The Lonely Sea (7 page)

The
Bismarck
now turned to the west and the British shadowers followed, Admiral Tovey's squadron still pursuing. But Tovey's
King George V, Repulse
and
Victorious
were now only three out of many ships converging on the German capital ship.

The battleship
Revenge
was ordered out from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Vice-Admiral Somerville's Force H—the battle cruiser
Renown,
the now legendary
Ark Royal
and the cruiser
Sheffield
—were ordered up from Gibraltar. The battleship
Ramillies,
then with a mid-Atlantic convoy, the cruiser
Edinburgh,
down near the Azores and the cruiser
London,
with a convoy off the Spanish coast, were all ordered to intercept. Last, but most important of all, the battleship
Rodney
was pulled off a Statesbound convoy. The
Rodney
herself was going to Boston for an urgent and long overdue refit, as her engines and boiler-rooms were in a sorely dilapidated state: but the
Rodney
's great 16-inch guns, and the magnificently Nelsonian capacity of her commander, Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton, to turn a blind eye to what he considered well-meant but erring signals from the Admiralty were to prove more than counter-balance for the parlous state of her engines. The greatest hunt in naval history was on.

Late that evening—just before midnight—Swordfish torpedo bombers from the
Victorious,
nine in all and led by Lieutenant-Commander Esmonde—who was later to lose his life but win a posthumous Victoria Cross for his attack on the
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst—
launched an attack against the
Bismarck
in an attempt to slow her. But only one torpedo struck home, exploding harmlessly against the
Bismarck'
s massive armour plating.

Or so the official Admiralty communiqué claimed. For once, however, the claim was an underestimate. Baron von Mullenheim Rechberg (today the German consul in Kingston, Jamaica) but then the lieutenant-commander in charge of the
Bismarck
's after turret—and the ship's senior surviving officer—said recently, when questioned on this point, that the
Bismarck
had been torpedoed three times by aircraft from the
Victorious.
Two of the torpedoes had little effect, but the third, exploding under the bows, caused severe damage and slowed up the
Bismarck
still more.

And then, at three o'clock on the morning of the 25th, that which both the Admiralty and Sir John Tovey had feared above all else happened—the shadowing ships, zig-zagging through submarine infested waters, made their first and only mistake, broke contact and completely failed to regain it. The
Bismarck
was lost, and no one knew where she was or, worse still, where she was heading.

Later on that same morning, Admiral Lutjens addressed the crew of the
Bismarck.
The optimistic confidence with which, only twenty-four hours previously, he had scoffed at Captain Lindemann's suggestion that they return to Bergen, had vanished completely. He was now a tired and anxious man, a man who realized all too clearly the enormity of his blunder. Incredibly, it seems that he was unaware that they had shaken off their pursuers—it was thought that they were still being shadowed by radar—and when Lutjens spoke the first overtones of desperation were all too clear in his voice.

The British, he said, knew where they were and it was only a matter of time before their big ships closed in, and in overwhelming force. They knew what the outcome must be. They must fight to the death for the Fuehrer, every last man of them, and, if needs be, the
Bismarck
herself would be scuttled. It is not difficult to imagine what effect this brief speech must have had on the morale of the
Bismarck'
screw.

Why had Lutjens been so sure that capital ships of the Royal Navy were bearing down on them? In the first place, wrongly believing that he was still being trailed by the
Norfolk
and
Suffolk,
he naturally assumed that they were guiding the British battleships to the scene. Secondly, the
Bismarck
had just been in wireless contact with the German Admiralty—who, says von Mullenheim, were
unaware of the true position—and had just received from them, doubtless on the basis of reports from Doenitz's U-boats, information about the whereabouts of her hunters which was not only misleading in itself but made doubly so by errors in transmission. British battleships were reported to be in the close vicinity and, acting on this false information, Lutjens ordered alterations in course which lost the
Bismarck
those few irreplaceable hours that were to make all the difference between life and death.

The
Bismarck'
s radio transmissions were picked up by listening posts in Britain, and the bearings taken. The Admiralty's incredulity that the
Bismarck
should thus suicidally break radio silence and betray its position—they didn't know, of course, that the
Bismarck
still thought she was being shadowed—was equalled only by their immense relief and the alacrity with which they sent these bearings to their Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Tovey.

By an ironic and amazing coincidence—and it happened almost exactly at the same time—just as Lutjens aboard the
Bismarck
had received a completely misleading report on the position of the enemy, so did Tovey on the
King George V.
In Tovey's case, however, the bearings had been correctly transmitted but were wrongly worked out on the plot of the battleship. The result, however,
was the same. Both admirals were misled, and misled at a vital moment.

The calculations made on the
King George V
showed that the
Bismarck
was north, instead of, as expected, south of her last reported position. This could mean only one thing—she was headed for Norway and home, instead of Brest, as everyone had thought. There wasn't a moment to lose—even now it might be too late. Tovey at once ordered his far-scattered fleet to turn in their tracks and make for the North Sea.

This every ship did—with the major exception of the
Rodney.
Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton on the
Rodney
doubted that the
Bismarck was,
in fact, making for the North Sea and as he was then sitting nicely astride her escape route to Brest he decided to remain there. Some time later the Admiralty, too, sent him a signal to the same effect, but Dalrymple-Hamilton ignored it, backed his own judgment and stayed where he was.

Later in the afternoon, in an atmosphere of increasingly mounting tension and almost despairing anxiety, further
Bismarck
position reports came in to Tovey that made it clear that the previous estimated
Bismarck
positions had been wrong and that she was indeed heading for Brest. Tovey was deeply worried, for the Admiralty, he knew, had the same information and yet were acquiescing in the Home Fleet's search to the north-east. It is now obvious that some powerful person in the
Admiralty—we shall probably never know who it was as their Lordships can hardly be accused of garrulity as far as the admission and explanation of their mistakes are concerned—was going in the face of all the evidence and backing his wildly wrong hunches.

Admiral Tovey backed his own hunch, decided he could not wait for the Admiralty to make up its mind and turned his fleet for Brest. Or, rather, such as was left of his fleet, for, apart from his own ship, the
Norfolk,
the
Rodney,
the
Dorsetshire
coming up from the south, and the
Renown, Ark Royal
and
Sheffield
of Force H, all the others were one by one being forced to retire from the chase by reason of the Admiralty's non-existent fuelling arrangements.

The
Bismarck,
too, was now short of fuel—desperately short. Through some almost unbelievable oversight or carelessness she had left home 2,000 tons of fuel short, and when the
Prince of Wales
shell, during the action with the
Hood,
had smashed into her bunkers, many hundreds of tons more had been lost, either directly to the sea or by salt water contamination. She had hardly enough oil left to reach Brest, even at an economical steaming speed—at a moment when she needed every knot she possessed.

The crew knew this, as crews always get to know these things, and to counteract the breaking
morale and steadily mounting despair reports were circulated that an oil tanker was already en route to refuel them, and that, before long, the seas around them would be alive with their own U-boats and the skies black with the bombers of the Luftwaffe, to escort them safely into harbour.

But the oil tanker never came. Neither did the U-boats nor the Luftwaffe. What came instead, after thirty-one hours of increasingly frantic searching by British planes and ships, was a long range Catalina of the Coastal Command. At 10.30 on the morning of 26 May, the long wait was over and the
Bismarck
found again, her last hope gone. She was then about 550 miles west of Land's End, and heading for Brest.

An illuminating comment on the state of the morale at that moment aboard the German battleship is provided by Baron Mullenheim, who says that the
Bismarck
had all prepared for instant use a dummy funnel and set of Naval code recognition signals. But, so frustrated and self-defeated—von Mullenheim's own words—were the crew that neither of these were used at the very moment when it might have been the saving of the
Bismarck.

Sir John Tovey's relief, just as he was convinced that the enemy had finally escaped him, must have been immense—but it was shortlived. His ship and the
Rodney,
with whom he was now in contact, were, he soon realized, much too far
behind the enemy to cut him off before he reached Brest. Neither the
Norfolk,
the
Dorsetshire
nor the five destroyers under the command of Captain Vian on the
Cossack,
recently pulled off a southbound convoy, could even hope to stop the
Bismarck—
they would have been blown out of the water before they had even begun to get within gun or torpedo range. The last remaining hope of stopping the
Bismarck
lay with the aircraft of the
Ark Royal,
approaching rapidly from the south.

Accordingly, at 3 p.m. in the afternoon of the 26th, torpedo carrying Swordfish took off in what was regarded at the time as a last desperate effort to stop the
Bismarck.
In the words of the official communiqué, ‘the attack proved unsuccessful'. This was hardly surprising in view of two facts that were not mentioned in the Admiralty's communiqué—many of the torpedoes, fitted with experimental magnetic warheads, exploded on contact with the water, which was just as well as, by what might have been a tragic mistake in identification, the attack was directed not against the
Bismarck
but their own escorting destroyer, the
Sheffield.

Admiral Tovey was now in despair. There was, he felt, no stopping the
Bismarck
now. Both he and the
Rodney,
by that time desperately short of fuel, would have to turn for home in only a matter of hours and allow the
Bismarck
to continue unmolested to Brest. It would have been the cruellest blow of his long and illustrious career.

The blow never fell. Sir John Tovey, and, indeed, the entire Royal Navy, were saved from this bitterest of defeats by a handful of young Fleet Air Arm pilots on the
Ark Royal,
who were desperately determined to redeem their ignominious blunder of that afternoon.

And redeem it they did. In almost a full gale, in rain squalls and poor visibility, they somehow, miraculously, took off from the treacherously wet, plunging, rolling flight deck of the
Ark Royal,
sought out the
Bismarck
in appalling flying weather and pressed home their attack, in face of intense antiaircraft fire, with splendid gallantry. Only two torpedoes struck home—von Mullenheim says three, but the number is unimportant. Only the last torpedo counted, and that one, exploding far aft on the starboard quarter, buckled and jammed the rudders of the great battleship. The
Bismarck
circled twice, then came to a stop, unmanageable and dead in the water, 400 miles due west of Brest. The long chase was over and the
Bismarck
was at bay.

Thus, with the crippling of her steering gear by the torpedo bombers of
Ark Royal,
began the agonizing last night of the brief life of the
Bismarck.

The greatest battleship in the world was about to go to her death, and it was almost as if nature
knew that nothing could now stay her end, for the weather that night was in dark and bitter harmony with the moods, the thoughts, the bleak and sombre despair of the hundreds of exhausted men who still kept watch aboard the
Bismarck.

The wind blew hard, the cold, driving rain lashed pitilessly across their faces, the waves ran high and rough and confused and the darkness was as absolute as darkness ever becomes at sea: there was no moon that night, and even the stars were hidden by the scudding rain-clouds.

Dead in the water, engines stopped, the
Bismarck
lay in the troughs between the great Atlantic combers rolling heavily, continuously, while the engine room crews worked frantically to free the jammed rudders. Their lives, the life of every man in the ship, depended on the success or failure of their efforts: Brest and safety were only twelve hours' steaming away, even six hours would have taken them under the protective umbrella of their own Luftwaffe, and there no British battleship would dare venture. But with steering control lost, they were helpless.

One rudder was freed and centred, and there it jammed, but even that was a major step forward: if the other could be freed, or even centred so as to eliminate its drag, there would still be hope, for the battleship could be steered by varying the relative speeds of the two great propellor shafts to overcome the contending forces of wind, wave
and tide. But the rudder, buckled and twisted by the impact of the torpedo explosion, remained far over at its acute angle, immovably jammed.