The Sinking of the Bismarck

The Sinking of the Bismarck

William L. Shirer

Copyright

The Sinking of the Bismarck
Copyright © 1962, 2014 by William L. Shirer
Published 2014 by RosettaBooks

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795342462

Contents

List of Maps

1. The Mighty
Bismarck
Goes to Sea

2. The Shadowing of the
Bismarck

3. First Battle: The
Bismarck
Sinks the
Hood

4. “Avenge the
Hood
!”

5. The
Bismarck
Is Lost

6. Where Is the
Bismarck
?

7. The
Bismarck
Is Found Again

8. The British Attack the Wrong Ship!

9. An Eleventh Hour Turn of Fortune

10. A Desperate Night on the
Bismarck

11. Final Battle: The Sinking of the
Bismarck

A Note on Sources

Maps

The North Atlantic Ocean and surrounding land areas

Chart showing the chief positions of the
Bismarck
and her British pursuers on May 23–24

Chart showing the relative positions of the
Bismarck
and her British pursuers on May 24–25

The situation at 10:30
A.M.
, May 26

The situation about 8:54
P.M.
, May 26

The situation at 10:30
A.M.
, May 27

Chapter One

The Mighty
Bismarck
Goes to Sea

It was a dark and perilous time for Great Britain.

The second spring of World War II had come, and the British stood alone against the seemingly invincible might of the German armed forces.

Germany, which had provoked the war on September 1, 1939, by attacking Poland, had conquered most of Europe. In 1940, led by the ruthless Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, the Germans had overrun Norway and Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France. And they had chased the remains of the British Expeditionary Force across the English Channel. After the fall of France, in late June, 1940, Italy had come into the war on the side of Germany. Under another fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, Italy was
threatening the British position in the Mediterranean Sea and in Egypt.

At the beginning of April, 1941, the victorious German army had advanced into Yugoslavia and Greece in the Balkans and quickly occupied them. The British, who had come to the aid of the gallant but small Greek forces, were pushed out of the mainland of Greece. They were trying to make a stand on the Greek island of Crete.

At home, England was taking a severe battering from German bombers. All that winter of 1940–41 the Nazi planes had come over night and day, dropping their lethal loads. Large areas of London and other cities lay in ruins.

At sea, the British, whose navy had ruled the waves for centuries, were in a desperate situation. And it was getting worse.

Since their summer conquests of 1940, the Germans had been able to utilize the harbors and airfields along the coast of western Europe. These stretched from northern Norway to southern France. From their new bases German submarines, warships and bombers had ranged out to sea and taken a fearful toll of British shipping, on which the very
existence of Britain depended. By the spring of 1941 British shipping losses had become so great that there was a grave question whether the island nation could hold out.

In February and March of that year, the powerful new German battle cruisers,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, broke out into the Atlantic and sank twenty-two British merchant ships. They then managed to get back to the French port of Brest.

Early in May the British Admiralty learned that the new German battleship
Bismarck
, the most powerful warship afloat in the world, had completed her trials in the Baltic. Any day now she might put out to sea to prey on British shipping.

Many of Britain’s battleships and aircraft carriers were not available for use against the
Bismarck
in the Atlantic. They were on duty in the Mediterranean trying to check Italy, which had a large navy of her own. They were also busy helping the British armies fighting the Germans in Greece and the Italians in North Africa.

On the morning of May 20, 1941, the Germans launched the greatest air-borne attack in the annals of warfare on the British positions in Crete. A large
part of the British Mediterranean fleet rushed to the scene to help the army, which faced another defeat. There was gloom in London as news of the German air-borne onslaught came in. But deeper gloom was to come from other news the next day.

***

At 8:00
A.M.
on May 21, a coded message arrived at the Admiralty in London from a British agent in Sweden. On the previous afternoon he had seen from the Swedish shore two large German warships steaming north through the strait between Sweden and Denmark. The ships were obviously en route to German-held Norway, from whose many harbors and fiords German warships in recent months had broken out into the Atlantic.

The ominous report was flashed at once to Sir John Tovey, commander in chief of the Home Fleet. He was on his flagship,
King George V
, at Scapa Flow, the great naval base in the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of the British Isles. Sir John was a wiry little man of quiet temperament, who remained calm in emergencies. He had a reputation in the navy for spreading confidence, and even optimism, among his officers and men.

The news he received on the morning of May 21 did not surprise or shake him. But he realized its importance. He immediately summoned his staff officers to discuss it. Their task was to ascertain which German warships were putting to sea, what they were up to, and where. Then they could take appropriate counteraction.

Admiral Tovey was quite sure that the reported German warships were the battleship
Bismarck
and a heavy cruiser of the
Hipper
class. From naval intelligence he knew their fighting qualities.

I myself had seen the
Bismarck
and the cruiser
Admiral Hipper
in the naval yard at Hamburg on Christmas Day the year before. There I had had an opportunity to learn something about these ships. In their respective classes, they were more powerful than any British or American ships then afloat. I knew that the German government had lied in officially listing their size.

At this time the British and American navies were still abiding by a disarmament treaty which limited battleships to 35,000 tons and heavy cruisers to 10,000 tons, but the Germans, while listing their warships at approximately those figures, were actually
building them bigger. The
Bismarck
displaced 42,800 tons; the
Hipper
-class cruisers, 14,000 tons. (The German battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, though registered as 26,000-ton ships, were in reality 31,300-ton vessels.)

The
Bismarck
was easily the most powerful battleship afloat. It had eight 15-inch guns in four turrets, two fore and two aft. It had eighty-one smaller guns, mostly anti-aircraft. It had a speed of twenty-eight knots which could be increased to thirty-one knots at extreme pressure. The most heavily armored ship yet built, it had the additional protection of a special anti-torpedo belt of nickel-chrome-steel. No torpedo then in use by the British—or so the Germans believed—could penetrate this belt. The Germans were convinced that the
Bismarck
was practically unsinkable. And so it turned out to be, as we shall see.

What the German battleship was up to, Admiral Tovey could easily guess. It would be gunning for British shipping in the Atlantic. At that moment ten precious convoys were at sea. An eleventh convoy was scheduled to sail the next day for the Middle East. This was the most precious of all.
It had 20,000 British troops aboard. Not one of these convoys had sufficient naval protection to stand up to the mighty
Bismarck
.

What did the British navy have in fighting ships to match the
Bismarck
? And, more important to Sir John, what did they have to catch and sink her?

No single capital ship in the British fleet could match the
Bismarck
with the possible exception of the 42,000-ton battle cruiser
Hood
, the largest vessel in the British navy and its great pride. But the
Hood
, like all battle cruisers, had sacrificed armor protection for speed.

Admiral Tovey knew that he was superior in numbers. He had in his Home Fleet at Scapa Flow two new 35,000-ton battleships,
King George V
, his flagship, and her sister ship,
Prince of Wales
. He also had the
Hood
. A brand-new aircraft carrier,
Victorious
, was at Scapa taking on planes. But she was due to sail the next day with the battle cruiser
Repulse
to escort the convoy of 20,000 troops for Egypt, Did he dare detach these two big ships from the convoy and risk losing 20,000 soldiers at sea? It was an agonizing question. But there were others.

First, was it really the
Bismarck
that a British spy in Sweden had seen putting out to sea? And second, where was she now, twenty-four hours after being sighted off the Swedish shore? He had to find answers to these questions at once.

Two Spitfire reconnaissance planes were sent out shortly before noon on May 21 to comb the Norwegian ports and fiords. One of them sighted two German warships in Grimstad Fiord just south of Bergen and dived in to take photographs.

The pilot thought the ships were cruisers. But when his photographs were developed and scanned by expert naval eyes back in Britain, they revealed that one of the ships was undoubtedly the
Bismarck
. The other was a heavy cruiser of the
Hipper
class, though which one the British did not know.

So the mighty
Bismarck
was found!

At once orders were given to the Coastal Command to send over bombers that night to try to hit the German battleship while she lay at anchor. In the first daylight of the morrow, other planes would attack with torpedoes.

Then the weather, which was to play a commanding role in the ensuing drama, intervened. It
grew worse and worse. Low clouds and fog brought the visibility down nearly to zero. The British sent out their bombers, but they could not find the target. Perhaps it was no longer there. Perhaps the
Bismarck
and her cruiser escort had already put out for the Atlantic.

On the chance that they might have, Admiral Tovey moved that night to intercept them. At midnight he dispatched a battle squadron from Scapa Flow under Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland. This consisted of Holland’s flagship, the
Hood
, the brand-new battleship
Prince of Wales
and six destroyers. The
Prince of Wales
was in fact so new that several parties of civilian mechanics were still working on her. They put out to sea with the ship, continuing their labors, especially on the big 14-inch gun turrets. These were not working very well. The squadron steered a course for Iceland, where it was to cover the Atlantic exits north and south of the island.

There were, in fact, four passages through which the Germans might break out into the North Atlantic. One was the Fair Island channel, sixty miles wide, between the Shetland and Orkney islands.