Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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Автор: Patrick Bishop
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007319268
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The news should not have come as such a great surprise. Hood was bound to come off worst in a contest with a strongly armoured opponent whose guns could comfortably outreach her own. She was a battle cruiser not a battleship, and now, at the age of twenty-one, a relatively elderly one at that. Her 42,100-ton displacement made her the biggest ship in the navy. But at the time she was designed, the existing technology did not allow her to carry eight 15-inch guns as well as heavy armour. Subsequent refits had failed to add adequate protection. Her deck armour was an inch thick in places and only three inches thick over the magazines where the shells and charges were stored. Bismarck’s deck was plated all over with between 4.2 and 4.7 inches of Krupp steel. Hood was highly vulnerable to Bismarck’s shells, especially if they were fired at a high trajectory. It was recognized that ‘plunging fire’, as it was called, would slice easily through her armour decking. Holland had known this better than anyone. Yet he had chosen to gamble at intercepting his adversary sideways-on, laying himself open to the battleship’s broadsides rather than getting ahead of the German force and confronting it head-on – which would have reduced the size of the target he presented.
The battle, though, had not been altogether one-sided. The three shells that Prince of Wales managed to land on Bismarck knocked out one of her electrical plants, flooding a boiler room and rupturing fuel tanks. She could now only manage a maximum speed of twenty-eight knots, trailing an iridescent banner of spilled oil in her wake. In this state a prolonged raiding expedition was out of the question.
Lütjens was faced with two choices. He could turn round and go home, having scored a memorable victory, and await further chances for glory. Or he could hold course and seek the safety of the French coast to recuperate. It was a desperate dilemma. If he carried on, he knew that his ships were in a race against the avenging forces of the British fleet, and that the chances of interception were high. Turning back was equally perilous. The navy would be alerted and waiting. So, too, would the air force, whose bombers were within easy reach of his homeward routes. He chose to press on, aiming to run for St Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, where there was a dry dock big enough to carry out repairs.
The Brittany ports were still nearly two thousand miles away and two enemy naval forces were converging on the German ships. Trailing doggedly in their wakes as they pressed on southwards were the Suffolk, Norfolk and Prince of Wales. By now, Tovey and the Home Fleet were hurrying south-west on a course which he hoped would place his ships in a position to cut off Lütjens’ retreat at about 9 a.m. the following day.
Bismarck ploughed on through worsening weather. Her bows were 3 degrees down in the water, the result of a hit in the foredeck from a shell fired by the Prince of Wales. The Prinz Eugen, though, was unscathed. As long as she was tied to Bismarck her chances of remaining so diminished. On the afternoon of the 24th, Lütjens decided to set her free. He signalled her commander Kapitän zur See Helmuth Brinkmann his intention to take advantage of the next squall to turn to westwards in the hope of shaking off Suffolk and Norfolk. The Prinz Eugen was to carry on the Atlantic raiding mission alone. Bismarck briefly turned on her pursuers to buy time for her consort while she got away.
That evening she was butting westwards through heavy weather when Tovey decided to throw the aircraft aboard the carrier Victorious into the hunt. At 10 p.m. a small force of Swordfish torpedo bombers and Fulmar fighter reconnaissance aircraft flew off into a storm-swept night. Despite the conditions they tracked down the Bismarck 120 miles ahead. One Swordfish got off a torpedo that struck the hull. The point of impact was at the thickest part of the armoured belt and the damage was slight. The explosion, however, shook loose the collision mats sealing the earlier damage, causing renewed flooding and pushing the battleship further down at the bows.
Fairey Swordfish
As Sunday, 25 May dawned, the Bismarck’s luck turned. Frantic work by the crew had restored some speed. Her pursuers, though, had been forced to slow down. On entering the broad waters of the North Atlantic, Suffolk and Norfolk began to zigzag to shake off any waiting U-boats. By 3 a.m. they had lost radar contact with their quarry. Without the tracking reports of the heavy cruisers to assist him, the great prize might slip from Tovey’s grasp. It was an appalling prospect.
He had been asleep in his sea cabin on King George V, about a hundred miles to the south and east of where Bismarck was last sighted when he was shaken awake with the bad news. He climbed up through two decks to the plotting office for a staff conference. His ships were now widely dispersed and half of them were running low on fuel. The weather was bad and promised to worsen, cutting down the chances of either the aircraft aboard Victorious or coastal-based long-range reconnaissance planes spotting Bismarck.
In the absence of real information about her condition, there were two eventualities to consider. Bismarck might be undamaged, in which case she would be heading west to carry out her raiding mission. Or she might be in trouble and heading east towards a French port. He decided to concentrate his forces on searching to the west. In the meantime, more ships were approaching from the south which could help comb the east.
Force H, an ad hoc fleet which operated out of Gibraltar under the command of Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, had been ordered north to join the hunt. At its core were Somerville’s flagship, the ageing battle cruiser Renown, the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire and the light cruiser Sheffield. Most importantly for what was to come, it included an aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal, with twenty Swordfish torpedo bombers aboard, crewed by men who had seen much action in the Mediterranean.
For a while it seemed the pursuers had regained the scent. Lütjens, unaware that he had shaken off the pursuit, radioed a situation signal to the Naval Group Command West headquarters in Paris. It was picked up by HF/DF receivers at British shore stations and, although it would take time for the code to be broken, it at least gave an indication of Bismarck’s whereabouts. She was somewhere to Tovey’s east but more than that was impossible to say. Tovey and his staff took the view that she was heading for home and hurried back on his own track away from his quarry.
As the morning advanced, the level of desperation rose. The damp, showery weather over Buckinghamshire matched the grey mood inside Chequers. To Churchill, Bismarck’s disappearance was an avoidable disaster. She should have been finished off when the chance arose in the Denmark Strait. His anger fell on Admiral Wake-Walker, and Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales, who in Churchill’s opinion should have carried on engaging Bismarck even if to do so invited disaster. At around noon he returned to London and throughout the rest of the day made frequent, scowling appearances in the Admiralty’s Operational Control Centre, greatly intensifying the anxieties of the staff as they struggled to make sense of the situation.8
For the rest of the day Bismarck’s chances improved with each passing hour. An increase in German naval and air force radio traffic along the Brittany coast eventually persuaded the Admiralty that the battleship was heading to Brest or St Nazaire, and orders were issued to change course, but hours of steaming time had been lost and one by one the British ships were breaking off the search as they headed off to refuel.9 Bismarck’s precise course was not known. Reconnaissance flights by RAF Coastal Command had turned up nothing and the weather was worsening, with thick cloud and low visibility forecast.
By mid-morning on Monday, 26 May, Bismarck was only a day from safety. The mood on board was lightening. They might not have reaped the glory promised by Kapitän Lindemann at the start of the voyage, but they would be content with survival. Even so, there was no slackening of concentration among the ship’s anti-aircraft crews. At 10.30 they caught a glimpse of a large twin-engined aircraft through a hole in the blanket of cloud overhead. The alarm was sounded and the thud of outgoing flak could be heard over the rising wind.
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