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

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СКАЧАТЬ chosen the grandiose option, with Räder’s approval. The result was ‘Plan-Z’, which had been finally agreed by Hitler only two months before. It envisaged a fleet with ten battleships at its core and four aircraft carriers to provide the air power that was becoming a vital adjunct of naval operations. Supporting them would be fifteen pocket battleships, over a hundred cruisers and destroyers and an underwater strength of more than 250 U-boats.

      A force of this size would take up to ten years to build. The plan had been designed on the assumption, reinforced by frequent assurances from Hitler, that a war with Britain was still well over the horizon. Only four years before, the two countries had signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, mentioned by Hitler in his speech. Germany agreed to limit its surface shipbuilding programme to 35 per cent of the British fleet. In submarines, it was permitted 45 per cent of the Royal Navy’s tonnage, with a clause allowing it to rise to parity in special circumstances. The deal was negotiated in a friendly atmosphere. Historically, both sides had felt respect for one another. When the commander of the British Fleet at Jutland, Lord Jellicoe, died in November 1935, Räder ordered all German warships to fly their flags at half-mast.

      A confrontation with the Royal Navy had seemed a distant prospect when Plan Z was being worked out. Now, with Chamberlain’s guarantee to the Poles, it loomed suddenly and alarmingly into view. Räder’s exalted title scarcely reflected the might of his fleet. As he waved his landlubber leader off at the end of his Wilhelmshaven jaunt, he knew very well that he had limited assets with which to face the coming crisis.

The German fleet that spring had only two big ships in service – the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, both displacing 32,000 tons.* There was a heavy cruiser, the 14,000-ton Admiral Hipper, which would be joined in the coming year by two ships of the same class, the Blücher and the Prinz Eugen. Three pocket battleships were in commission, the Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer. Despite displacing only 12,000 tons, they packed heavy firepower in their six 11-inch guns. Of the four planned aircraft carriers only one, the Graf Zeppelin, had been laid down, but years of work remained. As for submarines, about fifty would be ready for operations by the end of the summer.

      In numerical terms, this was a tiny force when compared with the Royal Navy. It could muster twelve battleships with five more on the way, four battle cruisers, six aircraft carriers with another six building, and twenty-four heavy cruisers. It was only below the waves that numbers were equal.

      But strength was not measured in numbers alone. The qualitative difference between the two fleets went a long way towards correcting the quantitative imbalance. The core of the German fleet was modern, whereas many of the British ships dated back to the previous war and only some of them had been updated. The new ships in the pipeline were inferior to their German counterparts. Britain, it would often be lamented in the years to come, had played the game when it came to honouring the various limitations agreements it had entered into in the inter-war years. The Germans had, systematically and ruthlessly, cheated.

      All their large ships were bigger than they were supposed to be. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were actually 6,000 tons heavier than officially claimed. The extra weight came from the thick armour plating which reduced the danger from the heavier guns of the British battle cruisers. They were also faster than claimed and could muster thirty-one knots, which gave them the edge over their counterparts if forced to run.

      It was in the top class – the battleships – that German superiority was most marked. Since Tirpitz and her sister ship Bismarck were laid down in 1936, the Germany Embassy in London, on Räder’s instructions, had lied to the Foreign Office about their specifications. Instead of being 35,000 tons, the upper limit agreed in the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, they would both weigh in at 42,500 tons. The British stuck to the rules. As a result the battleships under construction of the King George V (KGV) class were nearly 12 per cent lighter.

      It was not merely a question of size. When finished, Tirpitz and Bismarck would best the Royal Navy’s new ships in every department. They each mounted eight 15-inch guns against the 14-inch main armament of the King George V. They were faster and could travel far greater distances without refuelling. They were also immensely well protected, with thick layers of steel armour encasing decks and hull, turrets, engine rooms and magazines. It was often said by their enemies that the Germans had declared their battleships ‘unsinkable’. The claim does not seem to have been made officially. Their constructors revealed after the war that the Kriegsmarine often intervened during the building of Tirpitz and Bismarck to ‘raise their levels of unsinkability’.⁷ The result was that, in the case of Tirpitz, 40 per cent of her overall weight was made up of armour plating. The belief grew that Tirpitz and Bismarck could survive any torpedo, shell or bomb that British ships or aircraft could hurl at them, and it was not unfounded. The British navy had been starved of funds in the post-war years, and little effort had been put into developing new weaponry. Torpedoes and shells carried feeble charges and lacked penetrative power. The greatest failure to keep pace with technological developments lay in the area of naval aviation. The Admiralty was only now regaining control of the Fleet Air Arm from the RAF, whose equipment programmes had given priority to fighters and bombers. The navy was entering the war equipped with biplanes that looked like survivors from the previous conflict.

      Even with his long-term plan in tatters and Tirpitz and Bismarck still far from completion, Räder could still cause Britain great harm. The Royal Navy suffered from a crucial strategic disadvantage. Britain depended for survival on its seaborne trade. The navy had the duty of protecting a web of routes that stretched to all corners of the globe. Germany, as a continental power, was far less reliant on overseas supplies. If it came to war, its navy’s responsibility was clearer and narrower. Its function was not to protect but to attack, ravaging the sea lanes that linked Britain to the rest of the world.

      As the countdown to hostilities accelerated, it was powerful German warships rather than the U-boat fleet that the Admiralty most feared. ‘Nothing would paralyse our supply system and seaborne trade so successfully,’ wrote the First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, just before the outbreak, ‘as attack by surface raiders.’ It was to their detection, pursuit and destruction that the Home Fleet turned as the long overture finished and the curtain went up on the war.

* Von Hassell was a conservative patriot who had been wounded in the First World War and still carried a French bullet in his heart. He was executed for his part in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

* All displacements are given as standard, minus the weight of fuel, water and stores that would be carried on voyage.

       Chapter 3 Swordfish

      Caked with the salt of the northern seas, her flanks streaked with rust, HMS Suffolk slid gratefully towards the Icelandic haven of Hvalfjord. The heavy cruiser had been patrolling the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland and her crew were looking forward to a quiet evening in harbour. Then a signal arrived warning them that their respite might be a short one. Bismarck, the ship they had been watching for, had been sighted at the Norwegian port of Bergen.

      On arrival in Hvalfjordur Suffolk went straight off to refuel. The company were eating supper when another signal arrived. They were to return immediately to the Denmark Strait. The following morning, Friday, 23 May 1941, they met up with their sister ship Norfolk in the harbour at Isafjordur on the north-west coast of Iceland and headed off to take up their patrolling positions. The Strait was the most distant of the possible routes German warships could take from their own ports to the Atlantic. It was 300 miles long and 180 miles wide at its narrowest point, but even at this time of year it was still choked with pack ice which stretched eighty miles eastward from the Greenland coast.

      The СКАЧАТЬ