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

Chapter 2 Wilhelmshaven, Saturday, 1 April 1939

Adolf Hitler descended from a Mercedes limousine and strode along the dockside beneath the slipway supporting the gigantic hull. His face wore an expression of childish delight as he looked up at the soaring flank of his new battleship, then turned to salute the crowds packed in thousands in orderly squares alongside. They had been brought in from all over Germany’s ever-expanding territories to provide the numbers needed for a theatrical display of might and played their part enthusiastically, cheering, waving swastika pennants, pressing forward for a glimpse of the leader as he strode past.

He skipped up the steps to a high platform raised before the bow. It was a bright, sunny day but a cold wind whipping in from Jade Bay snapped at the flags and bunting and rattled the still-bare branches of the trees. Surrounding him on the platform was a cluster of admirals and generals. Among them, wearing a cloche hat and a fur stole, stood a lone woman. Frau Ilse von Hassell was there to name the ship in honour of her father, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the Imperial German navy. She was a reluctant participant. Her husband Ulrich, a diplomat, had watched the ascent of the Nazis with dismay. The head of the modern German fleet, Admiral Erich Räder, had first asked Tirpitz’s seventy-eight-year-old widow Marie to perform the ceremony but she claimed to be too old and infirm to attend. He turned next to Ilse and her younger sister Margot but they too declined. Ilse recalled that he then ‘sent a second appeal, urgently demanding my presence. It was practically an order. I need not explain … what such an order meant in those times in Germany.’¹

The Führer and the admiral’s daughter stood in the blustery wind for a minute or so in uncomfortable silence. Eventually he looked down at the sea of joyful, upturned faces and, ‘in a sort of monotone’, murmured: ‘I have sent trains to all parts of Germany, of Austria, of Czechoslovakia. It is the best propaganda.’ An official called her forward to the microphone. In a clear voice she declared: ‘By order of the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, I christen you with the name “Tirpitz”.’ The bottle swung and smashed. A large, hand-lettered sign reading TIRPITZ in Gothic script was lowered over the side. Then the hull began to move slowly, gathering speed as it went, stern-first down Slipway No. 2 hitting the basin in a maelstrom of churning water. Only the steel vanes welded onto the sides, sticking out like elephant’s ears, prevented a collision with the far jetty. The cheers of the crowd mingled with ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ blaring from loudspeakers as the notables descended the steps and were driven to the town hall square for the next event.

The day was charged with nervous expectation. The world was watching Wilhelmshaven. Europe was sliding towards war and Hitler’s words might give a sign of how fast or slow the catastrophe would be in coming. The omens were not good. The previous day Britain had abandoned its policy of appeasement. The decision had been forced by Hitler’s demand that Poland hand over the free city of Danzig, prised from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who stood by timidly as the Reich swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia, had at last made a stand, telling the House of Commons that Britain and France would lend Poland ‘all the support in their power’ if Germany attacked.

The volte-face triggered a Wagnerian rage. Hitler had hoped he would not have to go to war against the British. Admiral Canaris, the head of German Military Intelligence who was with him when the news came through, watched as he pounded his fists on a marble table, his face contorted with anger, shouting that he would ‘cook them a stew they’ll choke on’.² At around noon, Hitler began the speech everyone was waiting for. Wilhelmshaven’s main square had been decked out Nuremberg-style with flags and banners. Reporters in the press area noticed something they had not seen before at such events. Hitler was standing behind a curved glass screen, apparently designed to protect him from an assassin’s bullet.

His speech was long and disjointed, now soft, now hard, swinging between cajolery and bluster. Its main theme, though, was Britain, or ‘England’ as Germans chose to call it. The change of heart in London amounted to a declaration of enmity. Instead of staying on the sidelines as Hitler had hoped, Britain, its army and above all its navy would now have to be counted in the forces arrayed against his plans for European domination.

He started by reopening an old wound. He reminded the crowd that during the last war the British had ‘systematically’ encircled Germany, imposing a ‘hunger blockade’ that had resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Now, by blocking her efforts to reclaim her historic territories, she was seeking to do so again. Germany, he warned, was ‘not going to put up in the long run with a policy of intimidation or … of encirclement’.

The warning was reinforced by a threat aimed at the British navy – which had enforced the wartime blockade. Only four years before, Britain and Germany had agreed a naval pact that limited the size of the German fleet. It had been based, he said, ‘on the fervent desire we all possess never to go to war with England’. He went on: ‘If this wish no longer exists in England, then the practical condition for this agreement is removed.’ The German people would be ‘quite content to put up with this. We are so sure of ourselves because we are so strong and we are strong because we are united.’³

The speech ended in a volley of ‘sieg heils’. Hitler was driven away to board a launch which sped out into the sparkling waters of Jade Bay, carrying him to the battle cruiser Scharnhorst, which had gone into service less than three months before and seemed to embody all the power and vigour of the new order. There he was met by Erich Räder, carrying the baton which marked his promotion that day to the rank of Grossadmiral – the highest pinnacle of the naval hierarchy.

At 2.30 p.m. they sat down to eat flanked by admirals and generals, past and present. The exaltation that flooded through Hitler during great public performances had subsided and he appeared subdued. ‘He arrived, saluted, sat down, spoke to his neighbours and disappeared as he had arrived,’ wrote Ulrich von Hassell* in his diary. ‘He said not a word to any of the old officers, nor did he even look them in the eye.’⁴

Erich Räder with grossadmiral’s baton

After lunch Hitler was ferried to another ship, the Robert Ley, a large liner that took party loyalists on holiday cruises. He stayed on board throughout Sunday, while the ship tacked back and forth in the waters off Wilhelmshaven, escorted by Scharnhorst and a pair of destroyers. To amuse the Führer, Räder at one point ordered the battle cruiser to steer directly at the liner, only swerving away at the last minute.⁵

These carefree activities seemed calculated to demonstrate Hitler’s lack of concern at the new international developments. Whether he understood their full import for the navy he was reviewing was open to question. Naval matters played a subordinate role in Hitler’s military calculations, an attitude he did not bother to disguise. He was a soldier not a sailor. Throughout the time at Wilhelmshaven he had worn a brown greatcoat and tunic, the colour of the Flanders mud he had fought in bravely which stood out against the navy blue and gold braid of the attendant admirals. He came from landlocked Austria and was often seasick on his occasional voyages aboard the state yacht Grille.

Grossadmiral Räder, though, was disturbed by the turn that events had taken. He had been born sixty-three years before in Hamburg, the son of a devoutly Christian teacher, and entered the Naval College at Kiel at eighteen. It was the Dreadnought era when great battleships, bristling with guns and laden with armour plating, were the peak of naval power and prestige. He fought the British at Dogger Bank and Jutland and stayed on in the navy, serving the Weimar Republic loyally. In 1928 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine.

Räder kept his distance from Hitler until he came to power. His first impression of him was favourable. Hitler seemed to him ‘an outstanding personality with a real claim to leadership’.⁶ He had gained the Führer’s confidence and, once the strategic decisions had been taken, been given a free hand and a generous budget to build up the navy. Hitler had been presented with two choices for his navy. The first proposed a cheap, light, flexible force, centred on submarines and the small but powerfully armed long-range cruisers that the British had nicknamed ‘pocket battleships’. This plan had no pretensions to challenging Britain as a naval power but carried great potential to harm her. The second was to build a big fleet of modern surface ships that would establish Germany as a world maritime force. He had chosen the grandiose option, with Räder’s approval. The result was ‘Plan-Z’, which had been finally agreed by Hitler only two months before. It envisaged a fleet with ten battleships at its core and four aircraft carriers to provide the air power that was becoming a vital adjunct of naval operations. Supporting them would be fifteen pocket battleships, over a hundred cruisers and destroyers and an underwater strength of more than 250 U-boats.

A force of this size would take up to ten years to build. The plan had been designed on the assumption, reinforced by frequent assurances from Hitler, that a war with Britain was still well over the horizon. Only four years before, the two countries had signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, mentioned by Hitler in his speech. Germany agreed to limit its surface shipbuilding programme to 35 per cent of the British fleet. In submarines, it was permitted 45 per cent of the Royal Navy’s tonnage, with a clause allowing it to rise to parity in special circumstances. The deal was negotiated in a friendly atmosphere. Historically, both sides had felt respect for one another. When the commander of the British Fleet at Jutland, Lord Jellicoe, died in November 1935, Räder ordered all German warships to fly their flags at half-mast.

A confrontation with the Royal Navy had seemed a distant prospect when Plan Z was being worked out. Now, with Chamberlain’s guarantee to the Poles, it loomed suddenly and alarmingly into view. Räder’s exalted title scarcely reflected the might of his fleet. As he waved his landlubber leader off at the end of his Wilhelmshaven jaunt, he knew very well that he had limited assets with which to face the coming crisis.

The German fleet that spring had only two big ships in service – the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, both displacing 32,000 tons.* There was a heavy cruiser, the 14,000-ton Admiral Hipper, which would be joined in the coming year by two ships of the same class, the Blücher and the Prinz Eugen. Three pocket battleships were in commission, the Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer. Despite displacing only 12,000 tons, they packed heavy firepower in their six 11-inch guns. Of the four planned aircraft carriers only one, the Graf Zeppelin, had been laid down, but years of work remained. As for submarines, about fifty would be ready for operations by the end of the summer.

In numerical terms, this was a tiny force when compared with the Royal Navy. It could muster twelve battleships with five more on the way, four battle cruisers, six aircraft carriers with another six building, and twenty-four heavy cruisers. It was only below the waves that numbers were equal.

But strength was not measured in numbers alone. The qualitative difference between the two fleets went a long way towards correcting the quantitative imbalance. The core of the German fleet was modern, whereas many of the British ships dated back to the previous war and only some of them had been updated. The new ships in the pipeline were inferior to their German counterparts. Britain, it would often be lamented in the years to come, had played the game when it came to honouring the various limitations agreements it had entered into in the inter-war years. The Germans had, systematically and ruthlessly, cheated.

All their large ships were bigger than they were supposed to be. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were actually 6,000 tons heavier than officially claimed. The extra weight came from the thick armour plating which reduced the danger from the heavier guns of the British battle cruisers. They were also faster than claimed and could muster thirty-one knots, which gave them the edge over their counterparts if forced to run.

It was in the top class – the battleships – that German superiority was most marked. Since Tirpitz and her sister ship Bismarck were laid down in 1936, the Germany Embassy in London, on Räder’s instructions, had lied to the Foreign Office about their specifications. Instead of being 35,000 tons, the upper limit agreed in the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, they would both weigh in at 42,500 tons. The British stuck to the rules. As a result the battleships under construction of the King George V (KGV) class were nearly 12 per cent lighter.

It was not merely a question of size. When finished, Tirpitz and Bismarck would best the Royal Navy’s new ships in every department. They each mounted eight 15-inch guns against the 14-inch main armament of the King George V. They were faster and could travel far greater distances without refuelling. They were also immensely well protected, with thick layers of steel armour encasing decks and hull, turrets, engine rooms and magazines. It was often said by their enemies that the Germans had declared their battleships ‘unsinkable’. The claim does not seem to have been made officially. Their constructors revealed after the war that the Kriegsmarine often intervened during the building of Tirpitz and Bismarck to ‘raise their levels of unsinkability’.⁷ The result was that, in the case of Tirpitz, 40 per cent of her overall weight was made up of armour plating. The belief grew that Tirpitz and Bismarck could survive any torpedo, shell or bomb that British ships or aircraft could hurl at them, and it was not unfounded. The British navy had been starved of funds in the post-war years, and little effort had been put into developing new weaponry. Torpedoes and shells carried feeble charges and lacked penetrative power. The greatest failure to keep pace with technological developments lay in the area of naval aviation. The Admiralty was only now regaining control of the Fleet Air Arm from the RAF, whose equipment programmes had given priority to fighters and bombers. The navy was entering the war equipped with biplanes that looked like survivors from the previous conflict.

Even with his long-term plan in tatters and Tirpitz and Bismarck still far from completion, Räder could still cause Britain great harm. The Royal Navy suffered from a crucial strategic disadvantage. Britain depended for survival on its seaborne trade. The navy had the duty of protecting a web of routes that stretched to all corners of the globe. Germany, as a continental power, was far less reliant on overseas supplies. If it came to war, its navy’s responsibility was clearer and narrower. Its function was not to protect but to attack, ravaging the sea lanes that linked Britain to the rest of the world.

As the countdown to hostilities accelerated, it was powerful German warships rather than the U-boat fleet that the Admiralty most feared. ‘Nothing would paralyse our supply system and seaborne trade so successfully,’ wrote the First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, just before the outbreak, ‘as attack by surface raiders.’ It was to their detection, pursuit and destruction that the Home Fleet turned as the long overture finished and the curtain went up on the war.

* Von Hassell was a conservative patriot who had been wounded in the First World War and still carried a French bullet in his heart. He was executed for his part in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

* All displacements are given as standard, minus the weight of fuel, water and stores that would be carried on voyage.

Chapter 3 Swordfish

Caked with the salt of the northern seas, her flanks streaked with rust, HMS Suffolk slid gratefully towards the Icelandic haven of Hvalfjord. The heavy cruiser had been patrolling the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland and her crew were looking forward to a quiet evening in harbour. Then a signal arrived warning them that their respite might be a short one. Bismarck, the ship they had been watching for, had been sighted at the Norwegian port of Bergen.

On arrival in Hvalfjordur Suffolk went straight off to refuel. The company were eating supper when another signal arrived. They were to return immediately to the Denmark Strait. The following morning, Friday, 23 May 1941, they met up with their sister ship Norfolk in the harbour at Isafjordur on the north-west coast of Iceland and headed off to take up their patrolling positions. The Strait was the most distant of the possible routes German warships could take from their own ports to the Atlantic. It was 300 miles long and 180 miles wide at its narrowest point, but even at this time of year it was still choked with pack ice which stretched eighty miles eastward from the Greenland coast.

The cruisers spent the day criss-crossing the sleeve of green water, flecked with floes, but saw nothing. Then, early that evening, the voice of Captain Robert Ellis sounded over the tannoy. He broadcast news that was both exciting and alarming. Bismarck had left Bergen. Her destination was unknown but there was a strong chance she was heading their way. The ship’s officers did not allow the revelation to disturb their sangfroid. They gathered, as usual, in the wardroom for a drink before dinner. The captain had just walked in to join them when a klaxon blared, calling all hands to their action stations. The officers slammed down their sherries and pink gins and dashed to their posts. ‘It was the enemy!’ Lieutenant Commander Charles Collett recorded afterwards. ‘[And] they were only six miles away, slinking along the edge of the ice in a snowstorm.’¹

The moment that Winston Churchill and the Admiralty had been waiting for had arrived. Bismarck was at sea. Simultaneously, a great threat and a great opportunity had materialized. Sinking her would count as a magnificent naval victory. It would also provide some longed-for good news after a succession of setbacks, failures and disappointments. The relief of surviving the Battle of Britain had given way to the bleak realization of the nation’s isolation and the immensity of the difficulties ahead. The country was now engaged in another struggle for existence, which Churchill had christened the Battle of the Atlantic. Having failed to bring Britain to terms by the threat of invasion, Germany had switched strategy and was trying to starve her into submission, by cutting the lifelines that connected her with the rest of the world. Churchill was to judge later that ‘amid the torrent of violent events one anxiety reigned supreme … dominating all our power to carry on the war, or even keep ourselves alive, lay mastery of the ocean routes and the free approach and entry to our ports’.

It was the navy’s principal duty to defend these routes but the task was overwhelming. It no longer had the resources of the French fleet, a large part of which lay at the bottom of Mers-el-Kebir harbour, sunk by British guns. America gave all the help it could, but had yet to enter the war. Early engagements, in the battle for Norway and on the high seas, had failed to neutralize the threat from the German navy. Instead, in the spring of 1941, the Kriegsmarine was setting the pace in the struggle.

The main battleground was the vital sea lanes of the North Atlantic. In March and April 1941, nearly half a million tons of Allied shipping had been sent to the bottom. Most of it was sunk by U-boats, whose effectiveness had been badly underestimated by a complacent Admiralty in the interwar years. Until now the surface raiders that Admiral Pound had feared would ‘paralyse’ the sea lanes had played a secondary part in the campaign. That seemed about to change. A foray by the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in February and March had resulted in the destruction or capture of twenty-two ships totalling 115,600 tons. Now it was Bismarck’s turn and the transatlantic convoys, already ravaged by bombardment from land-based bombers and ambush by prowling U-boats, would be at the mercy of the most powerful German warship yet put to sea.

When the news of the sighting came through, Churchill was embarked on a weekend at Chequers with his wife Clementine, his daughter Sarah and her husband, the comedian Vic Oliver, as well as the devoted Major General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, his Chief of Staff as Minister of Defence. He had also invited Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s special representative. Before dinner that Friday night the Prime Minister was pondering a stream of unwelcome progress reports on the operation to seize Crete. The British effort was faltering. After being caught off guard, the Germans had fought back strongly. Paratroopers seized the vital airfield at Maleme and reinforcements were flying in. Luftwaffe fighters had begun to arrive that day as well as artillery units. Bismarck’s detection raised hopes that some better tidings might be on the way. Churchill waited up until 3 a.m., for the latest developments, but eventually gave up and went to bed.

The Bismarck’s breakout had been expected for days. An initial report from Captain Henry Denham, the busy British naval attaché in neutral Sweden, that the battleship had left the Baltic was soon reinforced by sightings by RAF reconnaissance flights and German naval signals decrypted by the Bletchley Park code breakers.

The question was, which way would she come? There were two possibilities. She could aim for the Denmark Strait. Or she could take the shorter route and dart at the gap between the Faroe and Shetland Islands. The Commander of the Home Fleet Sir John Tovey had dispatched Norfolk and Suffolk under the command of Rear Admiral William Wake-Walker to deal with the first eventuality. At the same time he had detached a squadron under Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland consisting of the battle cruiser Hood, the battleship Prince of Wales and six destroyers to plug the Faroes–Shetlands gap.

This was at first sight a formidable force. Hood was the biggest ship in the British fleet. Prince of Wales was brand new – so new that she had yet to complete working up and still had workers from Vickers Armstrongs on board when she sailed. On the evening of 22 May Tovey himself left Scapa Flow aboard his flagship King George V, and together with the aircraft carrier Victorious led the Home Fleet westwards.

With the assets at his disposal, Tovey had every chance of intercepting Bismarck and bringing her to action. It was a thrilling prospect. Great sea actions were rare, yet they were the unspoken end of all naval training and preparation. From early puberty, naval cadets were steeped in the legends of Trafalgar and the Armada. Below decks, the pride in tradition though more subdued was present nonetheless. An epic battle offered those who fought in it the chance of distinction and to those who directed it the prospect of greatness. Tovey knew that if he sank the Bismarck his place in the Royal Navy’s history was assured. He accepted, too, that his peers were harsh judges and failure would bring ignominy.

The odds on an interception were in his favour. Even so, there was still a good chance that Bismarck would reach the Atlantic unscathed. It had happened before. In February, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had evaded the Home Fleet to squeeze through the Faroes–Iceland gap to begin their Atlantic raid. If Bismarck repeated the feat, a ripe cluster of targets awaited her. There were eleven convoys plying the Atlantic, some of them perilously close to Bismarck’s likely point of arrival in the ocean’s northern reaches.

It was important for Hitler’s long-term war plans that the battleship made it through. He was about to turn his armies eastwards against the Soviet Union and he needed a cowed and docile Europe at his back. The war at sea presented the best chance of bringing his last enemy in the west to heel. The original operation, codenamed Rheinübung, or Rhine Exercise, had been correspondingly ambitious. Admiral Räder’s plan had been to combine his four biggest ships in a powerful task force that could, temporarily at least, cause a suspension of the convoys, cutting off Britain’s maritime life-support system. Bismarck and Tirpitz would sail from Germany, and meet up with Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, now lying at Brest on the French Atlantic coast. One by one, though, his force had been whittled away. A lucky torpedo dropped by a Beaufort of RAF Coastal Command had done Gneisenau enough damage to put her out of action for six months. Then it was discovered that the boilers powering Scharnhorst’s steam turbines needed replacing. The battleships would have to operate on their own. For both it would be their first operation.

There was one more blow to fall. Tirpitz’s progress from launch to commissioning had been slower than her sister’s. She had finally gone into service on 25 February that year. Spring sea trials in the Baltic had revealed numerous niggling mechanical difficulties. Räder decided he dare not risk her on a long and testing operation. The decision dismayed the crew and their new commander, Kapitän zur See Karl Topp. When Hitler paid a visit to the battleships as they lay at Gotenhafen, as the Germans called the Polish Baltic port of Gdynia, a fortnight before Rhine Exercise was to start, Topp begged him to overule Räder. Hitler refused. When Bismarck left Gotenhafen just before noon on 18 May, she had with her only a single big ship consort – the 14,000-ton heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen which, although new, had limited firepower and a short range.

The operation was led by Admiral Günther Lütjens, the commander of the German fleet. His reputation stood high. It was he who had led Gneisenau and Scharnhorst during their late winter rampage. Lütjens’ down-turned mouth and hard eyes seldom broke into a smile. He looked what he was – cold, proud and utterly confident of his abilities, rarely feeling the necessity to explain critical decisions to those above or below him. His abilities were tied to a strict sense of duty. He could be relied on to follow the spirit of his orders even when he doubted their wisdom. Lütjens was quite aware of the dangers ahead. His ship outclassed anything in the British fleet. But the task force he was commanding had shrunk to a fraction of its original strength. It seemed to him probable – even inevitable – that it would eventually be overwhelmed by weight of numbers. Before the start of Rheinübung he had called on a friend at Räder’s Berlin headquarters to say goodbye. ‘I’ll never come back,’ he told him, in a matter-of-fact voice.²

The mood aboard Bismarck, though, was buoyant. The ship thrummed with excitement and anticipation as she headed out towards the Norwegian Sea. At noon, over the loudspeakers, the ship’s commander, Kapitän Ernst Lindemann, at last told the 2,221 officers and men on board where they were going. ‘The day we have longed for so eagerly has at last arrived,’ he said. ‘The moment when we can lead our proud ship against the enemy. Our objective is commerce raiding in the Atlantic imperilling England’s existence.’ He signed off with ‘the hunter’s toast, good hunting and a good bag!’ There was to be nothing sporting about their methods, however. The orders Lindemann had been given included an instruction that ‘the work of destruction is not to be delayed by life-saving activities’.³

Two days later, Lütjens’ task force was two hundred miles off the Norwegian coast. Just after noon, ignoring the preferences of the headquarters staff who favoured the Faroes–Iceland passage, he decided he would take the long way round to the Atlantic. He ordered course to be set for the Denmark Strait, hoping that the fog, snow and rain that was gathering in the west would cloak his movements.

At 7.11 p.m. on 23 May, as the task force steamed at a brisk twenty-seven knots with the black peaks of Iceland to port and the antiseptic blue of the Greenland pack ice to starboard, lookouts picked up an ominous shape among the shifting banks of fog. It was the Suffolk. The flimsy hope of concealment was gone and, whether it came soon or late, everyone realized that a battle was now all but inevitable.

Suffolk’s lookouts had also sighted their enemy. The first reaction was alarm. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were only six miles away, and the battleship’s guns would make short work of her. It seemed to Charles Collett that ‘at that short range [she] could have blown us out of the water’. But nothing happened. Lütjens gave the commander of Prinz Eugen, Kapitän Helmuth Brinkmann, permission to fire but the target was too indistinct. Suffolk was able to turn away rapidly into the mist and wireless the momentous news. When it reached Tovey, he ordered the Home Fleet to alter course to the north-west to bring them to an intercepting point south of the Denmark Strait. Aboard the Hood, Holland had also picked up the sighting report. He, too, changed course and steamed at full speed on a line that he hoped would bring his ship and the Prince of Wales across the path of the raiders as they emerged from the Strait at about 5.30 on the morning of 24 May.