I Sank The Bismarck Page 20

  There was increasing speculation over where the German battleship had got to. Underneath the chart room in the island a briefing room was in almost permanent session as people wandered in to find out the latest news, and there was an active discussion about when, and if, we would be asked to go into action. In the absence of any hard information, speculation filled the vacuum; people even wondered if Bismarck would try to head, not for St-Nazaire, but for the Mediterranean to strengthen the Italian navy. While Force H was at sea in the Atlantic there would be little to stop her from bombarding Gibraltar.

  I have to say that, while I was aware that all this speculation was going on, like most of the Swordfish pilots I was largely concerned about the prospect of flying while the weather was as bad as it was. Take-off and landing called for good judgement and strong nerves, and flying the planes through such strong winds and thick clouds was arduous. The observers had to be spot on with their navigation as well. Flying through rain and wind in the open cockpits of the Swordfish was also tough. I saw many pilots and observers helped out of their cockpits by the deck crew because they were so stiff from the cold. But without question the possibility of flying against Bismarck was also at the back of my mind and I knew that it was going to be no picnic.

  Since the manoeuvre to throw off Suffolk and Norfolk had been perfectly executed, Admiral Lutjens ought to have been feeling extremely confident. Yet this was not the case. Remarkably, he had no idea that he had managed to shake off his pursuers and so continued eastwards in ignorance of his increasing safety. Because of this, he then made an exceptional error of judgement. Three hours after Suffolk signalled that she had lost contact with Bismarck, Lutjens signalled to his superiors that two cruisers and a battleship continued to maintain contact. No one knows why this message was sent, or what led Lutjens to believe that his turn to the east had not succeeded in fooling Suffolk.

  His error was compounded two hours later when he sent another, much longer message, lasting 36 minutes, that gave a brief history of events since his first contact with the cruisers in the Denmark Strait. He stressed that the British ships were fitted with very good radar (he was so impressed with it that he overestimated its range by 20 per cent) and that his own had failed with the first salvoes from his main gun turrets. The signal concluded with the fact that he had detached Prinz Eugen to continue the mission on her own.

  The German navy had its own listening posts in France and had been able to pick up and decode the enormous amount of signal traffic between British ships and the Admiralty since the first sighting of Bismarck. They knew a great deal – more than Lutjens did, in fact – about the positions of the warships hunting him. After his first signal to them they advised him that he had in fact lost his pursuers. They knew this because there had been no more signals from Suffolk after she communicated that she had lost contact. It remains a mystery why the wireless room in Bismarck had not also noticed this and reported it. In addition, Lutjens and everyone on board Bismarck believed that they had been exchanging fire with King George V, but the German navy HQ was aware that it was George V's sister ship, the newly commissioned Prince of Wales.

  Tragically for Lutjens, the information that he had lost them was not received until after his second message and the damage was done. It was these signals that enabled the Admiralty and the ships at sea to work out where Bismarck was. Again, those in Bismarck were ignorant of this. Why Lutjens sent the signals will never be known, but it is even more perplexing why he felt the need to send such a long signal, describing the previous day's events in such detail. He must have been aware that the German navy was intercepting British signals and would thus have a very good idea of the state of play. It is possible that Lutjens had suffered some sort of emotional collapse.

  From the British point of view, he had sunk Hood, damaged Prince of Wales and now we had lost contact with his ship. I don't think anyone in either the navy or the Admiralty in London was feeling very happy, or very confident. Admiral Tovey had even taken the Home Fleet in the wrong direction, mistakenly calculating the coordinates from the results of the direction-finding stations. Error was being compounded by error.

  Admiral Lutjens, however, must have seen it differently. This victory over the Royal Navy was not his main mission. Given command by Hitler of the biggest and finest ship in the German navy specifically in order to bring carnage to the Atlantic, his battle with Hood and Prince of Wales was a failure on his part because its consequences were that he now had to abandon his mission and beat it back to port. Even though we would see it as a huge propaganda success for the Germans, the latest public sign that the Royal Navy was losing its grip, for Lutjens his arrival in St-Nazaire for repairs would be nothing short of a humiliating retreat. Perhaps his long signal was motivated by a desire to smooth the path for himself on his return.

  This is the only reasonable explanation for his actions, and I think it is borne out by accounts of the speech that he made to the crew of Bismarck at midday on the 25th. He wanted to sum up the situation and confirm officially what most of them already informally knew: that they were heading for a French port. It was an opportunity to tell the truth about the situation and give a real boost to the crew's morale. Those young men in Bismarck really needed some leadership at that moment; they needed officers like our Captain Maund in the Ark, or Rear Admiral Somerville, who could send some slightly rude signals to each other at the drop of a hat. Sadly for them, Lutjens was not in the same mould. Instead, he predicted that they would face yet another battle and that they would fight until the gun barrels grew red and the last shell had been fired. He then ended by saying that the question for them as sailors now was victory or death. As a young man in wartime, seeing colleagues and friends disappear on a mission, I knew that I never thanked anybody for reminding me that I too might die. The situation was made bearable only by ignoring that uncomfortable fact as much as possible, and by concentrating on the here and now. It was useless to worry about the future, so you just didn't think about it. I can sympathize with the young crew of Bismarck, many of whom had come straight out of training school. Listening to their admiral talk about death or glory must have been intensely depressing. Their morale plummeted, as did everybody's on the ship. Even the officers started walking about with unbuttoned lifejackets.

  Something was clearly going wrong on the bridge of Bismarck that day, because an hour later Captain Ernst Lindemann made a second broadcast, in which he tried to repair the damage done by Lutjens. Lindemann wanted to lift the crew, so he told them that they would put one over on the enemy and soon reach a French port. This helped slightly, and confirmation that Bismarck had lost her pursuers also had a positive effect. As the day continued, optimism increased. Bismarck had seen no sign of any of our planes or warships for the whole day: it must have seemed that her chances of making it to safety were increasing hour by hour, as in fact they were.

  There was other good news. Divers had managed to enter the flooded part of the bow section and manually open some valves so that 100 tons more fuel oil were available. Also, engineers had carried out some remedial work to the machinery affected by the flooding of one of the port boiler rooms so that an adequate supply of distilled water was available to all the high-pressure boilers. These measures did not fundamentally change the situation, but they alleviated problems that might have slowed Bismarck even further. They also helped boost morale, serving to reaffirm to the crew that their fate was still in their own hands. The day ended without further incident.

  Early in the morning of 26 May the captain made another announcement. 'We have now passed most of Ireland on our way to St-Nazaire,' he said. 'Around noon we will be in the U-boats' operational area and within range of German aircraft. We can count on the appearance of Condor aircraft after that.' This message seemed to confirm the captain's original upbeat broadcast and cheers were heard around the ship. The crew could have been forgiven for thinking that they had outrun the British navy.

  Then, later on i
n the morning of the 26th, as Bismarck steamed ahead towards safety, her alarm claxons started rattling and the tannoy announced that there was an aircraft on the port beam. Flying in and out of the clouds was a Catalina flying boat. The noise of the anti-aircraft guns firing once more was a rude shock to all on board – they knew instantly that they had again been discovered by their enemy. Their thirty-one hours of hope had finished. The radio room picked up the signal that the Catalina was even now transmitting, then half an hour later another aircraft came into view. This was a more ominous sight. The aircraft had wheels, not floats, which indicated that there was an aircraft carrier within flying range. If there was a carrier, then there would be other surface units also. Where were they – ahead or behind? And would they be able to make an interception before the Luftwaffe appeared in the skies above them? Bismarck was now just 700 nautical miles from St-Nazaire – fewer than twelve hours from safety.

  Back on Ark Royal, the information that several direction-finding stations in the UK had picked up a radio signal from Bismarck and the position lines they had established were broadcast to the fleet. This was not an ideal fix, because the lines were almost parallel to each other, but it did confirm that the battleship had changed course to the south-east and neither returned to Greenland nor continued into the middle of the Atlantic.

  At midday on the 25th I was informed that plans were being prepared to search for Bismarck the next day, starting at daybreak. The air staff started looking at three patterns that would cover a range of options depending on Bismarck's estimated speed, from a top speed of 25 knots to as slow as 16 knots; the plans would also take into account the possibility that the ship would make a wide detour to the south before finally heading for St-Nazaire. At that time we had no idea that she was damaged, or suffering a fuel problem, and were still not aware that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen had separated.

  The flight schedules and crew rosters were pinned up outside the wardroom and in the squadron offices later that afternoon, and from them I deduced that we were going to make our first search at 0700 the next day, over an area of 140 miles by 90, and it was expected that we ought to have made contact by 0800. If we drew a blank there would be a second search at 1300, then a third later in the afternoon if that also failed. I would learn my particular search area at the briefing in the morning.

  The stormy weather, however, did not abate. By the end of the day we were punching into a north-westerly gale and also running into a strong southerly current. Our speed was cut to 17 knots and it seemed that we wouldn't reach our desired flying-off position by 0700. Would Bismarck slip ahead of us? Our chances of intercepting her seemed to be diminishing.

  Next morning, 26 May, Ark Royal was running into very high seas and wisps of spray were reaching as high as the bridge. The first dawn anti-submarine patrol was cancelled. The navigation officer was sent to measure the movement of the flight deck and he reported that it was 56 feet. This seemed impossible. No aircraft had ever been flown from the deck of a carrier in such weather. No pilot would jump at the chance to land on a runway that was rising and falling over 50 feet just as the aircraft touched down, but that was what we were being asked to do. The conditions were noted in the ship's report of proceedings, the daily diary of events on board, as 'extremely severe and entailing a great hazard to aircraft.' I think that says it all.

  Ten Swordfish were going to make the first search and they were brought up on the lifts from the hangar decks. We had to get extra ratings to help the normal deck crew hold the aircraft down in the gale-force winds, which were gusting at Force 7. Combined with our speed into it, the fitters and the riggers were struggling with winds of 50 miles an hour over the flight deck. The whole ship was covered in spray and the Ark was digging into the Atlantic waves, which were beginning to break green over the flight deck, 63 feet up from the waterline.

  Taking off from the plunging deck I formed up, then flew off to my assigned search area. Radiating from the Ark, each Swordfish would patrol a small segment of a rectangular area that would cover the whole 180 degrees to the west for a depth of 70 miles. I would be in the air for around three and a half hours. On the northern boundary of the search area there was some overlap, with searches being carried out by two Catalinas from Coastal Command – long-range twin-engined flying boats that were operating out of Northern Ireland.

  At about 1050, the wireless office in the Ark intercepted a signal from one of the Catalinas saying that they had spotted Bismarck about 50 miles to the west, within the area being searched by the Swordfish. There was enormous excitement at this news, and this increased when, twenty minutes later, one of our Swordfish reported that she too had a battleship in sight, giving the same position as that of the Catalina. There was almost no doubt now, although the observer of the Swordfish, Sub-Lieutenant Elias from 810 Squadron, was careful to say 'battleship' – he was still not certain it was Bismarck. He was aware that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, and Scharnhorst as well, actually had very similar silhouettes, so he was still uncertain which ship he had spotted. He was quite right: you must report back only what you can be sure of.

  We still did not know that Prinz Eugen had separated from Bismarck, or indeed that Scharnhorst had not secretly put to sea. The standard drill in this situation was that, once a sighting had been made, the Swordfish in the adjacent search area would also attempt to respond to the signal and make contact. We now had two Swordfish identifying the target and there was no doubt in most people's minds that we had finally located Bismarck again, though it was yet to be confirmed. I continued to patrol my area until it was time to head back to the Ark to make an extremely difficult landing on the plunging deck. Surely, I thought, it cannot get worse than this. I found, of course, that the Ark was in full swing as a result of the sighting of Bismarck.

  We could not afford to lose her this time. Six more Swordfish had already been fitted with long-range tanks to take over the job of shadowing as soon as the target had been found. Two of these now took off to relieve the crew that had found her and the other one that had joined them as back-up. They were having a hard job of it, as they were being fired on by the ship whenever they popped out of cloud, and the fire was accurate and concentrated. It made the job of identification that much harder. Meanwhile, the other Swordfish that had been searching were returning to the Ark to land on. It was a hazardous business, as the deck was still pitching wildly, and one aircraft was caught by the rising stern and swatted like a fly, its undercarriage crushed beneath it and its lower wing buckled. Fortunately, although the crew were shaken and stirred, they were not badly hurt. The broken plane caused a big hold-up until the wreckage could be pushed overboard so that the rest of the patrol could land, some of them probably flying on their last teaspoonful of petrol because of the delay.

  The two Swordfish that had actually spotted the brute we were hunting arrived back, finally relieved by the two long-range Swordfish, and their pilots and observers were hustled into the bridge to be interrogated by the senior officers. They were still not prepared to say categorically that the ship they had seen was Bismarck.

  'Did you see more than one ship?' they were asked.

  'No, there was just the one.'

  'Could you say what it was?'

  'I think it was Bismarck, but her silhouette was more like Prinz Eugen.'

  'Was there a gap between the funnel and the bridge?'

  'No, there was not.'

  It was never going to be anything more than inconclusive, but Rear Admiral Somerville was pressing for answers, as was everyone else in the Home Fleet and the Admiralty. The captain of Ark Royal sent a message back to Somerville in Renown: 'There is only one enemy ship. The evidence favours her being the Prinz Eugen. I am sure, however, she is the Bismarck.'

  So the die was cast. It was a gamble with very high stakes, and I am glad that I did not have to commit myself.

  At this point, it became clear to everybody in the Ark, and in Force H, from Admiral Somerville down to the engine
ers in the Ark's boiler room, that unless aircraft from Ark Royal could reduce the enemy's speed, Bismarck could not be overhauled by our battleships until she was well within the range of bombers from the French coast, which would be around midday the following day. An extra complication, of which we were unaware at the time but which was causing added anxiety, was that Admiral Tovey, pursuing Bismarck in his flagship King George V, was running very low on fuel.

  This problem had been compounded by the navigation officer in King George V having made an error in his calculations. He had arrived at a position, based on the radio fixes supplied to him by the Admiralty, which seemed to show that Bismarck was heading north. Admiral Tovey took this as evidence that Lutjens was going to try to make it back through the Norwegian Sea and signalled all the ships under his command to turn north. The Admiralty, in the meantime, had carried out their own calculations and come to the correct conclusion. It took some time to persuade Tovey that he was wrong, and by the time he realized his error and changed course yet again to the east, he was 150 nautical miles astern of Bismarck and incapable of making up the distance. In truth, it was the Ark or nothing.

  I certainly didn't know about Admiral Tovey's mistake. I was getting some food and a hot drink, but it was clear to me that we were preparing to make a torpedo attack. It didn't really matter what the target was or how important: the same urgency and anticipation spread throughout the ship. Even in the engine room, the stokers and engineers would be told that they needed to be ready to manoeuvre the ship for flying operations. They would be told through the intercom what was happening, and even on a ship as big as the Ark news spreads very quickly. Aircraft were being overhauled and refuelled in the hangar deck. Torpedoes on their trolleys were wheeled forward, ready to be fastened underneath the fuselage once the Swordfish were brought up to the flight deck and ranged aft. Extra ratings were mobilized to assist on the careering flight deck. Then a briefing about the expected attack on Bismarck got under way in the observers' office. Pilots were hastily informed of the orders for the mission by their squadron writers and told their aircraft and their order in the take-off.