The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (368 page)

If
Bismarck
avoided the net, Churchill would need help from Roosevelt. Accordingly, he cabled the president: “Should we not catch them going out, your Navy should surely be able to mark them down for us” and “Give us the news and we will finish the job.” That request, to act as Britain’s eyes in the Atlantic, created a diplomatic problem for the Americans, for Grand Admiral Raeder had made clear his intentions to shoot any American warship he thought “committed an act of war” by reporting to the British the position of German ships on the high seas. Raeder had a point. International law demanded that neutrals on the high seas mind their own business. But in early April, Roosevelt—in yet another tentative step toward hostilities—declared that American warships would henceforth patrol to twenty-six degrees west longitude, roughly from between Iceland and Greenland south to Brazil. He also declared that if American ships spotted German warships, they would broadcast their location on an open frequency, fully realizing that doing so might trigger an act of war on Germany’s part, which presumably (Churchill hoped) would trigger a declaration of war by America. Yet Roosevelt knew that America was not yet prepared in either martial spirit or armaments to carry through on such a declaration. His initiative had been largely bluff, though it had elated Churchill. Colville and Harriman were at Chequers when the news arrived. When Colville asked Harriman if this might mean war, Harriman replied: “That’s what I hope.”
²⁷¹

Churchill would have welcomed a crisis on the seas, and, in fact, he soon tried to engineer just such an incident. Roosevelt’s declaration meant that American warships patrolled east almost to the Azores and north to Greenland but not into the hottest battle zones, within one thousand miles of Britain, thereby lessening the chances of running into Germans. Roosevelt had struck a deal with the Danish government in exile to build airbases on Greenland. Had the bases been operational by late May, they might have benefited Churchill in his search for
Bismarck;
but they were not. In any case, the Denmark Strait went unobserved by the U.S. Navy as
Bismarck
slipped through. Churchill’s ships would have to find
Bismarck
on their own.

Suffolk
did just that. She spotted the two German ships in the early evening of May 23 and signaled the contact before running for cover in a fogbank.
Norfolk,
also hiding in the fog, picked up
Suffolk’
s report. Admiral W. F. Wake-Walker, directing the action of both ships from
Norfolk,
and eager to make visual contact, ordered
Norfolk
to the edge of the fogbank, directly under
Bismarck’
s fine optical sights.
Bismarck
loosed its first ever shots in anger, which straddled
Norfolk.
Walker fled back into the fog. It would fall to
Hood,
guided by
Suffolk
and
Norfolk,
to sink the
Bismarck.

Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, second in command of the Home Fleet, was on board
Hood,
about three hundred miles away and closing at such high speed that his escort destroyers gave up the chase and dropped back. At about 8:00
P.M.
Hood’
s captain, Ralph Kerr, told his crew that the Germans had been sighted in the strait. All hands were ordered to ready their battle gear—life jackets, flashlights, helmets—and were reminded to change into clean underwear, to prevent infection from shrapnel wounds. The ship was darkened, battle flags run up the masts. Shortly after midnight—it was now the twenty-fourth—the crews of
Hood
and
Prince of Wales
manned their battle stations.
Bismarck
was now about 180 miles to the north, her bottleneck into the Atlantic corked.

Churchill, dining at Chequers, demanded that all news be immediately brought to his attention. The evening’s dinner was, as usual, an “entirely male party,” Colville noted, consisting of Churchill’s brother, Jack, Colville, Harriman, and Ismay. Although the awful news from Crete weighed on Churchill and his guests, the conversation at the table, recalled Ismay, “was confined almost exclusively to the impending clash at sea.” They sat up until after 3:00
A.M.,
late even for Churchill, with hopes of getting some further news from the Admiralty. None arrived. Churchill recalled, “There was nothing for me to do and I went to bed… so well tired with other work that I slept soundly. I had complete confidence in The First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound, and liked the way he was playing the hand. I awoke in peaceful Chequers about 9
A.M.
with all that strange thrill which one feels at the beginning of a day in which great news is expected, good or bad.”
²⁷²

While Churchill slept, the last great duel of battleships in the Atlantic Ocean began. It was over in less than eight minutes. Just before 6:00
A.M.,
Prince of Wales
and
Hood
maneuvered to bring themselves east and south of
Bismarck
and
Prinz Eugen,
such that the rising sun brought the approaching German ships into sharp relief.
Prinz Eugen
came along first in line, which confused the British, for
Bismarck,
the logical leader, was trailing behind and appeared to be the smaller of the two ships.
Prince of Wales,
much of its crew green, and
Hood,
plagued by ineffectual range-finding radar, opened fire on
Prinz Eugen,
to no effect.
Bismarck,
meanwhile, took leisurely aim at
Hood
. One of
Prinz Eugen’
s eight-inch shells scored a hit amidships on
Hood,
igniting a fire that popped off ammunition kept at the ready. Captain Kerr ordered his crew to let the fire burn itself out and to take shelter near the superstructure. Kerr, realizing he had shot at the wrong target, ordered a turn to port, in order to reduce
Hood’
s profile and to bring its four 15-inch bow guns to bear on
Bismarck.
The turn came too late.

Bismarck’
s first salvos had straddled
Hood.
Now
Bismarck
had
Hood’
s range. She fired another salvo. An officer on
Prinz Eugen
saw the shell splashes and thought that this salvo, too, had missed. But at least one shell had found its mark, possibly beneath the waterline. Within a second or two, a great shaft of flame shot straight up from
Hood’
s midsection, high into the morning sky, followed a few seconds later by a catastrophic explosion.
Hood
disappeared for a few moments in the smoke, but large pieces of the ship were seen lofted high into the air. Within a few minutes, the smoke drifted off.
Hood
was gone. Three of her crew of 1,412 bobbed alive in the water. They called out until they found each other amid the oil and debris and dozens of inflatable life rafts, all of which were empty.
Hood,
its stern blown off, its bow broken off, took Admiral Holland and Captain Kerr and every other crewman down with her. Churchill awoke at Chequers to this worst possible news:
Hood
was lost and
Bismarck
was on the loose. He wandered into Harriman’s bedroom. Harriman bolted awake to behold an apparition dressed in a yellow sweater over a short nightshirt, his pink legs exposed. “Hell of a battle going on,” Churchill mumbled. “The
Hood
is sunk, hell of a battle.”
²⁷³

Gloom descended upon Chequers that morning, but Churchill shed no tears at the news of
Hood.
His tears flowed when sentimentality was in the air—a christening, the prospect of casualties among the creatures confined in the London zoo, the recounting over brandy of long-past heroic deeds. The sight of bombed-out civilians brought tears to his eyes; they were innocents. News of the death of soldiers or sailors in battle moved him to resolve, often to anger, sometimes to impetuous decisions, but not to tears. Upon learning of
Hood’
s demise, he came downstairs to find Clementine, Sarah, and Vic Oliver in a parlor, Vic at the piano, tapping out on the ivories a few measures of Beethoven, which Churchill took to be a funeral march. “Nobody plays the Dead March in my house,” Churchill growled. All in the room but Churchill laughed—a mistake, followed by another. “It’s not the Dead March,” said Oliver. “It’s the Appassionata Sonata.” Churchill glowered. “You can say what you like, I know it’s the Funeral March.” Vic then made a final error, by playing a few more chords from the Appassionata. Churchill erupted. “Stop it! Stop it! I want no
Dead March, I tell you!” Only when Sarah rushed to the piano and advised Vic to play another piece did the moment pass. Vic at least had had the good sense not to whistle the tune.
²⁷⁴

Churchill learned later that morning that
Prince of Wales
had taken several hits. One shell from
Prinz Eugen
passed without exploding clear through the gunnery plotting station in the superstructure, killing most of the plotters and knocking Captain Leach senseless. Still,
Prince of Wales
let loose four more salvos before withdrawing. Churchill fumed to Colville that the retreat was “the worst thing since Troubridge turned away from
Goeben
in 1914.” Churchill berated the Admiralty, the first sea lord, and, when his criticism of the Atlantic action waned, berated Cunningham in the Mediterranean for not risking his ships to block the invasion of Crete. Churchill demanded risk, not caution, from his naval commanders. Yet Cunningham
had
risked his ships, and he had scattered the German invasion fleet. Cunningham had put thousands of British troops on Crete, and by the twenty-fourth, with his ships under constant attack, he was preparing to get them off. His losses were horrific. Cunningham’s place in Royal Navy history was secure. Churchill, in his memoirs, finally gave him his due, and he included an anecdote that captures the spirit of the admiral. When an officer protested the risk to the fleet in getting the survivors off Crete, Cunningham responded, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship; it will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.”
²⁷⁵

It was May 24, Empire Day,
^*
when millions of schoolchildren throughout the Empire were granted a school holiday to celebrate their monarch, salute the Union Jack, and sing patriotic songs. A generation of children had heard inspirational speeches and listened to tales of heroic deeds from the imperial past, tales of Clive of India, Wolfe of Québec, and “Chinese Gordon” of Khartoum, Marlborough, and Nelson. Empire Day 1941 passed without celebration. Churchill would have to impart the news of
Hood
to the Commons the following week, but first a new diversion was to be unveiled that night at Chequers. The Old Man had recently insisted the great house be outfitted with a movie projector. His mood improved somewhat that evening as Marlene Dietrich, starring in
Seven Sinners,
made her Chequers premier.

But he continued to spread his anger between Cunningham and the admirals pursuing
Bismarck.
“The loss of half the Mediterranean fleet,” he snapped to Colville, “would be worthwhile to save Crete.” In fact, with
Cunningham’s mounting losses off Crete, about half the Mediterranean fleet
had
been lost since the start of the year. Churchill was incorrect in ascribing hesitancy—cowardice by any other name—to Cunningham, and he was wrong about Admiral Wake-Walker on board
Norfolk
and Captain Leach on board
Prince of Wales.
Leach was correct in withdrawing
Prince of Wales,
damaged, outgunned, her range-finding radar useless. Wake-Walker and Leach ran, not for lack of fighting spirit, but to live to fight another day. It was the correct decision.
²⁷⁶

Churchill did not at all see things that way. Livid, he wanted to welcome the two commanders home with courts-martial, but Admirals Pound and Tovey insisted the officers on the spot had acted correctly. Years later, his wrath softened by the passage of time, Churchill wrote in his memoirs that Wake-Walker had been “indisputably right” in his decision.

Prince of Wales
had put at least three 14-inch shells into
Bismarck,
and as a result the German ship suffered a serious fuel leak and loss of rudder control. The Admiralty did not yet know this. But Lütjens now knew his decision to not refuel at Bergen was fatal.
Bismarck,
wounded and lacking the fuel to make a run for home, had to run for a port in occupied France.
Prinz Eugen,
undamaged, ran for Brest.
Rheinübung
was finished. It remained to be seen whether
Bismarck
was as well. That night, Churchill was told that the Royal Navy would give battle the following morning, but in the early hours of the twenty-fifth,
Bismarck
vanished from
Suffolk’
s radar. Colville recalled that this dashing of Churchill’s hopes caused the entirety of the twenty-fifth to be passed as “a day of fearful gloom.” Over the next two days and across 1,200 nautical miles, a truly epic naval chase took place on the high seas. Churchill dearly would have loved to be in on the chase and particularly the kill, but he had to satisfy himself with observing from the Admiralty War Room, where he meddled. The “former naval person” had never heard a naval gun fired in battle. His had been an administrative naval career consisting in large part of sticking pins into his wall maps at the Admiralty. On this day, he made a nuisance of himself.
²⁷⁷

On the morning of Monday, May 26, having vanished for more than thirty hours,
Bismarck’
s position and heading were at last confirmed by an RAF Catalina flying boat, piloted by an American. Tovey, on board
King George V,
gave chase, with
Bismarck
now 130 miles ahead of him. The older battleship
Rodney
joined the hunt. Churchill, ensconced in the Admiralty War Room, oversaw a riotous scene of charts spread across old oak tables, pins marking known positions, admirals demanding information from subordinates, and Churchill needling them all. He pressured Pound to order Tovey to keep up the chase even if it meant
King George V
had to be towed to port for lack of fuel. Pound needed no encouragement; he was an old seadog who believed a captain’s place was on the bridge.
²⁷⁸