Battleship Bismarck (78 page)

*
The word
engagement
used in this and subsequent entries should not be taken literally. Since the
Bismarck
was not able to fire after 0931, what was going on was a one-sided cannonade.

†
Amid the din of the battle, I personally was not aware of any such torpedo hit. However, Donald C. Campbell observed the explosion of one of the
Rodney’s
60-centimeter torpedoes on our starboard side, near turret Bruno. Later he wrote: “I believe it was the first time in history that one battleship torpedoed another.”

†
The
Dorsetshire
took part in the action from 0904 to 0913, from 0920 to 0924, from 0935 to 0938, and from 0954 to 1018. Altogether, she fired 254 shells. The interruptions were caused by her difficulty in identifying and evaluating the fall of her own shot amid the storm of shells hitting around the German battleship. During these interruptions she helped the
King George V
and
Rodney
observe their fire. In his after-action report the
Dorsetshire’s
commanding officer, Captain B. C. S. Martin, did not claim any hits for his ship before 1002. It is doubtful that the
Dorsetshire’s
gunnery inflicted significant damage on the
Bismarck.

*
Swordfish from the
Ark Royal
, which did not carry out their intended attack.

†
The ship was the
King George V.
According to Russell Grenfell,
The Bismarck Episode
, page 186, the Swordfish flew towards the British flagship to request that the firing cease so that they could make their attack. The
King George V
did not heed them, however; in fact, they were taken under fire. When her commanding officer, Captain W. R. Patterson, asked the antiaircraft battery commander if he did not see the flight crews waving, he replied that he took them for Germans “shaking their fists.”

F    A Break in the Code?

I have often been asked whether the British success in breaking the German naval code at the beginning of the Second World War had anything to do with the pursuit and destruction of the
Bismarck.
Such questions have been inspired by recent publications describing this breakthrough, which was discreetly handled for many years after the war, in a sometimes sensational manner.
*
British experts did succeed in decoding some of the German operational radio transmissions so rapidly that the Admiralty was able to take timely countermeasures and, at times, to frustrate the intentions of the Seekriegsleitung. But by the end of Exercise Rhine on 27 May the British were still not in a position to read the secret radio traffic between the
Bismarck
and headquarters ashore—even though they were only a single day away from gaining such a capability. It is true that in the second week of May they were able to decode the radio signals of German reconnaissance planes—which, because of the limited cryptographic facilities of an aircraft, were not very securely encoded—and through them to anticipate an imminent German naval sortie into the Atlantic. Similarly, on 25 May they
learned of Lütjens’s intention to head for the west coast of France from a German radio transmission, but this transmission did not originate from the
Bismarck
and only confirmed what they already knew from other sources. On that day Generaloberst* Hans Jeschonnek, the Chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe, was in Athens and from there out of some personal interest asked Berlin what the German fleet commander was planning to do at that moment. The answer, to proceed to Brest or St. Nazaire, was not long in coming; it was given in the simple Luftwaffe code and through this backdoor immediately came to the attention of British intelligence. Likewise, the British learned from easily decoded Luftwaffe transmissions of the preparations being made to provide the
Bismarck
with air cover from France on 26 May. On the whole, however, it was by using then-conventional means of reconnaissance that the British achieved their success against Exercise Rhine. These means reached their high-water mark in the operations against the
Bismarck
, as thereafter the increasingly valuable cryptanalysis of the German secret naval code made conventional means more and more superfluous.

*
See
, among others: F. W. Winterbotham,
The Ultra Secret
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974); Anthony Cave-Brown,
Bodyguard of Lies
(London: W. H. Allen, 1976); David Kahn,
The Codebreakers
(New York: Macmillan, 1967); D. McLachlan,
Room 39
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); F. H. Hinsley, et al.,
British Intelligence in the Second World War
(London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1979); and, especially recommended, Patrick Beesly,
Very Special Intelligence
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977).

Bibliography

I. Books

Ayerst, David,
Guardian, Biography of a Newspaper
, London 1971.

Ayerst, David,
The Guardian Omnibus 1821–1971
, London 1973.

Beck, Ludwig,
Studien
, Stuttgart 1955.

Beesly, Patrick,
Very Special Intelligence
, London 1977.

Bekker, Cajus,
Verdammte See
, Berlin 1974.

Brennecke, Jochen,
Schlachtschiff Bismarck
, Herford 1960 and ditto, 4th revised and enlarged edition, 1967.

Busch, Fritz Otto,
Das Geheimnis der Bismarck
, Hanover 1950.

Carell, Paul and Böddeker, Günter,
Die Gefangenen
, Berlin-Frankfurt/Main 1980.

Churchill, Winston,
The Second World War
, Vol. II, London 1967, and Vol. III, London 1968.

Demeter, Karl,
Das deutsche Offizierskorps in Gesellschaft und Staat 16501945
, Frankfurt/Main 1962.

Domarus, Max,
Hitler, Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945
, Wiesbaden 1973.

Elfrath, Ulrich and Herzog, Bodo,
Schlachtschiff Bismarck, Ein Bericht in Bildern und Dokumenten
, Friedberg 1975.

Faulk, Henry,
Group Captives
, London 1977.

Feine, Hans Erich,
Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte der Neuzeit
, 3rd edition, Tübingen 1943.

Fest, Joachim
C, Hitler, Eine Biographie
, Berlin-Frankfurt/Main 1973.

Garzke, William H., Jr., and Dulin, Robert O., Jr.,
Battleships: Allied Battleships in World War II
, Annapolis, 1980.

Garzke, William H., Jr., and Dulin, Robert O., Jr.,
Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II
, Annapolis, 1985.

Gilbert, Martin,
Sir Horace Rumbold, Poitiait of a Diplomat 1869–1941
, London 1973.

Goebbels
Tagebüchel aus den Jahren 1942–43
, edited by Louis P. Lochner, Zürich 1948.

Grenfell, Russell,
The Bismarck Episode
, London 1948.

Habermas, Jürgen,
Philosophisch-politische Profile
, Frankfort 1971.

Hampshire, A. Cecil,
The Phantom Fleet
, London 1977.

Hinsley, F. H., et al.,
British Intelligence in the Second World War
, London, H.M. Stationery Office 1979.

Hitlers Machtergreifung
, dtv Dokumente, Munich, 1983.

Höhn, Reinhard, et al.,
Grundfiagen der Rechtsauffassung
, Munich, 1938.

Jackson, Robert,
A Taste of Freedom, Stories of German and Italian Prisoners Who Escaped from Camps in Britain during World War II
, London 1964.

Jens, Walter,
Die alten Zeiten niemals zu verwinden
(Address on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the book burning on 10 May 1933), Akademie der Künste, Anmerkungen zur
Zeit
, Nr. 20 (booklet), Berlin 1983.

Kennedy, Ludovic,
Pursuit
, London 1974.

Koellreuther, Otto,
Deutsches Verfassungsrecht – ein Grundriß
, Berlin 1935.

Lane, Arthur Bliss,
I Saw Poland Betrayed
, New York 1948.

McLachlan, Donald,
Room 39
, London 1968.

Maschke, Erich,
Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des II. Weltkrieges
, Munich 1974.

Maunz, Theodor,
Verwaltung
, Hamburg.

Maunz, Theodor,
Gestalt und Recht der Polizei
, Hamburg 1943.

Nesbit, Roy Conyers,
Failed to Return: Enquiries into Mysteries of the Air
, Wellingborough 1988.

Orwell, George,
The Collected Essays
, Journalism and Letters of, Vol. II, 1970, with reprint from the
New English Weekly
of 21 March 1940.

Poliakov, Leon and Wulf, Josef,
Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker
, Berlin 1959.

Putlitz, Wolfgang Gans Edler Herr zu,
Unterwegs nach Deutschland
, 2nd edition, 1956.

Raeder, Erich,
Mein Leben
, Vol. 1, Tübingen 1956, Vol. 2, Tübingen 1957.

Rauschning, Hermann,
Gespräche mit Hitler
, Zurich 1940.

Roskill, S. W,
The War at Sea
, Vol. 1, London, H.M. Stationery Office 1976.

Schmalenbach, Paul,
Die Geschichte der deutschen Schiffsartillerie
, Herford 1968.

Schmalenbach, Paul,
Kreuzer Prinz Eugen . . . unter 3 Flaggen
, Herford 1978.

Schmalenbach, Paul,
Warship Profile
, 18, Windsor, Berkshire.

Schnabel, Franz,
Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten jahrhundert.
Vol. II, Freiburg/Br. 1933.

Schofield, B. B.,
Loss of the Bismarck
, London 1972.

Spörl, Johannes, ed.,
Historisches Jahrbuch
, on commission for the Görres-Gesellschaft, 1955 (dedicated to Franz Schnabel).

Staatslexikon, Recht, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, edited by the Görres-Gesellschaft, Vol. XI, Freiburg 1970.

Stalmann, Reinhart,
Die Ausbrecherkönige von Kanada
, Hamburg 1958.

Steinmetz, Hans-Otto,
Bismarck und die deutsche Marine
, Herford.

Sulzbach, Herbert,
With the German Guns
, London 1973.

Toller, Ernst,
Eine Jugend in Deutschland
, Hamburg 1982 (original edition appeared in Amsterdam in 1933).

Tschirschky, Fritz, Günther von,
Erinnerungen eines Hochverräters
, Stuttgart 1972.

Wolff, Helmut,
Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in britischer Hand
, Munich 1974.

Wolff, Helmut,
Aufzeichnungen über die Kriegsgefangenen im Westen
, Bielefeld 1963.

II. Periodicals and Newspapers

Bidlingmaier, Gerhard, “Exploits and End of the Battleship
Bismarck,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings
, July 1958.

Canadian Statesman
, 11 November 1968.

Coler, Chr., “Bismarck und die See,”
Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau
, Vol. 19(1969).

Gribbohm, Günther, “Der Dolch des Mörders unter der Richterrobe,”
Südschleswigsche Heimatzeitung
, 18 October 1969.