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

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СКАЧАТЬ doubted there was any real danger of a British attack on Norway. It was another example of Hitler’s exasperating belief in instinct over logical assessment. However, the move had his approval. He, too, had come to believe that the Atlantic was too dangerous for extended raiding operations. Northern waters offered a more advantageous battleground for his big ships. From Norwegian ports they could sally forth against the Arctic convoys which, in response to Stalin’s appeals to Churchill and Roosevelt, were ferrying substantial war supplies round the North Cape to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel. The first had sailed from Iceland on 21 August, six more followed by the end of the year and many more were expected in 1942.

      The goal of strangling Britain had diminished in importance. The great struggle now was with the Soviet Union and Tirpitz could make an important contribution to the war on the Eastern Front. The holds of the cargo ships plying the Atlantic and Arctic oceans were crammed with tanks, aircraft, lorries, engines, guns and ammunition, shoring up Soviet resistance to the German onslaught. It was far more efficient to destroy them on the high seas than on the battlefield, and each ship sent to the bottom by the navy saved many Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe lives.

      The mere presence of Tirpitz and the other big units in northern waters would also add greatly to the Royal Navy’s already crushing burden of duty. The convoys needed heavy protection and a substantial force of capital ships, destroyers, minesweepers, anti-aircraft vessels and submarines would have to shield them as they came and went. Even if the German ships never left port they would act as a ‘fleet in being’, forcing the enemy to maintain a countervailing force in the area, tying up valuable units that could be put to much-needed use elsewhere.

      Räder summarized his intentions in his sailing orders. Her new home was to be Trondheim, halfway down Norway’s western coast. From there she was to ‘protect our position in the Norwegian and Arctic areas by threatening the flank of enemy operations against the northern Norwegian areas and by attacking White Sea convoys … to tie down enemy forces in the Atlantic so they cannot operate in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean or the Pacific’.¹² Tirpitz would be supported by the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen which would soon be on their way from Germany.

      Tirpitz left Gdynia on the Polish Baltic coast on the afternoon of 12 January 1942. At seven o’clock the following morning she arrived at Holtenau at the eastern end of the Kiel Canal which linked the Baltic to the North Sea. There she unloaded stores and equipment in order to lighten the load and ease the passage through the waterway. On board, excitement was mounting. After nearly a year of working-up exercises the preparations seemed to be over and operations about to begin. ‘Nobody knew anything,’ remembered Adalbert Brünner, a young midshipman who had joined the ship the previous autumn. ‘Everybody hoped we were off on a Gneisenau or Bismarck type of operation.’ The crew wondered whether ‘we were on our way to the Atlantic … the ship was humming with rumours.’¹³ It seemed barely possible that her broad beam would be able to squeeze through the canal. Water from the wash overflowed the banks and it appeared to Brünner as they passed under the high bridge at Rendsburg, halfway along the route, ‘one could almost shake hands with the pedestrians’.

      That evening Tirpitz arrived at Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Elbe at the western end of the canal where she took on fuel and reloaded the cargo previously taken off. The following day she steamed out into the North Sea. It was there that the crew finally heard of their destination. They were going to Norway not the Atlantic. The news did nothing to deflate spirits. Either way they would soon be in action. To some, the move seemed predestined. By a curious chance, the ship’s symbol was the curved prow of a Viking longship.

      It was deep midwinter, and the weather was on their side. Before setting off, Navy Group North reassured Topp that the forecast was bad for central England and Scotland, ‘with poor take-off conditions’.¹⁴ His ship stood a good chance of getting to Trondheim without being spotted by reconnaissance aircraft. On 15 January Tirpitz was on her way. The seas were so rough that the escorting destroyers were unable to keep pace and had to follow in the battleship’s wake as it sliced through the waves close to its top speed of just over thirty knots.¹⁵ Then, on the morning of 16 January, those on deck caught their first sight of the Norwegian coast. ‘It was hung with cloud, sombre, covered with snow,’ remembered Brünner. ‘It was a strange sight for all of us, scattered houses which didn’t look as if they were connected up by roads – it seemed like the quintessence of loneliness.’¹⁶

      In the afternoon they turned to starboard and passed between the low headlands at the entrance to Trondheimsfjord which plunged for eighty miles east and north into the Norwegian mainland. Their final destination was a narrow finger of water at the south-eastern end – Faettenfjord. It was only about three-quarters of a mile across at its widest, with a small island, Saltøya, planted at the entrance, and it took great skill to bring Tirpitz in. Topp managed the feat easily. ‘The commander simply made fast there without any pilot ships or tugs,’ said Georg Schlegel. ‘He was the best. He could really drive that ship.’¹⁷

      In Faettenfjord a berth had already been prepared with two massive concrete capstans sunk into the rocks on the northern side of the fjord as mooring points. The crew were immediately set to work stretching grey camouflage nets over the length and breadth of the ship, which they covered with fir branches cut from the forest that covered the hill above. Soon Tirpitz was cloaked in a dusting of snow and its outlines melted into the monochrome landscape of hill and water.

      The anchorage had been well chosen. Tirpitz was tucked into the tail of the inlet. The hills standing 400 to 600 feet above plunged straight into the water, making a natural mooring deep enough to take the ship’s nearly thirty-four-feet draught. There was another ridge on the southern shore, about 700 feet high. Any attacking aircraft would have to approach from the western, seaward side, making the task of the defenders much easier. The ship was protected by clusters of anti-aircraft batteries mounting sixteen 105mm, forty-four 20mm and eight 37mm guns sited to give an all-round field of fire. Within a few days more flak batteries had been placed on the slopes above it as well as chemical smoke generators that could pump out a thick, protective pall within minutes. Soon afterwards it was fully protected by attack from the water by steel antisubmarine and anti-torpedo nets, hung at right angles, a hundred yards from the stern, which faced backwards towards the mouth of Faettenfjord.

      Topp and his superiors were certain that the British would soon learn about the new whereabouts of the Tirpitz and immediately attack her. Thanks to Fane’s reconnaissance flight of 23 January, the battleship had indeed been found. The Admiralty and Air Ministry now set to finding a plan that would satisfy the Prime Minister’s impatient demand that it should be sunk without further ado. In his instructions, Churchill had raised the possibility of an attack by carrier-borne torpedo planes. That would mean sailing a carrier close enough to put their aircraft within range of the target. To do so would expose the carrier and its escorts to great risk from the Lufwaffe’s Ju88 and Ju87 bombers and dive-bombers and Heinkel 111 torpedo planes that had begun to arrive in the region in response to Hitler’s new focus on Norway. Even if the Fleet Air Arm’s Swordfish and Albacore biplanes made it to Faettenfjord, the narrowness of the anchorage made it extremely unlikely they would be able to hit the target.

      It was left to Bomber Command to come up with something. Tirpitz lay at the extreme limit of the range of even the four-engine bombers that had now come into service. To reach the target and return safely home they would have to take off from bases in Scotland. The operation that ensued was given the name ‘Oiled’. It was undertaken in a spirit of hope rather than expectation. The RAF had long been aware that it lacked the means to pose a deadly threat to large German warships. Since the second day of the war it had been trying to sink them, with very little success. Tirpitz herself had been the object of five operations while lying at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. The results were negligible, even when large numbers of aircraft were involved. On the night of 20/21 June 1941, a force of 115 Wellingtons, Hampdens, Whitleys, Stirlings and Halifaxes set off for Kiel to ‘identify and bomb the Tirpitz’. Not СКАЧАТЬ