Battleship Bismarck (49 page)

Survivors from the
Bismarck
are pulled aboard the
Dorsetshire
. With the admiral’s staff, prize crews, and war correspondents, the
Bismarck’s
complement numbered more than 2,200 men. Only 115 were saved. (Photograph from the Imperial War Museum, London.)

One of them, Tom Wharam, a young telegraphist, obeyed an officer’s order to take me below, to the midshipmen’s quarters. Little did I know that barely a year later he would be among the survivors of the
Dorsetshire
when she was sunk in the Indian Ocean by Japanese dive-bombers. After the war he became a good friend of mine, in that unique brotherhood that, as he once wrote me, binds men who once fought on opposite sides.

Below I saw some of my shipmates in various stages of undress. They were being given dry, warm clothing. My allotment was the civilian suit of an obviously very large officer.

Stabsobermaschinist Wilhelm Schmidt went over the stern into the water, and found himself surrounded by three or four hundred men. From a distance of 100 meters he watched the
Bismarck
roll over, saw her keel uppermost and air bubbles rising from under her—then
she sank. After he’d been in the water a long time, he spied mast tips on the horizon. They belonged to the
Dorsetshire
, and, together with many others, Schmidt soon found himself on her port side, the lee side. Amidships he found a stout manila line with an eye at the end of it. Some of his companions had already been hoisted up when he succeeded in getting a grip on the line and was pulled up.

Musikmaat Josef Mahlberg was also 100 meters away from the
Bismarck
when she capsized. Just as I did, he looked for signs of torpedo hits or other damage to the starboard side of her hull and saw none.

Maschinenmaat Wilhelm Generotzky, who was standing on the superstructure deck, saw men jumping into the water, among them his best friend. He also saw Luftwaffe sergeants shoot themselves and heard a chief engineer say, “If I had a pistol, I’d do the same thing.” Then there were shouts, “She’s sinking!” and “Turret Dora’s blowing up!” The deck was trying to slide out from under him. He and several others leapt down and went into the water from the starboard side of the upper deck. At almost the same moment that side of the ship rose completely out of the water. The jump must have brought a quick end to many of those men. Generotzky’s leap took him to a considerable depth and, as he fought his way to the surface, he kept telling himself, “It’ll get light any minute now.” When that finally happened, he shot halfway out of the water and sucked precious air into his empty lungs. He saw the
Bismarck
some 100 meters away, floating keel-up. Hissing jets of water escaping from various apertures in her hull were soaring into the air. While he watched, her stern sank, her bow rose, as if in a last farewell, and, with a gurgling sound, the
Bismarck
slid below the waves.

All that was left were the men in the water, hundreds of them, fighting a desperate battle with the elements. Generotzky did not expect to be rescued. He had lost his socks and cold pressed ever deeper into his body. His legs became numb. Floating oil burned his face and hands and forced its repulsive way into his mouth. It took him about forty minutes to reach the
Dorsetshire
and the many lines that had been thrown over. He let himself be lifted up by a wave and grabbed hold of one of the lines. But in the trough of the wave he lost his hold and fell helplessly back into the cold bath. Several other times he tried, in vain. As more and more men reached the ship, a struggle for survival broke out. When two or three men would try to
hang on the same line, none of them made it. In the scramble someone stepped on Generotzky’s head and while he was under water a wave threw him against the ship’s hull, injuring his leg. Noticing that the British seamen aft were tying eyes in more lines, he floated in that direction, managed to get his foot through one of them, and clamped both hands on the line. Seamen pulled him on board.

The port middle 15-centimeter turret was already a third under water, the upper deck long out of sight. Cardinal and Statz looked at one another, then the lieutenant leaped into the sea. Statz, the procrastinator, hesitated until the appropriate moment had passed, let the big oncoming sea surge on and jumped as it subsided. Cardinal was swept away on the crest of a wave and when they were washed together again Statz saw that Cardinal’s head was hanging slackly. The lieutenant had carried a pistol with him and used it on himself on the wave crest.

Statz now drifted parallel to the ship in the direction of her stern and was lucky not to be thrown back aboard by the sea. He saw the
Bismarck’s
heavy list and was barely past the ship before she rolled over. The entire starboard hull now lay before his eyes; unbelievable as it seemed, he could not detect the least damage, and not on the port side either, part of which he could see. Despite his nearness to the ship, he did not feel any suction and had no difficulty moving away from her. The
Bismarck
now lay keel upwards, her propellers still turning slowly and steadily; then she sank by the stern.

Now Statz was completely alone in the water; he did not even notice the cold, but the oil floating on the surface gave him trouble. For the first time, he noticed how good it was that he had kept on his leather clothes. The air pockets inside them, especially in the arms and knees, supported him wonderfully well, taking over the job of his life jacket, which had been completely shredded by shell splinters. Unfortunately, many others had not obeyed the ship’s standing order, “Don’t undress!”

Suddenly, Statz saw a ship coming towards him, very close, so that he had to swim hard to keep from being run over. In the end, he reached her starboard side. On the jack he saw an oversize British flag, on the upper deck men with steel helmets running back and forth, and recognized that this was the same cruiser he had last seen from the
Bismarck’s
bridge deck with all guns blazing. “Captivity,” he thought, “my new lot,” remembering a newsreel he had seen not long before of German soldiers in British captivity, wearing British uniforms with a colored square on the back. “We’re not very well instructed about being prisoners of war,” he reflected.

The
Bismarck
survivors in the water, as seen from the British cruiser
Dorsetshire
. Josef Statz declared that “this picture shows the view from the upper deck of the
Dorsetshire
as it will always remain in my memory.” A total of 85 survivors were picked up by the
Dorsetshire
and 25 more by the British destroyer
Maori
. There had been 2,221 men embarked in the
Bismarck
. (Photograph courtesy of Josef Statz.)

In the meanwhile, comrades had come swimming up from all directions. As Statz later determined, they had all gone overboard at the last moment; those who had jumped prematurely were carried hopelessly out of reach of the British rescue effort. Now Statz discovered lines hanging from the ship, with British seamen standing on deck ready to haul them up, and was urged on by the redeeming hope of finally being saved. But first came the struggle to get a hold on the oil-soaked, slippery rope-work—impossible to find it, his hands slipped off again and again. After definite eye contact with one of the rescuers, the latter threw him a rope ladder. Statz grasped it, held it in an iron grip, and was pulled up to the upper deck of the
Dorsetshire
. A last glance at the ocean showed him that there were still many swimmers
in the water. “How easily Cardinal could be standing here beside me,” he thought, “if he hadn’t…”

Throughout the action Fähnrich (B) Hans-Georg Stiegler had performed his duties with two men inspecting the electrical cable circuits below deck on the starboard side aft. He and his men soon learned to distinguish between the recoil from the ship’s guns (lateral shock), the impact of enemy shells (shock from above), and torpedo hits (shock from below). He had not seen an extreme situation in the course of the action; his equipment had been working perfectly and panic was nowhere evident before the order came to “Abandon ship!” He encountered a crowd of men for the first time on the main deck. Afterwards he could not say exactly which way he had taken to reach the starboard upper deck.

Above him Stiegler saw a burning launch; the smoke blocked his view and his way forward. Then the ship began to heel more and more to port. He observed some confusion among the men, kept them from jumping overboard too soon, and at a suitable moment slid down the starboard side of the ship’s hull more-or-less amidships with them and entered the water without injury. He saw many heads in the heavy ocean swells, a lieutenant commander drifted past, then he took off his shoes—why, really?—with the unpleasant result that his legs bobbed up and he was left in an unsteady state for swimming. Not long thereafter, it seemed to him, the bow of the
Dorsetshire
appeared. He grasped the end of one of the ropes hanging from her and let himself be hauled up, but lost his strength and hold, and fell back into the sea. He tried again, winding the rope tightly around his thigh, held on desperately, and this time it worked; his rescuer hoisted him aboard.

Maschinenobergefreiter Hans Springborn saw many men dive overboard headfirst, hit the bilge keel, and fall into the water with broken necks. He wasn’t going to let that happen to him, so he slid down the hull from the upper deck to the bilge keel and jumped into the water from there. When the
Bismarck
rolled over on her side, strong currents pulled him under and he was violently whirled around before he managed to regain the surface. That experience told him to get away from the ship as fast as he could.

After some time he saw the British destroyer
Maori
and had the luck to drift over to her. After several tries he got hold of a line, and was hoisted to safety by two seamen.

*
The jackstaff itself along with the mooring and anchor casing had been shot away during the last battle.

†
Franz von Lenbach was the leading German portraitist of the Imperial era.

*
Waffen (gunnery technology)

35    Survival

I was still changing my clothes when the
Dorsetshire
suddenly began to vibrate violently. What was happening? Was she leaving the area, and at a full power? Now, in the midst of the rescue? Was there some sudden danger? From what? There weren’t any U-boats around, as we knew all too well. Only that morning, we had asked for one to pick up the War Diary and none had appeared. That was a sure sign that there were no U-boats in the vicinity. Also, neither during the night nor at dawn had any boat come to the aid of the
Bismarck
. No rumor even of any intended U-boat action had reached me in my after station. It couldn’t be a U-boat that had caused this precipitate withdrawal. What could have? German planes? If that was it, the aircraft alarm would have been sounded. I racked my brain, but the only thing that registered was horror that our men in the water, hundreds of them, before whose eyes the
Dorsetshire
was moving away, were being sentenced to death just when safety seemed within reach. My God, what a narrow escape I had. There was nothing that I, a prisoner of war, could do.