I Sank The Bismarck (24 page)

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 in 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 engineers 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.

I was not selected for flying on this mission, which was
being led by Lt Commander Stewart-Moore, the CO of 820
Squadron. The attack, for some reason, was being made up
from 820 and 810 Squadrons – I don't know why, but it
meant that, as a member of 818, I was not included in the
plans. It was pointless to protest, as the operation clearly had
a momentum of its own and had been put into preparation
while I was still on patrol.

Meanwhile,
Bismarck
was still heading east, 30 miles south
of
Ark Royal
and the rest of Force H. Admiral Somerville on
Renown
ordered
Sheffield
to steam towards
Bismarck
and
make contact, then to continue shadowing her. The signal was
sent to
Sheffield
via Morse code using an Aldis signal lamp.
The Admiralty was also informed of the order, in a coded
radio signal that was simultaneously copied to
Ark Royal.

The prevailing wind was from the west, and every time aircraft
were landed on or took off, the
Ark
had to change
course and steam westwards. Each time this occurred,
Bismarck,
steaming east at around 22 knots, would increase
the distance between them, and the
Ark
had to race to catch
up. It was a long time since the
Ark
had had a major refit and
she had steamed over 100,000 miles in the interim. At full
speed the centre propeller shaft vibrated badly and hatch
screws regularly had to be retightened as they shook loose.
But we believed that the
Ark
would never let us down.

By 1400 the Swordfish that were going to make the strike
against
Bismarck
were ready, but the weather was no better.
The wind was still high, there was a lot of rain and visibility
was low. Thick cloud started at 800 feet and the frequent rain
squalls reduced the poor visibility to almost zero. But there
were occasional clear patches, and at 1415 the aircraft were
brought up on the lifts and the torpedoes were run aft along
the flight deck to them to be hoisted up into the cradles underneath
the fuselage. The engines were started and at 1445 the
flight deck officer reported all ready. The flagship made an
executive signal and the first of the Swordfish, with the CO of
820 Squadron in command, started its run down the deck. By
1500 they were all in the air, formed up in their sub-flights
and turning south to meet the enemy. I was merely watching
from the sidelines, standing near the bridge, with nothing to
do but wait.