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

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СКАЧАТЬ who ordered Prince of Wales to break off the action against Bismarck on the grounds that she was bound to come off worse. Tovey agreed with the decision. He let it be known that if proceedings were brought he would resign and appoint himself ‘prisoner’s friend’ at the service of the accused and Pound was forced to drop proceedings.

      Churchill interpreted this behaviour as evidence of cautiousness rather than moral fortitude. Even though he had – after some initial dithering – put Tovey in charge of the Home Fleet, he came to regard him as lacking in offensive spirit, the military quality that he prized above all others. By the beginning of 1942 he was complaining to Pound about Tovey’s ‘negative, unenterprising and narrow-minded’ attitude.³ Tovey, for his part, had a professional’s contempt for Churchill’s continuous interventions, which often seemed wildly at odds with reality. After an early meeting he wrote to his friend Vice Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham expressing surprise at the Prime Minister’s ‘astonishing statements about naval warfare both at home and abroad’.⁴ Cunningham shared his view, confiding in a letter to an aunt that Churchill was ‘a bad strategist but doesn’t know it and nobody has the courage to stand up to him’.⁵

      Churchill had served two stints as First Lord of the Admiralty, first in 1914–15 and then from September 1939 until arriving at Downing Street in May 1940. Like Hitler, he had an extraordinary capacity for absorbing facts and few matters, great or small, escaped his attention. There was no phony war at sea and the first weeks of the naval conflict were fraught with drama and incident. Churchill nonetheless found time on 21 November 1939, a day when the new cruiser HMS Belfast had had her back broken by a German mine in the home waters of the Firth of Forth, to dictate a memo on the question of whether having a cockney accent should be an impediment to rising up the service (it should not). His experience, and his image of himself as a born warrior, persuaded him that his judgement was at least equal to that of the admirals. There were enough occasions when he was demonstrably right and they were wrong to confirm him in this view.

      Churchill’s intention to keep the Arctic convoys sailing at regular intervals throughout the year presented Tovey with a continuing logistical migraine. He did not have the ships to provide a strong escorting force as well as mounting an effective guard on the northern passages to the Atlantic. The lengthening hours of daylight made the voyage increasingly hazardous. In the first few months of 1942, the convoys had got off lightly. Only one destroyer and one merchantman had been sunk and several convoys had passed undetected. The concealing robe of darkness, though, was slipping away. The same was not true of the polar ice cap, which would take several more months to retreat, forcing the convoys to pass through narrow waters patrolled by U-boats and within easy reach of the newly arrived Luftwaffe reinforcements on land. Tovey voiced his fears but Churchill was adamant that the risks were acceptable and the convoys would sail.

      Tovey could take some comfort in the thought that a great opportunity had arisen from the new situation. Tirpitz was now in Norway, with the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer to support her. Another convoy was due to set to sail at the beginning of March. Surely they would venture out to attack it, providing him with the chance to bring off an extraordinary coup? He had already sent Bismarck to the bottom. Now he was well placed to sink her sister. It was a thrilling prospect, and he was eager to seize it. So, too, was Churchill. The Prime Minister’s fascination with Tirpitz was unabated. On 27 January he had taken the trouble to complain to Alexander about the waste of time involved in signalmen, cipher staff and typists referring to the ship as ‘Admiral von Tirpitz’ in every signal when ‘surely TIRPITZ is good enough for the beast’.⁶ Now there was a chance that the beast might come out to fight. On 3 March he once again emphasized Tirpitz’s great significance in the strategic picture, telling the War Cabinet Defence Committee that she was ‘the most important vessel in the naval situation today’, and that ‘her elimination would profoundly affect the course of the war’.⁷

      By then, a new convoy, PQ.12, was already at sea. It had set sail on 1 March, with seventeen vessels from Iceland, bound for Murmansk. At the same time, Convoy QP.8, made up of fifteen ships which had made the journey earlier, set off from Murmansk for home. The lurking presence of the Trondheim squadron meant that, for the first time, the movement in both directions would be covered by the main body of the Home Fleet. PQ.12 would have a close escort comprising a cruiser, Kenya, two destroyers, Oribi and Offa, and several Norwegian whaling vessels converted to hunt submarines. A larger force consisting of the battleship Duke of York, the battle cruiser Renown and six destroyers, commanded by Vice Admiral Alban Curteis, had put to sea from Iceland on 3 March to cover from a distance. Tovey, on board King George V, followed two days later from Scapa Flow, together with the cruiser Berwick and six destroyers. To provide air cover and to attack any German shipping, the 29,500-ton carrier HMS Victorious sailed with them. She was fast, modern and could accommodate thirty-six aircraft. It was a lavish use of the Home Fleet’s stretched resources. Altogether, the thirty-two merchantmen in the outward and inward convoys would be protected by forty-two escorts.

      Around noon on 5 March 1942 one of the Luftwaffe long-range Focke-Wulf Condors that scoured the northern sea routes for enemy convoys saw ships sailing eastwards near Jan Mayen Island, a barren lump of rock in the middle of the Norwegian Sea about 350 nautical miles north-east of Iceland. The news was passed on to the headquarters of Naval Group North, at Kiel. Its commander, Generaladmiral Rolf Carls, eagerly signalled the naval staff in Berlin for permission to attack.

      Räder, with Hitler’s blessing, gave permission. Here, at last, was a chance for Tirpitz to do something to justify its existence. The Kriegsmarine’s big ships soaked up enormous amounts of materiel and manpower that were much needed elsewhere yet had made little difference so far to the war at sea. It was becoming clear from the battle in the Atlantic that submarines and aeroplanes were far more effective than surface vessels at the business of ravaging allied seaborne commerce. By now U-boats had destroyed more than five and a half million tons of Allied merchant shipping. Enemy aircraft had accounted for nearly two million tons. Warship raiders, however, had managed only to sink seventy-three ships totalling a paltry 363,146 tons. Submarines and aircraft had also proved a deadlier enemy to the Royal Navy’s big ships than their opposite numbers in the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet. Of the eight battleships, battle cruisers and aircraft carriers lost to enemy action in the war to date, only two had been sunk by gunfire.

      Räder, though, was cautious. The prize of destroying the convoy was not worth the risk of the loss of his battleship. Vizeadmiral Ciliax, in command of the operation, was told that he was to avoid confronting enemy forces unless it was absolutely necessary to complete the destruction of PQ.12. Even then, he was to engage only if he was confident that he was facing an equal or inferior force.

      There was plenty of time for an interception and nothing to be gained by an early appearance that would give the enemy time to react. It was not until the following morning that Tirpitz slipped her moorings at Faettenfjord and set off westwards into Trondheimsfjord. Darting ahead were the slim shapes of the destroyers Hermann Schoemann, Friedrich Ihn and Z-25. Snapping in the wind, high on the mast, flew the flag of Otto Ciliax, flushed with success from the Channel Dash and as anxious as Tovey for another triumph.

      That afternoon Tirpitz passed the Agdenes fortress and steered round the Brekstad headland and out into the open sea. Norwegian agents onshore seem either to have missed her passing or their reports did not reach London in time, for the first sighting was made by one of the British submarines, now on regular picket duty off the entrance to Trondheimsfjord. Lieutenant Dick Raikes was patrolling in Seawolf, trying to stay hidden on a ‘horribly flat sea’ from the German aircraft that appeared frequently overhead, when, just before 6 p.m., the submarine’s hydrophones picked up the ominous churning of big propellers. He stayed on the surface long enough to glimpse the foretop and funnel of a large warship which he immediately took to be Tirpitz. He dived and set off towards her but ‘never got within ten miles of her’. It was, as he reflected later, as well that he did not for the destroyers and the escorting aircraft circling the squadron would have made short work of Seawolf.⁸

      He СКАЧАТЬ