The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (367 page)

By late afternoon on the twentieth, another wave of almost four thousand paratroopers landed in the vicinity of the Rethymnom and Heraklion airfields. Within hours Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt: “Battle for Crete has opened well.” The battle had opened well, but that situation lasted for only a few hours. The Germans, dispersed and confused at first, rallied throughout the night. A New Zealand battalion inexplicably withdrew from a vital hill above Maleme. The Maleme airfield fell to the Germans
on the twenty-first. Ju 52 transports began ferrying in the five thousand troops of the 5th Mountain Division, but at great cost: More than half of the Ju 52s sent to Crete never returned. British anti-aircraft guns accounted for only a few of the planes; most were lost while trying to land on beaches, on wrecked airfields, and in plowed fields in order to disgorge their cargoes of troops. The RAF was in far worse shape. By late on the twenty-first, the RAF had no planes on Crete. Freyberg’s ground forces were dispersed and unable to coordinate movements. On the night of the twenty-first, the Royal Navy turned away German transports—mostly commandeered Greek fishing boats and small coastal steamers—carrying seven thousand troops. But daylight on the twenty-second brought the Stukas. “A lot of ships lost,” noted Colville, “including [cruisers]
Gloucester
and
Fiji.
” More than seven hundred of
Gloucester’
s eight hundred crew members went down with the ship. In reply to Colville’s expression of grief at the naval losses, Churchill growled, “What do you suppose we build ships for?” The Royal Navy’s deflection of the German transports was welcome news, but those losses were not enough to keep the Germans off the island, because the Germans were coming by air. Less than thirty-six hours after telling Roosevelt the battle had opened well, Churchill was forced to inform the president: “Battle in Crete is severe.” “Severe” did not do justice to the circumstances. Another last stand was shaping up.
²⁶⁵

The Germans fought as if Crete were a sacred Teutonic site, pressing the battle, Colville wrote, “with blind courage.” They fought with such fury because there would be no escape were they to fail. The British could always evacuate by sea in the event of defeat, and had in fact developed a talent for doing just that. The German paratroopers, on the other hand, were there to stay, one way or another. Their brethren in the Luftwaffe controlled the air, and the parachutists grabbed the airfields. The British had blasted the airstrips to rubble, but the Germans held and repaired the fields. Supplies and reinforcements were flown in during the next seven days, while Stukas riddled any British or Greek troops who tried any heroics. Once in possession of the airfields, the Germans were, in effect, in possession of Crete. But the cost of victory for Student’s paratroopers was extraordinary; five thousand out of nine thousand had been killed. Hitler told Student the cost was too high to justify ever staging another operation of that magnitude. The loss of so many of the Ju 52s—the workhorse of supply for the Wehrmacht—was also disturbing. Hitler would need all he could get to feed and arm his armies as they struck deep into Russia.
²⁶⁶

As of the twenty-eighth, the port of Sphakia, on the island’s south side, was still held by the British, but in the end, it would serve as this battle’s Dunkirk and Narvik. That day Freyberg’s army began the trek over the mountains to Sphakia, with the German mountain troops in pursuit. By
battle’s end, three days later, the army had lost more than 1,700 killed and 2,000 wounded. Almost 12,000 British and Anzac troops stayed behind as prisoners of the Reich. Just ten days after Churchill told Roosevelt that the battle was “severe,” Crete was lost, and the British again were forced to flee the scene of a disastrous defeat by sea. Mountbatten’s destroyer HMS
Kelly
was among the Luftwaffe’s victims. Captain Dickie survived, but more than half of the crew were lost when
Kelly
capsized and sank while plowing ahead at full speed. Between May 21 and June 2, the Royal Navy, pummeled from the air, lost three cruisers sunk and four damaged, six destroyers sunk and eight damaged, and more than 2,000 officers and seamen killed. The battleships
Warspite
and
Valiant
were damaged, as was the aircraft carrier
Formidable.
It was the Royal Navy’s most costly naval battle of the war. German aircraft—in daylight operations—had accounted for all the British ships. Göring had achieved over Crete what he had failed to achieve over Britain: air superiority. He had redeemed himself.
²⁶⁷

O
n May 21, the second full day of the battle for Crete, other ominous news arrived at No. 10. It appeared
Bismarck
was preparing to make its run for the high seas. Surface raiders such as
Bismarck
and her sister ship,
Tirpitz,
if free to roam the Atlantic, were as equal a threat to shipping as, or greater than, U-boats. German submarines engendered a primal fear in the crews and passengers aboard their targets; they were the monsters under the bed, lurking unseen beneath the sea, their presence announced by a thunderous eruption of flame from the bowels of some unfortunate merchantman.
Bismarck
was a monster plain and simple. A tanker or freighter captain who espied
Bismarck
setting a course across his bow knew his ship was doomed. Convoy escorts (destroyers and corvettes) proved adequate at hunting and killing submarines, but their small guns and depth charges were useless against capital ships.
Bismarck
amok, undetected by RAF reconnaissance planes, which lacked the range to patrol to the vast reaches of the central Atlantic, could run down any convoy, immune to the minuscule fire of the escorts.
Bismarck,
if she chose, could
ram
her way through a convoy; a thin-skinned five-thousand-ton freighter would perish beneath her bows like a rowboat.

The January German sortie of
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
resulted in the mauling of one convoy—ten ships were sunk in one day—and the loss of more than 115,000 tons of shipping. As a result, the British gained a great deal of respect for the lethality of the
Kriegsmarine’
s surface ships
and now had a double-edged problem. Locating the German battleships was difficult enough, but what to do when they were located? Churchill faced two bad choices if Hitler let loose his surface ships. He could chase the Germans and expose the British coast or leave the Germans unmolested and expose the convoys. He lacked the warships to do both. It was an old predicament for the British, which, when Napoleon grasped its significance, led him to contemplate a naval feint in 1804. By sending a French fleet to the British West Indies, he hoped to lure the British Home Fleet into a wild goose chase, thereby allowing his main fleet to land an invasion force on British soil. Had Hitler studied Napoleon’s seafaring tactics or only his Russian escapades? Churchill also feared that the mere appearance of German capital ships on the high seas would dissuade America from risking its merchantmen to convoy supplies to Britain, let alone risk its outdated Atlantic fleet to protect those ships. He later wrote that a concentration of surface raiders “in the great spaces of the Atlantic Ocean would subject our naval strength to a trial of the first magnitude.”
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
had in January given the trial’s opening arguments.
Bismarck
presumed to close the case.
²⁶⁸

On the evening of May 21,
Bismarck
and the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen,
escorted by six destroyers, slipped out of Bergen fjord in Norway under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens, a stern, humorless veteran of the Great War’s coastal gunboat battles, in which his willingness to attack superior forces and his skill at coming away victorious earned him a reputation as a brilliant and courageous tactician. He was Grand Admiral Raeder’s first choice to command
Bismarck
on this, her maiden operation, code-named
Rheinübung
(Rhine Exercise). Lütjens, prone to fatalistic premonitions, told fellow officers that
Rheinübung
was to be his “death voyage.” The admiral had secured his place on this mission by his superb command of the heavy cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
during their murderous January spree. The original plan for
Rheinübung
called for these two ships to sail with
Bismarck,
but the British had driven them into French ports, where they were undergoing repairs.
Bismarck
and
Prinz Eugen
(named for Eugene of Savoy, Marlborough’s ally at the Battle of Blenheim) would conduct
Rheinübung
alone. Riding at anchor in Bergen fjord, the two ships made tempting targets for the RAF, as dusk lingers in late spring at those latitudes. Were the RAF to appear overhead, Lütjens stood a fair chance of seeing his fatal premonition fulfilled before he even weighed anchor. But high clouds and clinging fog afforded the Germans a perfect opportunity to escape into the North Sea. Not willing to risk an improvement in the weather, Lütjens made his dash for the open sea. In his haste to depart Bergen, he failed to top off
Bismarck’
s fuel tanks.
²⁶⁹

The British, expecting just such a rapid departure, hoped to shadow the
German ships. If
Bismarck
and
Prinz Eugen
reached the North Sea undetected, the Royal Navy could then only guess which of four routes they would take to break out into the Atlantic. Two of the routes took the ships within British air-patrol range north of the Orkney Islands; the third ran between the Faroe Islands and Iceland, within range of British spotter planes stationed there. Lütjens’s fourth choice was the longest—to loop to the north of Iceland and run down the chute of the Denmark Strait, the ice-choked channel between Greenland and Iceland. This was the route he had taken in January. He chose to take it again. Everything was going his way. When the clouds broke over Bergen on May 22, a lone Spitfire, rigged for photo reconnaissance, roared up the fjord just a few feet above the waves and into the teeth of enemy fire. The pilot took a fast look around, turned hard for home, and radioed his message:
Bismarck
is gone.

This news troubled Churchill. Eleven convoys were at that moment on the open seas or preparing to depart British ports. One of them, escorted by two cruisers, both of which
Bismarck
could easily dispatch, was sailing south of Britain, destined for the Middle East with 20,000 reinforcements for Wavell. Were
Bismarck
and the troop transports to cross paths, Churchill’s war in Africa would be over.
Bismarck
had to be located, and sunk.

Early on the twenty-second, the escort destroyers dropped away from the far swifter
Bismarck
and
Prinz Eugen
. Alone now, Lütjens steamed north until the early afternoon, when he turned northwest in readiness for the run down the Denmark Strait, fog-bound at this time of year and full of newly calved icebergs. Just before midnight, the German ships turned into the strait. If his luck held, Lütjens would break out into the Atlantic in about thirty hours. This was the most dangerous part of the venture; the navigable part of the channel was at most only thirty miles wide at this time of year, narrow enough that if the British were lucky, their naval radar—limited in range to about twelve miles, and unreliable—could pick up the German ships, that is, if the British had vessels on station. They did. Two cruisers,
Norfolk
and
Suffolk,
positioned themselves in the lower part of the strait. Neither was a match for
Bismarck
or
Prinz Eugen.
Their job was to spot the Germans and shadow them until the battle cruiser
Hood
and Britain’s newest battleship,
Prince of Wales,
appeared on the scene.
Prince of Wales
carried ten 14-inch guns and was built to hunt and kill almost anything afloat.
Hood
—the
Mighty Hood
to Britons—was twenty-two years old, armed with eight 15-inch guns, and the pride of Great Britain, feared even by German sailors. When Churchill learned that it was to be
Hood
that would give battle to
Bismarck,
he retired to bed content.
²⁷⁰

Hood
and
Prince of Wales
departed Scapa Flow a few minutes after
midnight on the twenty-second, dispatched by Admiral Sir John Cronyn Tovey, commander in chief of the Home Fleet. They made for the Denmark Strait on a course that would take them across the other three exit points into the Atlantic. Had Lütjens elected to make his run through one of them,
Hood
would cross his path. If not, the Germans and British would likely meet and fight at the southern end of the Denmark Strait. When he received the baleful report from the lone Spitfire, Tovey put his flag aboard the new battleship
King George V
and sallied out of Scapa Flow with the aircraft carrier
Victorious,
four cruisers, and seven destroyers. Tovey intended to straddle the three exit routes east of Iceland. Somebody was bound to run into the Germans. Such was the plan.