Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship

As dawn came up on 24 May, Prinz Eugen and Bismarck emerged at high speed from the southern end of the Denmark Strait. Hood and Prince of Wales were closing with them from the east at an angle. At 5.35 a.m. a lookout in the crow’s nest of the Prince of Wales saw smoke on the north-west horizon and yelled down the voice pipe to the bridge that the enemy was in sight. Seven minutes earlier the Prinz Eugen had already spotted distant ships off her port bow. The two forces plunged towards each other on a converging course and at 5.52 a.m., at a range of over thirteen miles, Hood, in the lead, opened fire with four shells from her 15-inch guns. Holland gave the order to engage the left-hand ship. He had picked the wrong one. It was Prinz Eugen, a much less dangerous adversary than Bismarck. Captain John Leach in Prince of Wales did not make the same mistake and engaged Bismarck. The Hood’s salvoes missed their target. Prince of Wales’s 14-inch guns scored three hits on Bismarck, the last bursting through the hull below the water line and doing considerable damage.

Lütjens, on Bismarck, held his fire. Then, at 5.55 a.m., he ordered both ships to aim at Hood. At least one shell hit her, starting a fire. Hood and Prince of Wales now turned to port to bring their main aft guns to bear. As they did so a salvo from Bismarck crashed around Hood amidships. One shell appeared to hit just behind the mainmast. Collett, watching from Suffolk, saw ‘a terrific sheet of scarlet flame suddenly reach up high into the heavens … and then die down to be followed by billowing clouds of thick black smoke’. He knew at once that a magazine had gone up and that ‘this must be an end to her’.

So it was. On board Prince of Wales a young midshipman, G. P. Allen, was at his station in the Upper Plot, the chart room just below the bridge. His duties including recording events in the ship’s log as they were called down on the voice pipe from above by the navigator. He remembered later how ‘the Hood was only a few cable lengths away on our port bow when at 06.02 I heard “Hood hit,” at 06.04 I heard “Hood on fire” and at 06.05 “Hood sunk.”’

As Allen, whose nineteenth birthday it was that day, struggled to absorb the information a shell impacted a few yards over his head, smashing into the bridge and killing two of his fellow midshipmen. The Upper Plot was connected to the bridge by a funnel through which the captain could peer down to check the ship’s progress on the chart stretched out below. The shell had blown the top off the funnel and ‘blood began to drip steadily onto the chart table. We caught the drips in a half-empty jug of cocoa.’ The Prince of Wales was by now in no fit state to fight back. She had been hit seven times by the German ships. Two of her ten 14-inch guns were out of action – not because of the damage wrought by the German ships but because they were still not properly installed when the order came to sail. Captain Leach ‘very wisely’ in Allen’s view decided that he risked losing his ship without any chance of damaging the enemy. He turned her away, made smoke and ran for safety.

The loss of the Hood was heard with disbelief among the rest of the fleet. One minute it had been on the surface firing its guns. The next it had disappeared along with all but three of its 1,419-strong crew. The ‘mighty Hood’ as she was known to the Royal Navy was the symbol of Britain’s maritime power, whose appearance in the great ports of the world on flag-flying visits sent a message that, despite the challenges from rising powers, the navy still ruled the waves.

The catastrophe sent a shudder through the surrounding ships. Patrick Mullins, an ambitious and well-read young ordinary seaman with the Home Fleet on board Repulse, wrote later that it was ‘difficult to comprehend the effect that the sudden loss of this great, glamorous and handsome ship had [on us]. Suspension of belief was the first reaction, followed by awe and then by the realization that now it was up to us … suddenly our side did not look nearly so strong.’

Tovey, aboard King George V, heard the news in a stark signal sent from the Norfolk stating simply, ‘Hood has blown up.’ Soon it reached the Admiralty who passed it on to Chequers. ‘Pug’ Ismay was woken by the sound of voices and got out of bed ‘to see the Prime Minister’s back disappearing down the corridor’. Averell Harriman’s bedroom door was open and Ismay went in. He was told that Churchill had arrived a few minutes before ‘in a yellow sweater, covering a short nightshirt, his pink legs exposed’, muttering ‘“Hell of a battle. The Hood is sunk, hell of a battle.”’

The news should not have come as such a great surprise. Hood was bound to come off worst in a contest with a strongly armoured opponent whose guns could comfortably outreach her own. She was a battle cruiser not a battleship, and now, at the age of twenty-one, a relatively elderly one at that. Her 42,100-ton displacement made her the biggest ship in the navy. But at the time she was designed, the existing technology did not allow her to carry eight 15-inch guns as well as heavy armour. Subsequent refits had failed to add adequate protection. Her deck armour was an inch thick in places and only three inches thick over the magazines where the shells and charges were stored. Bismarck’s deck was plated all over with between 4.2 and 4.7 inches of Krupp steel. Hood was highly vulnerable to Bismarck’s shells, especially if they were fired at a high trajectory. It was recognized that ‘plunging fire’, as it was called, would slice easily through her armour decking. Holland had known this better than anyone. Yet he had chosen to gamble at intercepting his adversary sideways-on, laying himself open to the battleship’s broadsides rather than getting ahead of the German force and confronting it head-on – which would have reduced the size of the target he presented.

The battle, though, had not been altogether one-sided. The three shells that Prince of Wales managed to land on Bismarck knocked out one of her electrical plants, flooding a boiler room and rupturing fuel tanks. She could now only manage a maximum speed of twenty-eight knots, trailing an iridescent banner of spilled oil in her wake. In this state a prolonged raiding expedition was out of the question.

Lütjens was faced with two choices. He could turn round and go home, having scored a memorable victory, and await further chances for glory. Or he could hold course and seek the safety of the French coast to recuperate. It was a desperate dilemma. If he carried on, he knew that his ships were in a race against the avenging forces of the British fleet, and that the chances of interception were high. Turning back was equally perilous. The navy would be alerted and waiting. So, too, would the air force, whose bombers were within easy reach of his homeward routes. He chose to press on, aiming to run for St Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, where there was a dry dock big enough to carry out repairs.

The Brittany ports were still nearly two thousand miles away and two enemy naval forces were converging on the German ships. Trailing doggedly in their wakes as they pressed on southwards were the Suffolk, Norfolk and Prince of Wales. By now, Tovey and the Home Fleet were hurrying south-west on a course which he hoped would place his ships in a position to cut off Lütjens’ retreat at about 9 a.m. the following day.

Bismarck ploughed on through worsening weather. Her bows were 3 degrees down in the water, the result of a hit in the foredeck from a shell fired by the Prince of Wales. The Prinz Eugen, though, was unscathed. As long as she was tied to Bismarck her chances of remaining so diminished. On the afternoon of the 24th, Lütjens decided to set her free. He signalled her commander Kapitän zur See Helmuth Brinkmann his intention to take advantage of the next squall to turn to westwards in the hope of shaking off Suffolk and Norfolk. The Prinz Eugen was to carry on the Atlantic raiding mission alone. Bismarck briefly turned on her pursuers to buy time for her consort while she got away.

That evening she was butting westwards through heavy weather when Tovey decided to throw the aircraft aboard the carrier Victorious into the hunt. At 10 p.m. a small force of Swordfish torpedo bombers and Fulmar fighter reconnaissance aircraft flew off into a storm-swept night. Despite the conditions they tracked down the Bismarck 120 miles ahead. One Swordfish got off a torpedo that struck the hull. The point of impact was at the thickest part of the armoured belt and the damage was slight. The explosion, however, shook loose the collision mats sealing the earlier damage, causing renewed flooding and pushing the battleship further down at the bows.

Fairey Swordfish

As Sunday, 25 May dawned, the Bismarck’s luck turned. Frantic work by the crew had restored some speed. Her pursuers, though, had been forced to slow down. On entering the broad waters of the North Atlantic, Suffolk and Norfolk began to zigzag to shake off any waiting U-boats. By 3 a.m. they had lost radar contact with their quarry. Without the tracking reports of the heavy cruisers to assist him, the great prize might slip from Tovey’s grasp. It was an appalling prospect.

He had been asleep in his sea cabin on King George V, about a hundred miles to the south and east of where Bismarck was last sighted when he was shaken awake with the bad news. He climbed up through two decks to the plotting office for a staff conference. His ships were now widely dispersed and half of them were running low on fuel. The weather was bad and promised to worsen, cutting down the chances of either the aircraft aboard Victorious or coastal-based long-range reconnaissance planes spotting Bismarck.

In the absence of real information about her condition, there were two eventualities to consider. Bismarck might be undamaged, in which case she would be heading west to carry out her raiding mission. Or she might be in trouble and heading east towards a French port. He decided to concentrate his forces on searching to the west. In the meantime, more ships were approaching from the south which could help comb the east.

Force H, an ad hoc fleet which operated out of Gibraltar under the command of Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, had been ordered north to join the hunt. At its core were Somerville’s flagship, the ageing battle cruiser Renown, the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire and the light cruiser Sheffield. Most importantly for what was to come, it included an aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal, with twenty Swordfish torpedo bombers aboard, crewed by men who had seen much action in the Mediterranean.

For a while it seemed the pursuers had regained the scent. Lütjens, unaware that he had shaken off the pursuit, radioed a situation signal to the Naval Group Command West headquarters in Paris. It was picked up by HF/DF receivers at British shore stations and, although it would take time for the code to be broken, it at least gave an indication of Bismarck’s whereabouts. She was somewhere to Tovey’s east but more than that was impossible to say. Tovey and his staff took the view that she was heading for home and hurried back on his own track away from his quarry.

As the morning advanced, the level of desperation rose. The damp, showery weather over Buckinghamshire matched the grey mood inside Chequers. To Churchill, Bismarck’s disappearance was an avoidable disaster. She should have been finished off when the chance arose in the Denmark Strait. His anger fell on Admiral Wake-Walker, and Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales, who in Churchill’s opinion should have carried on engaging Bismarck even if to do so invited disaster. At around noon he returned to London and throughout the rest of the day made frequent, scowling appearances in the Admiralty’s Operational Control Centre, greatly intensifying the anxieties of the staff as they struggled to make sense of the situation.

For the rest of the day Bismarck’s chances improved with each passing hour. An increase in German naval and air force radio traffic along the Brittany coast eventually persuaded the Admiralty that the battleship was heading to Brest or St Nazaire, and orders were issued to change course, but hours of steaming time had been lost and one by one the British ships were breaking off the search as they headed off to refuel.

Bismarck’s precise course was not known. Reconnaissance flights by RAF Coastal Command had turned up nothing and the weather was worsening, with thick cloud and low visibility forecast.

By mid-morning on Monday, 26 May, Bismarck was only a day from safety. The mood on board was lightening. They might not have reaped the glory promised by Kapitän Lindemann at the start of the voyage, but they would be content with survival. Even so, there was no slackening of concentration among the ship’s anti-aircraft crews. At 10.30 they caught a glimpse of a large twin-engined aircraft through a hole in the blanket of cloud overhead. The alarm was sounded and the thud of outgoing flak could be heard over the rising wind.

The aeroplane was a PBY Catalina long-range reconnaissance seaplane. It was operated by Coastal Command’s 209 Squadron and had taken off on a search mission from the base at Loch Erne in Northern Ireland at 3.45 that morning. The men at the controls, though, were not British but Americans. US Navy Flying Officer Dennis Briggs and Ensign Leonard B. Smith had volunteered to go with an assignment of Catalinas, supplied to Britain under the Lend-Lease agreement, to train up British crews. The mission went far beyond their supposed duties, but was in keeping with President Roosevelt’s determination to offer Churchill every assistance short of actually entering the war on Britain’s side.

Smith had seen the ship through a patch of clear sky from ten miles away and he and Briggs had brought it in through the murk hoping to track it from a safe distance. Instead they had emerged directly overhead providing the anti-aircraft gunners with a few seconds of point-blank firing time. Bullets and shells punched through wings and fuselage and one shell punctured the floor of the pilots’ cabin. But then they were smothered once again in cloud, and radioing back the sensational news. Bismarck had been found and from now on she would be tracked by shadowing aircraft.

For those on board there was still hope. They were 790 miles north-west of Brest at the time of the sighting and they did not need to reach port to find relative safety. The U-boats and the Focke-Wulf Condor bombers operating from the Brittany coast were daunting deterrents to the British pursuers. By now most of the heavy ships had departed in search of fuel, leaving only King George V and Rodney, and they were far away, too far to make an interception if Bismarck maintained her speed.

That left Somerville’s Force H, which was approaching Bismarck from the south. The Ark Royal was less than a hundred miles from the battleship at the time of the Catalina sighting. Her Swordfish had been searching in the same area and soon sighted their quarry. There was no question of engaging. Somerville’s flagship, Renown, was an old-fashioned battle cruiser and no match for the Bismarck, even in her damaged state. Nor were the cruisers Dorsetshire and Sheffield. At noon, Somerville detached Sheffield to pick up Bismarck’s trail with instructions to follow her at a safe distance.

He calculated that the best chance lay in an aerial attack that would slow her down and allow Tovey to catch up. ‘Slim’ Somerville was a popular commander, who sometimes took exercise before breakfast by rowing a skiff round his ships. His Fleet Air Arm crews thought he had a better understanding of the uses of aircraft than most admirals. He had learned to fly himself and sometimes flew as a passenger on training flights ‘just for fun’.

Perhaps his Swordfish, flimsy and insubstantial though they seemed against the power of the elements and the might of their opponent, might complete the job themselves. ‘With any luck we may be able to finish her before the Home Fleet arrives,’ he said in a message to the crews.

At 2.50 p.m., fifteen Swordfish from 818 and 820 Squadrons took off to attempt an attack. The weather all day had been atrocious. Even the Ark Royal, which reared sixty feet above the waves in calm seas, had green water coursing over her bow. The crews stepped out onto the bucking deck and groped their way to their aircraft. ‘The after end of the flight deck … was pitching something like fifty feet up and down,’ recalled Sub-Lieutenant Charles Friend, an observer. ‘The take offs were awesome in the extreme. The aircraft, as their throttles were opened, instead of charging forward on a level deck were at one moment breasting a slippery slope and the next plunging downhill towards the huge seas ahead and below.’

The force was led by Lieutenant Commander James Stewart-Moore, who flew as an observer. He was eager and confident as he prepared to take off. He admired Somerville and was anxious to do him proud as ‘he took good care of us and we did our best for him’.

The mission seemed ‘fairly straightforward’. One of the Swordfish in his flight was equipped with radar which would aid the hunt. At the pre-operational briefing he was assured that there were no British ships in the search area which was ‘a great help as it meant we did not have to identify the ships before we started our attack’.

Despite the howling Force 8 gale all the aircraft got off safely. The radar-equipped machine led the way. It was operated by the observer, Sub-Lieutenant N. C. Cooper. There was no wireless communication between aircraft and crews relied on hand signals. ‘After a while I saw Cooper waving to me,’ Stewart-Moore recalled. Cooper indicated that the set had picked up something twenty miles away to starboard. This was puzzling. The position did not seem to correspond with the last known course of the Bismarck. Nonetheless, as Stewart-Moore had been told there were no British ships in the area, ‘it had to be German’. As they swooped down through the clouds to torpedo-dropping height, keeping close together, ‘everything looked promising’.

But as soon as they were clear of the clouds, his pilot, Lieutenant Hugh de Graff Hunter, ‘called to me down the voice pipe, “It’s the Sheffield”’. Instead of Bismarck, they had come across the cruiser Somerville had detached to shadow her. Hunter waggled his wings furiously to alert the other aircraft but it was too late. One by one, they dropped their ‘kippers’, as they called their torpedoes, while their commander ‘watched from above, horrified and praying for a miracle’.

To his enormous relief ‘the miracle department was paying attention to incoming prayers and the miracle was provided at once. Without any apparent reason, all the torpedoes except one or two, blew up within half a minute of striking the water.’

Back on board Ark Royal they were met with ‘profuse apologies’ for the intelligence cock-up. Plans were already in place for another strike. Stewart-Moore was anxious to alert his superiors about the premature detonation of the torpedoes. They were the standard 18-inch-diameter model, but equipped with an innovative Duplex magnetic firing pistol. When these were fitted, the torpedoes were set to run just below the target ship. The pistol was activated by the sudden change in the magnetic field surrounding the torpedo, made by the steel hull. The ship then caught the full force of the subsequent blast. The old-fashioned pistols were activated by the torpedo colliding with its target. The disadvantage was that much of the force of the explosion was vented uselessly into the atmosphere.

Stewart-Moore guessed that the Duplex mechanisms had been disoriented by the heavy swell, causing them to go off early. The contact pistols stood a much better chance in the rough seas. He found it very hard to get anyone to listen to him, however. Eventually it was Somerville himself, a torpedo specialist in his early days, who ordered the detonators to be changed for the next attack.

Six sub-flights of Swordfish, fifteen aircraft in all, were lined up for another attempt before night fell. The attack was led by Lieutenant Commander Tim Coode, of 818 Squadron. His wingman was a twenty-one-year-old Scotsman, Sub-Lieutenant John ‘Jock’ Moffat. He felt the full weight of the expectations pressing down on him and his comrades. ‘It was all on us now,’ he remembered. ‘It was a question of salvaging our reputations. There was serious concern that we didn’t make a mess of this again. By now we were under no illusions about how important this was to the Navy and to Churchill and we felt under enormous pressure to pull it off.’

As the Swordfish were brought up from the hangars below, the weather worsened steadily. On the flight deck ‘the wind hit you like a hammer, threatening to knock you down … the deck crews were really struggling with the aircraft, spray was coming over the side and the waves were breaking over the front of the flight deck’. The 22,000-ton Ark Royal was bucking and sliding as he took off. ‘I felt that I was being thrown into the air rather than lifting off,’ he wrote. ‘I was struggling to control the aircraft while the wheels were still on the deck, watching for a sideways gust that might push me into the bridge, praying that we would clear the tops of the mountainous waves.’

They were helped on their way by the Deck Control Officer, Lieutenant Commander Pat Stringer, who, at well over six feet tall, had to be anchored with a harness to a stanchion to avoid being blown overboard. Stringer had an instinctive understanding of the ship’s position in relation to the sea. ‘He would signal to start the take off when he sensed that the ship was at the bottom of a big wave so that even if I thought that I was taking off downhill, the bows would swing up at the last moment and I would be flying above the big Atlantic swell rather than into it.’

Eventually all the aircraft were airborne and after forming up together headed off. Moffat tucked in behind Coode and within a few minutes they had found – and correctly identified – Sheffield. The signal lamp winking from the deck told them that Bismarck was only twelve miles ahead. They were flying low, at 500 feet, and Coode ordered them to climb to 6,000 feet. They broke through a thick blanket of cloud into clear, freezing air. Moffat’s first concern was the ice forming on the leading edges of his wings and main struts. It was quickly overtaken by alarm at the black smoke from exploding shells mushrooming all around them. ‘We knew then that Bismarck was nearby and we assumed she had found us on her radar.’ Coode signalled them to form a line astern and they dived through the cloud. Almost immediately they lost sight of each other. When Moffat broke out of the cloud at 300 feet he found he was alone.

In the pre-operational briefing the pilots had been given a detailed plan of attack. It followed the standard Fleet Air Arm method for firing torpedoes at ships at sea. The first three flights were to come in on the port beam from differing bearings. The second wave would do the same on the starboard side. The intention was to force the anti-aircraft gunners to divide their attentions between two targets and to bracket the ship with torpedoes, severely restricting its ability to steer out of their path.

Any chance of this happening had now vanished. There were no other aircraft in sight. Moffat glanced around. There, about two miles away to the east, was the Bismarck. ‘Even at this distance the brute seemed enormous to me,’ he recalled. He turned to his right towards her. Almost immediately ‘there was a red glow in the clouds ahead of me about a hundred yards away as anti-aircraft shells exploded’. Then the gunners were aiming just ahead of him and their fire threw up ‘walls of water’ in his path. Two shells erupted next to and below the Swordfish, knocking it 90 degrees off course. Moffat dropped to fifty feet, just above the height where he might catch a wave and cartwheel in to the sea.

This seemed to be below the angle at which the flak guns could operate but, in their place, cannon and machine guns were pumping out red tracer which flowed towards Moffat and his two-man crew ‘in a torrent’. As he raced towards the target he felt that ‘every gun on the ship was aiming at me’. He could not believe that he was flying straight into the hail of fire. ‘Every instinct was screaming at me to duck, turn away, do anything.’ But he suppressed his fear and pressed grimly on as the target grew larger and larger.

His training taught him to assess the speed of the ship under attack and fire ahead, using a simple marked rod mounted horizontally along the top of the cockpit to calculate the correct distance to lay off. With Bismarck looming ahead of him, Moffat felt he could not miss. ‘I thought, I’m still flying. If I can get rid of this torpedo and get the hell out of here, we might survive.’ He was about to press the release button on the throttle when he heard his observer, Sub-Lieutenant John ‘Dusty’ Miller, shouting ‘Not yet, John, not yet!’ Moffat looked back to see Miller’s ‘backside in the air … there he was hanging over the side and his head [was] down underneath the aeroplane and he was shouting “not yet!”’ Moffat realized what was going on. ‘It dawned on me that if I dropped that torpedo and it struck the top of a wave it could go anywhere but where it’s supposed to.’ Miller was waiting for a trough. Then ‘he shouted “let her go!” and the next [moment he] was saying “John, we’ve got a runner.”’

Relieved of the torpedo’s ton weight, the Swordfish leapt upwards and it was all Moffat could do to wrestle it down below the gunfire streaming overhead. It would have taken ninety seconds to follow the track of the torpedo to the target. Hanging around meant certain death. Moffat put the Swordfish into a ‘ski turn. I gave the engine full lick and I stood on my left rudder and I shuddered round flat.’ It was a manoeuvre that only the slow-moving Swordfish could pull off and it kept them down beneath the lowest elevation of the guns. He headed away at maximum speed, keeping low until he judged it was safe to climb into the cover of the clouds. He had no idea of whether his torpedo had found its target or not.

There was one last hazard to face. When he reached Ark Royal the deck was still heaving. As he finally touched down ‘there was nothing more welcoming than the thump of the wheels on the deck and the clatter of the hook catching on the arrestor wire’. Clambering down from the cockpit he felt light-headed from adrenalin and fatigue. He told the debriefers the little he could, then headed below for a special meal which he was too tense to eat.

The mood among the crews was subdued. Everyone had been disoriented by the cloud and the attacks had all taken place in ones and twos. Only two, possibly three torpedoes had been seen to hit the target. That was not a cause for celebration. Bismarck’s thick armour meant that even a direct hit amidships would not necessarily prove fatal, as the attacks from Victorious had shown. Moffat thought he might have been responsible for one recorded strike. A pilot who followed him in saw a torpedo exploding two-thirds of the way down the port side.

Visibility was too bad for another attempt that night but they would be sent off again the following morning. Someone remarked gloomily that ‘the Light Brigade had only been asked to do it once’. Then a stream of information started to arrive that lifted their spirits. Sheffield signalled that the Bismarck had slowed down. Then came the astonishing news that she had turned round and was heading straight towards the battleship King George V, which was approaching from the north. A little later, two Swordfish returned to Ark Royal from a long reconnaissance to report that Bismarck had lost speed and had steamed round in two full circles. HMS Zulu, which by now had arrived on the scene, confirmed it: Bismarck had been stopped, less than five hundred miles from the French coast.

Moffat learned later that it was probably his torpedo that had stopped her. It had exploded at the battleship’s stern, jamming her rudders at 12 degrees and making steering impossible. With that, Bismarck’s fate was sealed. Throughout the night she was subjected to repeated torpedo attacks from fast destroyers which had now caught up. In the morning, King George V and Rodney arrived and closed for the kill. The end was never in doubt but it still took forty-five minutes of pounding from the two British battleships and the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire before the Bismarck’s big guns stopped firing. By then Lütjens was dead, probably killed when a shell from King George V hit the bridge. Dorsetshire administered the coup de grâce. An able seaman on board, A. E. Franklin, watched two 21-inch torpedoes leave the cruiser’s tubes then saw ‘a tremendous explosion … the fish having truly planted themselves in the bowels of the Bismarck far below the water line amidships’. Dorsetshire closed to 1,000 yards to deliver another torpedo which struck squarely on the port side.