The Sinking of the Bismarck (6 page)

In the Admiralty in London there was much confusion. No one at the nerve center of the British navy in London noticed that Admiral Tovey’s plotting of the position of the
Bismarck
was at variance to their own and that the Home Fleet obviously was going off on a mad chase in the wrong direction. As the hours passed, most of the top-ranking naval officers in London became certain that the
Bismarck
was making for France. Yet Admiral Tovey was not informed of this.

Finally, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Tovey received
a radio message from the Admiralty giving a new position for the
Bismarck
. This had been plotted from radio directional bearings received from the enemy ship’s radio two hours earlier.

Admiral Luetjens had continued to send out a stream of radio messages all day. The twenty-fifth of May was his birthday and he had received a number of birthday congratulations radioed from Berlin. Even Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, had sent him a message: “Best wishes on your birthday.”

It was perhaps only natural for the German admiral to reply—and thus by his radio broadcasts to unwittingly keep the British informed of his course and changing position. He still was sure he was being shadowed. There was no sense in maintaining radio silence when the enemy had his ship on its radar screen and knew exactly where he was.

At 8:46
A.M.
Naval Group West, under whose command he now was, had radioed Luetjens that it believed he had given the slip to his pursuers.

Last enemy contact report [it advised] was at 02:13 [2:13
A.M.
]. We have impression that contact with
Bismarck
has been lost.

Unfortunately for himself, his ship and crew, the headstrong German admiral did not believe it. He still failed to believe it at 6:30 that evening when Group West again radioed him saying that there had been no British reports of sighting the
Bismarck
all day. Thus the mistakes on both sides were contributing to the sharpening of the tense drama now approaching its climax.

***

The position of the
Bismarck
radioed by the Admiralty to Sir John at 3:30 on the afternoon of May 25 came as a shock to the Commander in Chief. It showed that the enemy battleship was not heading north for home but southeast for a French port. It meant that Admiral Tovey had for several hours been engaged in a wild-goose chase in the wrong direction. Indeed, he realized that during the early afternoon the
Bismarck
must have passed him on her way south and now would have a head start in the race for the French coast.

Completely baffled, Admiral Tovey asked his navigation officer to check his arithmetic in the original plotting of the enemy’s position. The officer did so and found his mistake. The German
battleship had been pointing toward France all day!

At 6:10
P.M.
Sir John, after waiting in vain for further word from the Admiralty, steered the Home Fleet around and set a new course southeast. An hour later the Admiralty approved. All British ships in the Atlantic, it ordered, were to try to intercept the
Bismarck
on her way to France.

The newly discovered course of the German vessel immediately put several British warships out of the race, for their fuel supplies were fast dwindling. The
Ramillies
had dropped out earlier in the day on receipt of the false news that the
Bismarck
had turned northeast. The old British battleship was much too slow to attempt to catch up on the new course. Therefore during the early afternoon the Admiralty had instructed her to take over the troopship
Britannic
, which the
Rodney
had had to abandon the day before. The
Ramillies
was to escort the
Britannic
on to Canada.

The cruiser
Suffolk
, which had turned west to look for the enemy off Greenland, was much too far away to join in the chase toward Brest. She now made for a refueling station in Iceland. So did the carrier
Victorious
and her escorting cruisers.
The crippled
Prince of Wales
was also low on oil. She was ordered home. The
Norfolk
’s oil tanks were getting dangerously low. But Rear Admiral Wake-Walker decided to risk remaining in the chase with her.

***

The twenty-fifth of May had been another dark and frustrating day for Admiral Tovey. As evening came, with mounting seas, a stiff wind from the northwest and a falling barometer, he took stock of his situation.

He had hoped to give battle to the
Bismarck
at nine o’clock that morning. But during the hours of night just preceding she had been lost. Soon afterward he had had a stroke of luck when Admiral Luetjens broke radio silence. But because of a mistake in arithmetic on Tovey’s own flagship, this good fortune had led him off on a wild-goose chase instead of bringing him into quick contact with the enemy.

As darkness fell over the stormy seas, he was alone. The once mighty Home Fleet had been reduced to one battleship, his flagship
King George V
. The
Hood
was lost. All the other war vessels
had had to return to base to refuel. His own ship was dangerously low on oil. He had already had to reduce speed to conserve it. At reduced speed how could he catch and engage the
Bismarck
? He calculated that she was already at least 100 miles ahead of him and faster than his own ship.

The
Rodney
was somewhere in front of him, but just where Tovey did not know. Her captain, unlike the German admiral, had been observing radio silence all day.

And finally there was Force H, which had been coming up full steam from Gibraltar. Within twenty-four hours or so he ought to meet her. The more the Commander in Chief thought about it on that grim, stormy evening the more he saw that Vice-Admiral Somerville’s squadron was probably his last and only hope. It stood between the
Bismarck
and safe refuge at Brest or St. Nazaire.

The battle cruiser
Renown
could scarcely be expected to stand up to the more powerful German battleship. But planes from the carrier
Ark Royal
might slow her up with torpedoes.

Of course the planes from the carrier
Victorious
had not been very successful in a similar attempt
the night before. Still, this was about his only hope. The torpedo-carrying Swordfish from the
Ark Royal
would at least have to reduce the speed of the
Bismarck
if Admiral Tovey were to catch her.

But first the enemy battleship had to be found. Sir John had a general idea of her whereabouts from the radio direction finders. But she had not been sighted by eye or radar since the night before. She must now be found or the chase was up.

For this, too, the scouting planes of the
Ark Royal
seemed to be his last hope. But unknown to the troubled British admiral there was still another source of hope.

Chapter Seven

The
Bismarck
Is Found Again

All day long on May 25 and far into the night three Catalinas from the Northern Ireland base had been out over the distant sea searching for the
Bismarck
.

Shortly after midnight one of them had sighted what looked in the murky night like a battleship and four destroyers. The big ship did not respond to the plane’s signals. It was probably the
Rodney
with her destroyers, but the pilot couldn’t be sure.

An hour later a second plane flew over the wake of a big vessel farther west. This ship also failed to reply to the plane’s signals. She could have been the
Bismarck
. And then again she might have been the
King George V
. In the black stormy night the pilot could not tell.

The three long-range flying boats did not get back to base until nearly noon on May 26 after almost twenty-four hours in the air. Long before that, two other flying boats of Coastal Command from the same base in Northern Ireland had set out to join in the search. They had taken off from Lough Erne at 3:00
A.M.
while the night was still black.

The area they were to search had at last been strictly defined. This was a “square” some 700 miles due west of Brest. It was based partly on the positions of the
Bismarck
as plotted by the British radio direction-finding stations, taking into consideration her probable course and speed. It was also based, in part, on one man’s hunch.

This man was Air Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, commander in chief of the R.A.F. Coastal Command. Bowhill had been an officer in both the merchant marine and the navy before becoming a flier in the Royal Air Force. He thus knew the sea as well as the air—a rare quality in any airman.

From the moment news was received that the
Bismarck
was lost, Sir Frederick had had a hunch about what she was up to. She was making for
Brest or St. Nazaire. Several naval officers at the Admiralty and on the ships at sea had had the same feeling. But Bowhill’s hunch was something special.

He was sure that the German battleship would not head directly for the French ports. Rather, he thought, she would follow a wide circle. She would steer first for Cape Finisterre on the northwest coast of Spain. Since Spain was neutral, the Cape’s lighthouse was still functioning. (The lights along the coasts of France and England were extinguished during the war as a measure of self-protection against hostile ships and planes.) Then, the Air Marshal reasoned, the
Bismarck
would proceed around the Bay of Biscay to haven at St. Nazaire or Brest.

On the evening of May 25, when Bowhill conferred with the Admiralty, he insisted on being allowed to follow his hunch. One of the two Catalinas must cover an assumed course of the
Bismarck
toward Cape Finisterre in Spain.

After some argument the Admiralty gave in to him on condition that the second plane search farther north on an assumed course of the enemy
directly toward Brest. The square of search thus became a rectangle tilted northeast. It was about two hundred miles long and a hundred miles wide. It lay some 600 miles northwest of Cape Finisterre and 700 miles due west of Brest. If the
Bismarck
were making for either place, Bowhill calculated, she ought to be somewhere within the rectangle by 10:00
A.M.
on May 26.

It was a rather large area for just two planes to cover, and the weather reports were discouraging. There were high winds and low clouds over mountainous seas. The Catalinas would have to get down low to discover any ships. And identification in such conditions of bad visibility would not be easy. Still, Sir Frederick was fairly optimistic as his two aircraft skimmed over the waters of Lough Erne, rose into the air and headed southwest into the darkness before dawn.

***

As daylight broke on May 26, Force H was getting close to the prey. But closing in on the
Bismarck
was not the only problem faced by Vice-Admiral Somerville aboard his flagship
Renown
. He had another. Ever since steaming out of Gibraltar on
the night of the 23rd he had been concerned about running into the German battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
. On that day British planes had reported the two warships still in Brest, where they were undergoing repairs from a bombing by R.A.F. bombers some weeks before.

But after Somerville’s squadron headed northward in the Atlantic, he received no more news about the two German ships. By May 25—two days later—the commander of Force H had to face the possibility that the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
might well have completed their repairs and put out from Brest to come to the rescue of the
Bismarck
. If so, they might be dangerously near his own squadron, which was no match for them.

Twice during May 25 as he sped toward the general direction of the
Bismarck
, Admiral Somerville had sent out aircraft from the carrier
Ark Royal
to look for the two German battle cruisers. But visibility had been so poor that the planes had been recalled shortly after taking off. In the evening the Admiral gave orders that the first dawn patrol of planes the next day would have to disregard the
Bismarck
, desperate as the search
for her was. They must look first to see if the German battle cruisers were near by.

The night of the 25th grew very stormy. So high were the waves that speed had to be drastically reduced—from twenty-six knots to twenty-three, and then down to nineteen and finally, just after midnight, to seventeen knots. At this rate, Somerville realized, he would never be able to converge on the
Bismarck
. And the high seas were threatening to smash up his ships. The small destroyers were barely able to keep afloat, and waves pounded over the decks of the cruiser
Sheffield
and the battle cruiser
Renown
.

Even the flight deck of the
Ark Royal
, sixty-three feet above the water line, was being washed by the heavy seas. Her bow and stern were rising and falling a distance of fifty-five feet as the ship pitched and rolled. If such seas kept on, the carrier would be unable to launch any planes at all from the lurching deck when the decisive time arrived.

***

The stormy seas were troubling the Germans too.

Early on the afternoon of May 25, Naval Group
West had radioed Admiral Luetjens that it was assembling seven U-boats to protect him on his run into Brest. At 7:32
P.M.
it advised the German Fleet Commander that strong air forces also were being mobilized to give him protection and to bomb his pursuers. Three destroyers, it added, were putting out from Brest to join him.

But the seas were too high for them. Early on the morning of May 26 Naval Group West informed Admiral Luetjens by radio that the weather made it impossible for the destroyers to leave port. He would have to depend on “close air cover for the time being.”