I Sank The Bismarck Read online

  So we went back to Colombo, in the company of Illustrious and Indomitable, patrolling the Indian Ocean, crisscrossing the Equator, escorting convoys to India, training and exercising but never coming across the Japanese who, after their carrier fleet had made airborne attacks on Colombo and Calcutta, and their submarine foray to Madagascar, had abandoned any expeditions into the Indian Ocean. With a full programme of flying, coordinating with two other carriers, there were plenty of accidents, and one stands out in my mind as being as dreadful as any I had witnessed.

  We were towing a target buoy behind us for a dive-bombing exercise and a Swordfish from Illustrious was taking part. The plane was at 1,000 feet when the pilot rolled and went into his dive, and suddenly the wings on his plane folded back. I had heard stories of occasions when the bolts holding the wings straight had started to loosen, but I had never experienced it, nor did I know anyone else who had. The bolts were checked by the rigger each time the wings were straightened after coming up from the hangar deck.

  But now there was nothing to be done. The Swordfish continued uncontrollably in its dive: it went straight down vertically, hitting the sea at 200 miles an hour. There was no wreckage and no survivors, of course, despite the fact that a destroyer circled the area for some time. I think it was the most heart-wrenching accident that I ever saw, and I have seen a few.

  By August we learned that we were scheduled to return to the UK via Cape Town – a move which I had wished for for some time.

  Shortly before this we left Colombo for Mombasa and then were due to sail on and call at Durban. One evening, Brok Brokensha knocked on my cabin door and asked me to play a tune for him on my fiddle. Brok was an old colleague, originally a Skua pilot on Ark Royal; he was also one of my South African friends at Arbroath. In fact, he was one of the three I had left at the hotel in Princes Street in Edinburgh on my way to visit my parents on my last leave before joining the Ark myself. We had met up again on the 'Formy', where he was flying Grumman Wildcats. He was a great pilot and had shot down several enemy aircraft, being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He had married a girl he met in Scotland, a real stunning beauty, and I liked him a great deal. He had the cabin opposite mine and we often spent time in each other's company.

  We sat and talked that night and I played, at his request, 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes' on my violin. Then we turned in, as I had to be on deck first thing, and I knew Brok was on the first combat air patrol to be launched the next morning.

  Next morning, Brok's Martlet was ranged up and was scheduled to be the first for take-off, but there was no sign of him. Despite repeated calls on the tannoy for Lieutenant Brokensha to report to the flight deck, he still didn't turn up, so eventually I climbed into the cockpit of his plane and taxied it out of the way so that the rest of the section could take off. When the flying off was finished I went down to Brok's cabin. His bunk had not been slept in. We never found him. The carrier was searched from keel to flight deck, but there was not a trace of him. Brok came from Durban, and when we docked there we had a difficult visit from his parents, who were naturally distraught, but couldn't offer any reason for his disappearance. I was the last person to see him alive and continually went over in my mind that last evening that I saw him, when he had come to my cabin, but his behaviour had seemed perfectly normal. It was a complete mystery, and a very sad one.

  So we left Durban, made a halt at Cape Town and Sierra Leone, and eventually docked at Greenock. After a couple of weeks' leave I was sent as an instructor to 824 Squadron to assist in deck-landing training.

  I had been there a few weeks when I collapsed with a very high fever. At first I imagined that I had suddenly started a bout of malaria, although I had not suffered from it at all during my sometimes arduous postings in the Eastern Fleet. I had been extremely nervous of getting it while I was based at Mackinnon Road, but unlike many others there I had escaped it. When a Wren saw me, however, she immediately called for an ambulance and rushed me to hospital. She was right. My arm and left shoulder had started to swell, and in the emergency ward I was diagnosed as having septicaemia. I was seriously ill for around ten days, drifting in and out of consciousness, until I awoke, very thin and weak, to observe a buxom matron with more medals on her chest than Montgomery standing next to me. I was extremely lucky to be alive, she told me, and I believed her. I think that my natural resistance to infection had been weakened by the inoculations I had been given at the start of my cruise on Formidable, and the stress and strains of the tour of duty had not helped, but to this day I still do not know why I became so ill without any warning.

  On the day the matron said that I was fit enough to go for a walk, she told me to go to the hospital gates and turn right.

  'Why right?' I asked.

  'Because left is to the pub.'

  I did as I was told (I must still have been extremely weak) and walked along a lovely stretch of road with the sea to one side. After a mile I came to the local churchyard, which was enclosed by an old stone wall. Quite prominent was a large, black gravestone with the frightening words engraved on it: HERE LIES JOHN MOFFAT. I could not bring myself to walk past it, and returned to the hospital.

  After a period of sick leave, I had a medical examination and was told that I would not be recommended for carrier duties again. To my surprise, I found that I was not unduly upset. Something had gone out of me – whether it was the endless patrols over the Indian Ocean or the gradual weariness at friends and colleagues dying I don't know, but carrier operations no longer seemed so exciting. It was a truth that I had not admitted when I first heard I was to be sent to Formidable. I had done the best that I ever could in the Ark, and deep down I did not believe that anything could reach that pitch again. I needed something else.

  I was posted to become officer in charge of flying at a satellite base in the south of England, Naval Air Station Cowdray Park, near Midhurst in Sussex. Here I was responsible for the preparation of aircraft to go into squadron service after they had been delivered from the manufacturer. Later, with D-Day approaching, I took on further responsibilities for organizing air transport around the country and communications to liberated areas of France. I became friendly with the CO of a Communications Squadron at Leeon-Solent, Sir George Lewis, who, in civilian life, had been a well-known lawyer. Sadly, shortly after D-Day, he died in northern France when a Hudson aircraft crashed soon after take-off, killing everyone on board, including Admiral Ramsey, who had planned the amphibious operation of 6 June.

  While I was stationed there I persuaded Marjorie to travel down to meet me and get married. At last she consented. The plan was that I would meet her in London and, because travel restrictions in the south of England were getting tighter and tighter as D-Day approached, I would be able to escort her to Midhurst. I had pursued my relationship with her whenever I had the opportunity. Naturally I had not seen her while I was in the Ark or Formidable, but my dogged approach had paid dividends. I had taken regular leaves in Scotland, and gradually she had come round. We had decided to get married some time before I went to Midhurst, but the question really was when. My father, when he heard the news, was outraged. It was utter foolishness to get married in wartime, according to him – but I had never listened.

  So I went to London and stayed at the Russell Hotel in Russell Square in order to be able to get to Euston to meet Marjorie on the platform as her train from Glasgow came in. The next morning, as I was preparing to leave the hotel, there was an air-raid warning. This was not for the Luftwaffe flying overhead, but attacks from V1 flying bombs were now commonplace throughout the south of England. I heard one go over and crouched in the hotel lobby, thinking that I would be late. The all-clear still did not sound. I decided that I had to leave and started to walk north to the station. Suddenly I heard another V1 clattering overhead and then it cut out. I flung myself against a building and waited. The explosion was tremendous: the buzz bomb had landed in the next street. It was dreadful. A horrible stink of burned wood, ru
bble and brick dust got up my nostrils. Pieces of debris were flying everywhere, windows were shattered, and there was a deathly silence after the explosion before the ambulance bells started. I lay on the pavement, unhurt, but a little frightened and covered in dust.

  Eventually the all-clear went and I stood up and dusted myself down. I was nearly an hour late. Running to the station, I hoped Marjorie would still be there. Of course, sometimes the trains were very late. Sometimes they were stopped outside London during an air-raid alert, but I had no way of knowing. I rushed into the station and found it completely empty. All the trains had left, no doubt because of the raid. I went up to a porter and asked about the Glasgow train. Oh, that had been and gone, he said, forty-five minutes ago.

  I didn't know what to do. I walked to the platform where the train should have been standing. At the far end I spotted a figure sitting on two large cases. I rushed down the platform and, sure enough, it was Marjorie. 'You knew I would come, didn't you?' I asked.

  'I couldn't go anywhere,' she replied. 'These cases are full of champagne for the wedding. Go and fetch a porter's trolley.'

  A few days later we were married, at a small church in Midhurst with a guard of honour from the ratings and petty officers at Cowdray Park. It was the best day's work I ever did in my life. Sadly, Marjorie died six years ago, suddenly, while we were on holiday in England. She was the most important influence in my life. Marrying her was the one thing that I can honestly say I have never ever regretted.

  Conclusion

  A Lifetime Later

  I had one other accident in an aircraft shortly after the war had come to an end. I was flight testing an Albacore that had just been returned from engineering work at Lee on Solent and I was taking off from Cowdray Park in the direction of Midhurst. Everything seemed to be fine: lining up at the end of the runway, the engine was running smoothly and all the instruments looked good. I took off easily and started to climb out to 1,000 feet to go round for a few circuits. I had reached perhaps 600 feet when the engine, alarmingly, started to backfire and then cut out completely. It was standard procedure in this situation to attempt to crash straight ahead, but for some reason I decided to attempt a landing back at Cowdray Park.

  I executed a quick turn and, sinking lower and lower, struggled to keep the Albacore on an even keel. There is always a point where you think that at last you have made a fatal mistake, although a crash from 600 feet would also probably have killed me. I managed, however, to coax the plane over the threshold and brought it thumping in to land.

  I was commended for that action, with an entry in green ink in my logbook written and signed by my senior officer to commemorate it. That was my last flying accident until my crash in 2001.

  Within a few months of the war ending I had said goodbye to the navy and started life on Civvy Street, right back in a sense to where I had been at the start of the war. I had some anxious months worrying what my future would be, but I eventually started work in the hotel industry and made a successful career out of it for the rest of my working life.

  Over the years, working as a hotel manager, bringing up two lovely daughters, there has rarely been a day in the sixty-eight years since the events of 26 May 1941 when I have not remembered what it felt like to fly towards that great monster of a ship, the Bismarck, or what I saw the next morning as she toppled over into the sea. I kept those thoughts mostly to myself, and when I attended reunions of the Fleet Air Arm, or met some of my old colleagues from 818 Squadron in Ark Royal and Formidable, we would talk about the times we enjoyed in Gibraltar or the wardroom, or the marvellous hospitality we encountered in Cape Town or Mombasa. I was very fortunate to build friendships after the war with some of the officers from Ark Royal. I was to meet both Lt Commander Stringer and Commander Traill in peacetime, and we were able to enjoy each other's company over a meal and a drink. We did not dwell on the past, but occasionally we would talk about what had happened to so many of our former friends. Sadly, many of the pilots who took part in the Bismarck attack did not survive the war. It's worth observing that most of their deaths were caused by unexplained crashes or mechanical failures of some kind. This was a brutal fact of life in the Fleet Air Arm; it is one of the reasons why even operations that were apparently uneventful patrols over the ocean could ultimately become stressful.

  The story of the sinking of the Bismarck eventually took on a life of its own. A few years after the end of the war there was a well-known feature film, Sink the Bismarck!, starring Jack Hawkins, and several books and articles were published. Most of them seemed to downplay the importance of the Fleet Air Arm, our fifteen Swordfish and the absolutely vital nature of our intervention in preventing Bismarck from reaching St-Nazaire.

  In 1989 the man who found the wreck of Titanic, Bob Ballard, discovered the wreck of Bismarck, and this started a fresh wave of interest in the German warship. Since his discovery, several other expeditions have filmed the wreck or tried to investigate it by using research submarines. Some of these, and the TV documentaries that were made about them, have attempted to argue that Bismarck was not sunk, but was scuttled by her own crew.

  In 2004 I heard that the wreck of Ark Royal had also been discovered, and a few months later I found myself on board a very large yacht, operating a remote underwater camera. I was allowed to manoeuvre this camera as though I were landing on the flight deck of Ark Royal, now lying 3,000 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean. It was a remarkable feeling – I never in all my life imagined that something like that would be possible, never mind that I would be the one so privileged to do it. From that same yacht I was able to look at many other pieces of the wreck, including the wreckage of a Swordfish aircraft that I think had fallen from the flight deck when the Ark was torpedoed six months after attacking Bismarck.

  On the whole, I think knowledge of the events around the sinking of the Bismarck should be kept alive, if only to prevent anything like that happening again.

  But a few years before I looked at Ark Royal once again, something else was brought to my attention: a report into the attack that was written with the assistance of the Fleet Air Arm Museum in the Royal Naval Air Station at Yeovilton in Somerset. This report tried to answer the question, 'Whose torpedoes hit the Bismarck, and where?' I need to repeat that there was a great deal of confusion during the attack and it was almost impossible to tell what was happening. In the debriefing after we had landed on we tried to be as factual as we could, but drawing up an accurate picture was impossible. The atrocious gale, the bad visibility, Bismarck herself manoeuvring violently behind a wall of gunfire, all conspired to prevent any one person forming an accurate picture of their own role in the attack, let alone building up any sort of wider vision. In the immediate aftermath we didn't believe that we had caused any damage. It was not until reports from Sheffield and the reconnaissance Swordfish confirmed that Bismarck had radically altered her course and appeared to be out of control that some very tentative assessments by some of the pilots were suddenly transformed into firmer facts. I think this was natural. Many senior pilots had had the experience of reporting hits on warships to find that they were later mistaken. It was, though, still unclear whose torpedoes had actually hit the ship, let alone whose had been the one that damaged the rudder, and at the time it was not of great importance to us. Our main concern was getting some rest before we had to mount another attack in the morning.

  I never claimed any result from my attack. As a junior sublieutenant in the Volunteer Reserve, I was not self-confident enough to make any claim before the likes of Tim Coode or the senior pilots of 810 and 820 Squadrons. But this new document, compiled by a young American researcher, Mark Horan, using action reports written at the time, came to the conclusion that out of the two pilots who could possibly claim to have dropped the torpedo that hit Bismarck's stern, myself and Lieutenant Keane, I was the most probable candidate.

  It is now so long after the event I think it is impossible to say anything with any certa
inty. If it was my torpedo, as the report suggests, that crippled the Bismarck, then I feel no personal pleasure in this, any more than I did at the time. I saw the result, which few others have had the misfortune to do, and no matter how pleased I might be to remove a threat to Britain and our convoys, I cannot take any satisfaction from the deaths of nearly two thousand sailors. Many people have said that we attacked Bismarck to seek revenge for the loss of Hood. Nothing could have been further from our minds. We did it because we were at war and it was our job. If we thought of anything – and we did – it was the threat that Bismarck presented to our ships, to our merchant fleet and to Britain's survival.

  What I would say is that the forty-three crew members of the fifteen Swordfish that attacked Bismarck, and I was one of them, did what was demanded of us, and anyone in the wardroom who saw us afterwards would know what that effort cost us. If we hadn't decided that we could fly in such appalling conditions, if we hadn't pressed on against the gunfire, if we had failed, then the Bismarck would have escaped to safety. That was something that the senior officers in the navy did not want to admit. We were in the Fleet Air Arm and, what's more, we were in Force H – a slightly irregular operation headed by a slightly irregular officer, Admiral Somerville, who barely six months previously had had to face allegations that he was not sufficiently aggressive in taking on the Italian fleet. Similarly, the investigations that purport to show that Bismarck was scuttled, that she was destroyed by her own crew, tend to write us and the whole of the Royal Navy out of the picture.