I Sank The Bismarck (23 page)

When Lutjens had signalled his intentions to his superiors,
they had replied acknowledging that both St-Nazaire and
Brest were being made ready to receive him. In addition, six
U-boats were being positioned on his route to the French
ports. There was little more to do except wait for nightfall
and attempt once more to throw off the pursuing cruisers and
Prince of Wales.

Then, in the quasi-twilight of a northern night, the lookouts
in
Bismarck
reported approaching aircraft. They had spotted
the Swordfish from
Victorious.
Apart from the 15in-calibre
main armament, every gun on
Bismarck
opened fire.
Esmonde's plane was hit when he was still 4 miles from the
target. The barrage was so heavy that the second and third
flights of three aircraft broke away and turned to port. Reforming,
each flight attacked from three different angles on
the port side, with a lone aircraft coming in from starboard.
Bismarck
was being steered from her open bridge and
manoeuvred to avoid the torpedoes that seemed to be coming
from all directions.

Some Swordfish flights turned round and made a second
approach, some of them only 2–3 metres above the sea. All
the torpedoes were dropped at close range. Only one torpedo
hit the target, however, and it sent up a huge column of water,
followed by thick black smoke. Unfortunately, it exploded
against the thickest part of
Bismarck
's belt armour, at the
waterline, and caused no structural damage to the ship at all.
A seaman in the compartment next to the detonation, however,
was thrown against a bulkhead and killed by the impact.
This was the first casualty to be suffered by
Bismarck
's crew.
All the Swordfish survived the attack and made for their
carrier. But it was a long way back and the dark had now
finally descended.
Victorious
shone a searchlight vertically
into the sky as a beacon for her returning aircraft and they all
managed to land on safely. It was a gallant attack made by a
squadron that had barely completed its training, but they had
not succeeded in their aim of slowing
Bismarck
so that Tovey
could catch her. The great battleship was unscathed.

At this point, it seemed that it must only be a matter of time
before
Bismarck
succumbed to the superior numbers of the
Royal Navy. Warships were diverted from their escort duties
all over the North Atlantic and were converging on
Bismarck
's position, which was being continually updated by
reports from
Suffolk.
Individually, none of the battleships or
battlecruisers was a match for
Bismarck,
and there was no
doubt that one or two would be severely damaged, if not
sunk, but it would be impossible for
Bismarck
to defeat all the
ships that were descending on her. Later that night, however,
fortune confounded Admiral Tovey and the Admiralty in
London.

Admiral Wake-Walker had allowed his three ships,
Suffolk,
Norfolk
and
Prince of Wales,
to take up a position to the east
of
Bismarck,
so that as she headed south they were on her
port quarter. They were sailing in a zigzag pattern as a defence
against any U-boat attacks, and every now and then
Suffolk
would lose radar
contact with
Bismarck,
but establish it again
on the next leg of the zigzag. Two hours after midnight,
Lutjens ordered an increase in speed and turned the giant
battleship on a new course to the west. Gradually, over a
period of an hour,
Bismarck
completed a circle, moving
behind
Suffolk
and
Norfolk,
then set a new course of 130
degrees, heading south-east for St-Nazaire. On board
Suffolk
there must have been the assumption that
Bismarck
would
shortly appear again on their radar screens, but this time there
was no trace.
Suffolk
continued on her course for some time,
but there was still no sign. An hour after
Bismarck
started her
manoeuvre,
Suffolk
radioed that she had lost contact with the
enemy. The error was compounded when Rear Admiral Wake-
Walker continued on his course to the south-west, assuming
that that was the direction that Lutjens had taken.
Prince of
Wales
continued to head south, under orders to join forces
with Admiral Tovey, and she too sailed away from
Bismarck.

On board
Ark Royal,
as dawn broke on 25 May, we heard
that contact had been lost. It was not going to be easy to
locate her again. Visibility was decreasing and a gale was
blowing.
Renown
was taking seas solidly over her forecastle
and speed had to be reduced to 21 knots. Anti-submarine
patrols took off when it seemed that visibility would be lifting
and the crews would be able to see something. Twice during
the day Swordfish had to be recalled because of low visibility.
I didn't fly that day: my scheduled patrols were both cancelled
because of the weather. Heavy rain clouds came down at a
speed of 50 miles an hour, blotting out the horizon over wide
arcs. At times the rain squalls were so bad that returning
Swordfish could not see the flight deck and had to circle,
hoping for a break in the weather for a few minutes so that
they could put down. It was an outstanding test of endurance
and skill on the part of the pilots.

There was increasing speculation over where the German
battleship had got to. Underneath the chart room in the island
a briefing room was in almost permanent session as people
wandered in to find out the latest news, and there was an
active discussion about when, and if, we would be asked to go
into action. In the absence of any hard information, speculation
filled the vacuum; people even wondered if
Bismarck
would try to head, not for St-Nazaire, but for the
Mediterranean to strengthen the Italian navy. While Force H
was at sea in the Atlantic there would be little to stop her
from bombarding Gibraltar.

I have to say that, while I was aware that all this speculation
was going on, like most of the Swordfish pilots I was largely
concerned about the prospect of flying while the weather was
as bad as it was. Take-off and landing called for good judgement
and strong nerves, and flying the planes through such
strong winds and thick clouds was arduous. The observers
had to be spot on with their navigation as well. Flying
through rain and wind in the open cockpits of the Swordfish
was also tough. I saw many pilots and observers helped out of
their cockpits by the deck crew because they were so stiff from
the cold. But without question the possibility of flying against
Bismarck
was also at the back of my mind and I knew that it
was going to be no picnic.

Since the manoeuvre to throw off
Suffolk
and
Norfolk
had
been perfectly executed, Admiral
Lutjens ought to have been
feeling extremely confident. Yet this was not the case.
Remarkably, he had no idea that he had managed to shake off
his pursuers and so continued eastwards in ignorance of his
increasing safety. Because of this, he then made an exceptional
error of judgement. Three hours after
Suffolk
signalled that
she had lost contact with
Bismarck,
Lutjens signalled to his
superiors that two cruisers and a battleship continued to
maintain contact. No one knows why this message was sent,
or what led Lutjens to believe that his turn to the east had not
succeeded in fooling
Suffolk.

His error was compounded two hours later when he sent
another, much longer message, lasting 36 minutes, that gave a
brief history of events since his first contact with the cruisers
in the Denmark Strait. He stressed that the British ships were
fitted with very good radar (he was so impressed with it that
he overestimated its range by 20 per cent) and that his own
had failed with the first salvoes from his main gun turrets. The
signal concluded with the fact that he had detached
Prinz
Eugen
to continue the mission on her own.

The German navy had its own listening posts in France and
had been able to pick up and decode the enormous amount of
signal traffic between British ships and the Admiralty since
the first sighting of
Bismarck.
They knew a great deal – more
than Lutjens did, in fact – about the positions of the warships
hunting him. After his first signal to them they advised him
that he had in fact lost his pursuers. They knew this because
there had been no more signals from
Suffolk
after she communicated
that she had lost contact. It remains a mystery why
the wireless room in
Bismarck
had not also noticed this and
reported it. In addition, Lutjens and everyone on board
Bismarck
believed that they had been exchanging fire with
King George V,
but the German navy HQ was aware that it
was
George V
's sister ship, the newly commissioned
Prince of
Wales.

Tragically for Lutjens, the information that he had lost
them was not received until after his second message and the
damage was done. It was these signals that enabled the
Admiralty and the ships at sea to work out where
Bismarck
was. Again, those in
Bismarck
were ignorant of this. Why
Lutjens sent the signals will never be known, but it is even
more perplexing why he felt the need to send such a long
signal, describing the previous day's events in such detail. He
must have been aware that the German navy was intercepting
British signals and would thus have a very good idea of the
state of play. It is possible that Lutjens had suffered some sort
of emotional collapse.

From the British point of view, he had sunk
Hood,
damaged
Prince of Wales
and now we had lost contact with his ship. I
don't think anyone in either the navy or the Admiralty in
London was feeling very happy, or very confident. Admiral
Tovey had even taken the Home Fleet in the wrong direction,
mistakenly calculating the coordinates from the results of the
direction-finding stations. Error was being compounded by error.

Admiral Lutjens, however, must have seen it differently.
This victory over the Royal Navy was not his main mission.
Given command by Hitler of the biggest and finest ship in the
German navy specifically in order to bring carnage to
the Atlantic, his battle with
Hood
and
Prince of Wales
was a
failure on his part because its consequences were that he now
had to abandon his mission and beat it back to port. Even
though we would see it as a huge propaganda success for the
Germans, the latest public sign that the Royal Navy was
losing its grip, for Lutjens his arrival in St-Nazaire for repairs
would be nothing short of a humiliating retreat. Perhaps his
long signal was motivated by a desire to smooth the path for
himself on his return.

This is the only reasonable explanation for his actions, and
I think it is borne out by accounts of the speech that he made
to the crew of
Bismarck
at midday on the 25th. He wanted to
sum up the situation and confirm officially what most of them
already informally knew: that they were heading for a French
port. It was an opportunity to tell the truth about the situation
and give a real boost to the crew's morale. Those young
men in
Bismarck
really needed some leadership at that
moment; they needed officers like our Captain Maund in the
Ark,
or Rear Admiral Somerville, who could send some
slightly rude signals to each other at the drop of a hat. Sadly
for them, Lutjens was not in the same mould. Instead, he predicted
that they would face yet another battle and that they
would fight until the gun barrels grew red and the last shell
had been fired. He then ended by saying that the question for
them as sailors now was victory or death. As a young man in
wartime, seeing colleagues and friends disappear on a
mission, I knew that I never thanked anybody for reminding
me that I too might die. The situation was made bearable only
by ignoring that uncomfortable fact as much as possible, and
by concentrating on the here and now. It was useless to worry
about the future, so you just didn't think about it. I can
sympathize with the young crew of
Bismarck,
many of whom
had come straight out of training school. Listening to their
admiral talk about death or glory must have been intensely
depressing. Their morale plummeted, as did everybody's on
the ship. Even the officers started walking about with unbuttoned
lifejackets.

Something was clearly going wrong on the bridge of
Bismarck
that day, because an hour later Captain Ernst
Lindemann made a second broadcast, in which he tried to
repair the damage done by Lutjens. Lindemann wanted to lift
the crew, so he told them that they would put one over on the
enemy and soon reach a French port. This helped slightly, and
confirmation that
Bismarck
had lost her pursuers also had a
positive effect. As the day continued, optimism increased.
Bismarck
had seen no sign of any of our planes or warships
for the whole day: it must have seemed that her chances of
making it to safety were increasing hour by hour, as in fact
they were.

There was other good news. Divers had managed to enter
the flooded part of the bow section and manually open some
valves so that 100 tons more fuel oil were available. Also,
engineers had carried out some remedial work to the
machinery affected by the flooding of one of the port boiler
rooms so that an adequate supply of distilled water was available
to all the high-pressure boilers. These measures did not
fundamentally change the situation, but they alleviated
problems that might have slowed
Bismarck
even further. They
also helped boost morale, serving to reaffirm to the crew that
their fate was still in their own hands. The day ended without
further incident.