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

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СКАЧАТЬ to those above or below him. His abilities were tied to a strict sense of duty. He could be relied on to follow the spirit of his orders even when he doubted their wisdom. Lütjens was quite aware of the dangers ahead. His ship outclassed anything in the British fleet. But the task force he was commanding had shrunk to a fraction of its original strength. It seemed to him probable – even inevitable – that it would eventually be overwhelmed by weight of numbers. Before the start of Rheinübung he had called on a friend at Räder’s Berlin headquarters to say goodbye. ‘I’ll never come back,’ he told him, in a matter-of-fact voice.²

      The mood aboard Bismarck, though, was buoyant. The ship thrummed with excitement and anticipation as she headed out towards the Norwegian Sea. At noon, over the loudspeakers, the ship’s commander, Kapitän Ernst Lindemann, at last told the 2,221 officers and men on board where they were going. ‘The day we have longed for so eagerly has at last arrived,’ he said. ‘The moment when we can lead our proud ship against the enemy. Our objective is commerce raiding in the Atlantic imperilling England’s existence.’ He signed off with ‘the hunter’s toast, good hunting and a good bag!’ There was to be nothing sporting about their methods, however. The orders Lindemann had been given included an instruction that ‘the work of destruction is not to be delayed by life-saving activities’.³

      Two days later, Lütjens’ task force was two hundred miles off the Norwegian coast. Just after noon, ignoring the preferences of the headquarters staff who favoured the Faroes–Iceland passage, he decided he would take the long way round to the Atlantic. He ordered course to be set for the Denmark Strait, hoping that the fog, snow and rain that was gathering in the west would cloak his movements.

      At 7.11 p.m. on 23 May, as the task force steamed at a brisk twenty-seven knots with the black peaks of Iceland to port and the antiseptic blue of the Greenland pack ice to starboard, lookouts picked up an ominous shape among the shifting banks of fog. It was the Suffolk. The flimsy hope of concealment was gone and, whether it came soon or late, everyone realized that a battle was now all but inevitable.

      Suffolk’s lookouts had also sighted their enemy. The first reaction was alarm. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were only six miles away, and the battleship’s guns would make short work of her. It seemed to Charles Collett that ‘at that short range [she] could have blown us out of the water’. But nothing happened. Lütjens gave the commander of Prinz Eugen, Kapitän Helmuth Brinkmann, permission to fire but the target was too indistinct. Suffolk was able to turn away rapidly into the mist and wireless the momentous news. When it reached Tovey, he ordered the Home Fleet to alter course to the north-west to bring them to an intercepting point south of the Denmark Strait. Aboard the Hood, Holland had also picked up the sighting report. He, too, changed course and steamed at full speed on a line that he hoped would bring his ship and the Prince of Wales across the path of the raiders as they emerged from the Strait at about 5.30 on the morning of 24 May.

      Throughout the night, Suffolk and Norfolk kept a high-speed tail on Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, helped by the Suffolk’s new Type 284 long-range search radar. It was a delicate business, requiring them to keep close enough to stay in radar range but beyond the reach of German shells. At one point the 15-inch guns of Bismarck flamed out of the murk sending five salvoes in the direction of Norfolk but they fell wide and she suffered only minor damage. There was a frantic ninety minutes when the cruisers lost the scent but then, Collett recorded, they were ‘rewarded in the early morning by seeing, mere smudges on the horizon, the Hood and the Prince of Wales to the eastward and the German ships, by now also specks on the horizon (as we had opened our distance as it became lighter) to the southward’. The sight of the British ships was ‘a great relief … it meant that our main job was completed successfully and that there was little likelihood of the German ships turning round and engaging us – always a distinct possibility whilst we were shadowing’. Collett, in his air defence role, had a station on the upper works with all-round vision. It gave him a grandstand view of what happened next.

      As dawn came up on 24 May, Prinz Eugen and Bismarck emerged at high speed from the southern end of the Denmark Strait. Hood and Prince of Wales were closing with them from the east at an angle. At 5.35 a.m. a lookout in the crow’s nest of the Prince of Wales saw smoke on the north-west horizon and yelled down the voice pipe to the bridge that the enemy was in sight. Seven minutes earlier the Prinz Eugen had already spotted distant ships off her port bow. The two forces plunged towards each other on a converging course and at 5.52 a.m., at a range of over thirteen miles, Hood, in the lead, opened fire with four shells from her 15-inch guns. Holland gave the order to engage the left-hand ship. He had picked the wrong one. It was Prinz Eugen, a much less dangerous adversary than Bismarck. Captain John Leach in Prince of Wales did not make the same mistake and engaged Bismarck. The Hood’s salvoes missed their target. Prince of Wales’s 14-inch guns scored three hits on Bismarck, the last bursting through the hull below the water line and doing considerable damage.

      Lütjens, on Bismarck, held his fire. Then, at 5.55 a.m., he ordered both ships to aim at Hood. At least one shell hit her, starting a fire. Hood and Prince of Wales now turned to port to bring their main aft guns to bear. As they did so a salvo from Bismarck crashed around Hood amidships. One shell appeared to hit just behind the mainmast. Collett, watching from Suffolk, saw ‘a terrific sheet of scarlet flame suddenly reach up high into the heavens … and then die down to be followed by billowing clouds of thick black smoke’. He knew at once that a magazine had gone up and that ‘this must be an end to her’.⁴

      So it was. On board Prince of Wales a young midshipman, G. P. Allen, was at his station in the Upper Plot, the chart room just below the bridge. His duties including recording events in the ship’s log as they were called down on the voice pipe from above by the navigator. He remembered later how ‘the Hood was only a few cable lengths away on our port bow when at 06.02 I heard “Hood hit,” at 06.04 I heard “Hood on fire” and at 06.05 “Hood sunk.”’⁵ As Allen, whose nineteenth birthday it was that day, struggled to absorb the information a shell impacted a few yards over his head, smashing into the bridge and killing two of his fellow midshipmen. The Upper Plot was connected to the bridge by a funnel through which the captain could peer down to check the ship’s progress on the chart stretched out below. The shell had blown the top off the funnel and ‘blood began to drip steadily onto the chart table. We caught the drips in a half-empty jug of cocoa.’ The Prince of Wales was by now in no fit state to fight back. She had been hit seven times by the German ships. Two of her ten 14-inch guns were out of action – not because of the damage wrought by the German ships but because they were still not properly installed when the order came to sail. Captain Leach ‘very wisely’ in Allen’s view decided that he risked losing his ship without any chance of damaging the enemy. He turned her away, made smoke and ran for safety.

      The loss of the Hood was heard with disbelief among the rest of the fleet. One minute it had been on the surface firing its guns. The next it had disappeared along with all but three of its 1,419-strong crew. The ‘mighty Hood’ as she was known to the Royal Navy was the symbol of Britain’s maritime power, whose appearance in the great ports of the world on flag-flying visits sent a message that, despite the challenges from rising powers, the navy still ruled the waves.

      The catastrophe sent a shudder through the surrounding ships. Patrick Mullins, an ambitious and well-read young ordinary seaman with the Home Fleet on board Repulse, wrote later that it was ‘difficult to comprehend the effect that the sudden loss of this great, glamorous and handsome ship had [on us]. Suspension of belief was the first reaction, followed by awe and then by the realization that now it was up to us … suddenly our side did not look nearly so strong.’⁶

      Tovey, aboard King George V, heard the news in a stark signal sent from the Norfolk stating simply, ‘Hood has blown up.’ Soon it reached the Admiralty who passed it on to Chequers. ‘Pug’ Ismay was woken by the sound of voices and got out of bed ‘to see the Prime Minister’s back disappearing down the corridor’. Averell Harriman’s bedroom door was open and Ismay went in. He was told that Churchill had arrived a few minutes before СКАЧАТЬ