germany had been at war with the Soviet Union and the fleet was assembled to deter Russian warships from venturing out from Kronstadt. The Soviet ships stayed put and there is no sense at all of impending action in Voigt’s accounts of onboard life. Instead his letters are taken up with marvelling at the comfort and modernity of his surroundings. ‘My room is considerably bigger than what I’m used to,’ he wrote on 7 October after Tirpitz had returned to Gdynia. ‘[There’s] a chair with leather-type upholstery for visitors, a comfortable writing chair, a square table, lace curtains on the portholes and the sides, all in cream.’ He also had a telephone ‘that communicates with all officers and other stations. There’s an entire phone book for this little city.’

      The latter was an exaggeration but Tirpitz certainly had the facilities of a fair-sized village or small town. There was a hairdressing salon with five barbers, a bakery, a cinema well stocked with newish films, and a printing press which churned out regular editions of the onboard newspaper Der Scheinwerfer (The Searchlight). Officers took their meals in a mess that was like ‘a large and imposing restaurant with ceiling lighting’. The food was plentiful and pretty good. His first meal on board was ‘excellent’ – lentil soup followed by roast meat. During the Baltic autumn there were luxuries to supplement the staples of meat, tinned fish and potatoes and ‘now and again we get beautiful apples, tomatoes and grapes’.

      There was also plenty to drink. At his first meeting with Kapitän Karl Topp, he was offered sparkling wine then whisky. He had encountered him before and found him ‘not much changed except a bit greyer’. Topp was extremely welcoming. ‘He was friendly and spent a lot of time talking to me,’ he reported to Erika on 1 October. The following day he comments again on his friendliness and observes proudly that ‘he treats me with respect … something the others remarked on’.

      Voigt’s evident admiration for his captain appears to have been shared by most of the men on board. Karl Topp was forty-five years old when he took formal command of Tirpitz on 25 January 1941. He was born in Vörde in Prussian Westphalia, the son of a clergyman, and joined the Imperial navy when he was nineteen, serving in submarines during the First World War. At its close he was first officer of a U-boat in the Mediterranean which succeeded, through sinkings and minelaying, in forcing the temporary closure of the port of Marseilles. His captain was Martin Niemöller, then a fierce nationalist who went on to become a Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi theologian.

      Topp was one of the lucky ones who managed to stay on in the service during the harsh and chaotic Weimar years. He combined virtuoso seamanship with technical knowledge and specialized in military shipbuilding. He was stocky with a broad, meaty face and bright blue eyes. His manner was calm and methodical. He radiated authority, leavened with humour and consideration for his men. The weather was bitter on 25 February 1941, the day Tirpitz was officially commissioned. One of the engine room officers, Georg Schlegel, remembered that ‘we all went to the top deck and it was snowing and very cold. The Commander kept it short so that we didn’t have to stand in the snow so long. The flag was hoisted and that was that.’⁸ Touches like that generated affection as well as respect among the ship’s company, who had given him the nickname ‘Charlie’.

      Topp commanded a crew of 2,608, made up of 108 officers and 2,500 men. Most of them were young and inexperienced. Among them, though, was a core of sailors who had experienced the full trauma of war at sea. They were survivors of the heavy cruiser Blücher, the newest ship in the Kriegsmarine which had been sunk by shore-based gun and torpedo batteries as she sailed into Oslofjord during the invasion of Norway in April 1940 – an event as shocking and unexpected as the loss of Hood was to be for the British. Tirpitz seemed immune from such a catastrophe. Everyone on board took comfort from the ship’s armadillo hide of steel armour and the huge guns, encased in turrets named Anton, Bruno, Caesar and Dora. ‘The many, very heavy guns give a sense of absolute safety,’ wrote Voigt to Erika in Berlin. The sheer size seemed to promise security, as reflected in the metaphors of impregnability that crop up again and again in his correspondence. The ship was a ‘fortress’, a ‘slab of granite’.

      Tirpitz, though, was an offensive not a defensive weapon. In the aftermath of the Bismarck disaster there was uncertainty as to how she should now be used. The loss had jolted Hitler into action. Admiral Räder noted that the Führer abandoned laissez-faire and now became ‘much more critical and more inclined to insist on his own views than before’.⁹

      The battleground for which Tirpitz had originally been intended no longer seemed attractive. America’s full entry into the war in December 1941 made the Atlantic a much more dangerous place for surface ships. The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau were still in the area, lying up at Brest, where they were harassed by Bomber Command and afflicted by mechanical problems that delayed their return to operational health. Tirpitz was still not at battle readiness and, even if she were, would face a dangerous voyage to a French Atlantic port and be exposed to RAF attack once she got there. If a raiding force did venture out its operations would be circumscribed by a dire shortage of oil. All in all, Atlantic operations by large ships seemed to offer more danger than they did reward.¹⁰

      Hitler’s thoughts turned instead to Norway, which Germany had held since the spring of 1940. He regarded its possession as a strategic necessity. Norway commanded the Reich’s northern approaches. It was also vital for the transportation of essential iron ore supplies from Sweden. During 1941 he grew increasingly worried that Germany might be about to lose it. Hitler harboured a persistent suspicion – which sometimes seemed to shade into obsession – that Britain planned to invade Norway. A series of increasingly daring raids by British and Norwegian commandos on the Lofoten Islands, Spitsbergen and Bear Island, and Vaagsøy on the mainland, raised the possibility that a landing in Norway might be imminent. The prospect of losing Narvik was particularly alarming. It was the only ice-free port in the area, through which Swedish ore could be shipped to German war factories all year round.

      On 13 November Hitler met Räder at the Wolfschanze, a headquarters in East Prussia from where he oversaw the war on the Eastern Front. It was decided to transfer Tirpitz from the Baltic to Trondheim. Hitler was now of the opinion that ‘every ship which is not stationed in Norway is in the wrong place’.¹¹ Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would be moved СКАЧАТЬ