by James Young
“Would you prefer they spread their fire more evenly so we can have a taste, Leftenant?”
“No sir, not with the shells that are being slung out there.”
Gordon brought his binoculars back up.
“Still can’t see the enemy yet, but that’s why the boffins were aboard during our refit,” Gordon said. The man turned to his talker, jaw clenched.
“Tell Guns they may fire when we have visual contact or the enemy reaches nineteen thousand yards, whichever comes first,” Gordon said, his voice clipped. “Inform bridge of the eventual target’s bearing so we may get a look.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
Gordon turned back towards Eric and opened his mouth when he was interrupted by the sound of ripping canvas followed by the smack! of four shells landing between Exeter and the next British cruiser in front of her. A moment later, a bell began ringing at the rear of Exeter’s bridge. Eric was about to ask what the device signified when the heavy cruiser’s forward turrets roared, the blast hitting him like a physical blow. The look of shock was obviously quite apparent, as Gordon gave Eric an apologetic smile.
“Sorry, guess I should have…”
Exeter’s captain was again interrupted, except this time by two bright flashes aboard the cruiser forward of her the British battleline. The other vessel was visibly staggered by the blows, with a fire immediately starting astern.
“Looks like Suffolk has worse luck than we do,” Gordon observed grimly. The British heavy cruiser’s turrets replied back towards the enemy, but it was obvious, even to Eric, that their companion vessel was badly hit.
“Guns reports target is at bearing two nine zero, range twenty thousand yards…”
The bell ringing cut the rating off, as it was followed immediately by the Exeter unleashing a full broadside. Gordon had already begun to swing his sight around to the reported bearing, and bent to see what his guns were up to. Eric, looking past the captain, saw Suffolk receive another hit, this one causing debris to fly up from the vicinity of her bridge. He suddenly felt his mouth go dry.
Someone has the range, he thought grimly.
“Bloody good show Guns!” Gordon shouted into the voice tube near his sight. “Give that bastard another…”
The firing gong rang again, Exeter’s gunnery officer apparently already ahead of Gordon. Eric braced himself, the roar of the naval rifles starting to cause a slight ringing in his ears. He turned to look towards the horizon, following the direction of Exeter’s guns.
“These will help,” the officer of the deck said from beside him, handing him a pair of binoculars.
“Thank you,” Eric said, turning towards the officer only to see the man go pale.
“Oh bloody hell! Look at the Hood!”
Eric turned and looked down the British line, noting as he turned that the Suffolk was heeling to Exeter’s starboard with flames shooting from her amidships and rear turret. Ignoring the heavily damaged heavy cruiser, he brought up his binoculars as he looked towards the front of the British line. In an instant, he could see why the officer of the deck had made his exclamation. The battlecruiser’s guns appeared frozen in place, and oil was visibly gushing from her amidships. As Eric watched, another salvo splashed around her, with a sudden flare and billow of smoke from her stern indicating something serious had been hit.
“Captain, the Hood is signaling a power failure!” the officer of the deck shouted. Eric turned to see the man had acquired another set of eyeglasses and was also studying the flagship.
Gordon nodded, stepping back from his captain’s sight and brought his own set of binoculars up to study the battlecruiser. Eric quickly handed his over before the OOD could react.
“It would appear that our Teutonic friends can shoot a bit better than we expected,” Gordon said grimly.
Admiral Bey would have agreed with Gordon’s assessment had he heard it, as he too was pleasantly surprised at how well his scratch fleet was performing. Unfortunately for the Germans, however, the British could shoot almost as well, their guns seemed to be doing far more damage, and they had much better fire distribution. The only British capital ships with major damage were the Hood, set ablaze and rendered powerless by the Tirpitz and Jean Bart, and Nelson due to hits from the Bismarck and Strasbourg. Among the cruisers, only the Suffolk had been hit, being thoroughly mauled by the KMS Hipper and Lutzow. In exchange, only the Jean Bart, Gneisenau, and Bismarck remained relatively unscathed among his battleline. Of the rest of his vessels, the French battlecruiser Strasbourg had been thoroughly holed by the H.M.S. Warspite’s accurate shooting, Tirpitz was noticeably down by the bows, and Scharnhorst had received at least two hits from Prince of Wales in the first ten minutes of the fight.
Bey’s escorts, consisting of the pocket battleship Lutzow and a force of German and Vichy French cruisers, had arranged themselves in an ad hoc screen to starboard. The fact that they outnumbered their British counterparts had not spared them from damage, albeit not as heavy as that suffered by the Franco-German battleline. Moreover, while Exeter’s shooting had set the lead vessel, the French heavy cruiser Colbert, ablaze and slowed her, this was more than offset by the battering the Suffolk had received from the Lutzow, Hipper, and Seydlitz. As that vessel fell backward in the British formation, the remaining cruisers split their fire between the Exeter, Norfolk, and the destroyers beginning their attack approach.
Word of the British DDs’ approach caused Bey some consternation. While it could be argued that his force was evenly matched with the British battleline, the approaching destroyers could swiftly change this equation if they got into torpedo range. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Bey ordered all vessels to make smoke and disengage. It was just after the force began their simultaneous turn that disaster struck.
The KMS Scharnhorst, like the Hood, had begun life as a battlecruiser. While both she and her sister had been upgraded during the Armistice Period with 15-inch turrets, the Kriegsmarine had made the conscious decision not to upgrade her armor. The folly of this choice became readily apparent as the Prince of Wales’ twentieth salvo placed a pair of 14-inch shells through her amidships belt. While neither shell fully detonated, their passage severed the steering controls between the light battleship’s bridge and rudder.
The Scharnhorst’s helmsman barely had time to inform the captain of this before the second half of PoW’s staggered salvo arrived, clearing the battleship’s bridge with one shell and and hitting Scharnhorst on the armored “turtle deck” right above her engineering spaces with a second. To many bystanders’ horror, a visible gout of steam spewed from the vessel’s side as all 38,000 tons of her staggered like a stunned bull. Only the fact that her 15-inch guns fired a ragged broadside back at the British line indicated that the vessel still had power, but it was obvious to all that she had been severely hurt.
One of those observers was the captain of the KMS Gneisenau, Scharnhorst’s sister ship and the next battleship in line. Confronted with the heavily wounded Scharnhorst drifting back towards him, the man ordered the helm brought back hard to starboard. In one of the horrible vagaries of warfare, the Gneisenau simultaneously masked her sister ship from the Prince of Wales’ fire and corrected the aim of her own assailant, the H.M.S. Nelson. No one would ever know how many 16-inch shells hit of the five that had been fired at the Gneisenau, as the only one that mattered was the one that found the German battleship’s forward magazine. With a massive roar, bright flash, and volcanic outpouring of flame, the Gneisenau’s bow disappeared. Scharnhorst and Jean Bart’s horrified crews were subjected to the spectacle of the Gneisenau’s stern whipping upwards, propellers still turning. The structures only glistened for a moment, as the battleship’s momentum carried her aft end into the roiling black cloud serving as a tombstone for a 40,000-ton man-of-war and the 1,700 men who manned her.
“Holy shit! Holy shit!” Eric exclaimed, his expletives lost in the general pandemonium that was Exeter’s bridge.
“Get yourselves together!” Gordon roared, waving his hands. As if to emphasize his point, there was the sound of ripping canvas, and a moment later, the Exeter found herself surrounded by large waterspouts.
“Port ten degrees!” Gordon barked, the bridge crew quickly returning to their tasks.
“Sir, Nelson is signaling that she is heaving to!”
“What in the bloody hell is the matter with her?!” Gordon muttered, a moment before Exeter’s guns roared again.
“Guns reports we are engaging and being engaged by a pocket battleship. He believes it is the…” the talker reported.
Once again there was the sound of ripping canvas, this time far louder. Eric instinctively ducked just before the Exeter shuddered simultaneously with the loud bang! just above their heads. Dimly, he saw something fall out of the corner of his eye even as there was a sound like several wasps all around him. Coming back to his feet, Eric smelled the strong aroma of explosives for the second time that day, except this time there was a man screaming like a shot rabbit to accompany it.
“Damage report!” Gordon shouted. “Someone shut that man up!”
Feeling something wet on his face, Eric reached up to touch it and came away with blood. He frantically reached up to feel if he had a wound, and only came away with more blood. Looking around in horror, he suddenly realized that the blood was not his, but that of a British rating who was now missing half of his head, neck, and upper chest. Eric barely had time to register this before a litter crew came bursting into the bridge. The four men headed to the aft portion of the structure, obviously there for the man who had been screaming before a gag had been shoved in his mouth. Eric followed the litter team’s path, then immediately wished he hadn’t as his stomach lurched. The casualty’s abdomen was laid open, and Eric saw the red and grey of intestine on the deck before turning back forward.
Oh God, he thought, then had another as he thought about the injured man’s likely destination. I hope Rawles is okay.
“Hard a starboard!” Gordon barked. Eric braced himself as the Exeter heeled over, the vessel chasing the previous salvo as her guns roared back at the German pocket battleship. He noticed that the guns were starting to bear even further aft as the cruiser maneuvered to keep up with the remainder of the British battleline. Looking to starboard, Eric saw the battleship Nelson drifting past them on her starboard side. The vessel’s forward-mounted triple turrets, still elevated to port, fired off a full salvo once Exeter was past, but it was clear that the battleship had suffered severe damage.
“Sir, we took one glancing hit to the bridge roof,” the OOD reported, pointing at the hit that had sprayed splinters into the structure. Eric was amazed at the man’s calm. “We took another hit aft, but it detonated in the galley.”
“King George V signals commence torpedo attack with destroyers,” the talker interrupted. “All ships with tubes to attack enemy cripples.”
Six waterspouts impacted approximately three hundred yards to port, and Eric found himself questioning the wisdom of staying aboard the heavy cruiser after all.
“Well, looks like this ship will continue her tradition of picking on women bigger than her,” Gordon observed drily. “Flank speed, port thirty degrees. Get me the torpedo flat.”
Eric looked once again at the hole in the bridge roof.
A step either way and I’d probably be dead, he thought wildly. Or worse, if that shell had it full on we’d all be gone. Shaking his head, he turned to look off to port as the throb of Exeter’s engines began to increase.
“You ever participate in a torpedo attack during your summer cruise, Mr. Cobb?” Gordon asked after barking several orders to the helm.
“No sir,” Eric croaked, then swallowed to get a clearer voice. “Our cruisers don’t have torpedoes. I’m familiar with how to do one theoretically…”
Exeter’s guns banged out another salvo, even as the German pocket battleship’s return fire landed where she would have been had the cruiser continued straight.
“Well, looks like you’re about to get to apply some of that theoretical knowledge,” Gordon said, bringing his binoculars up. The man scanned the opposing line.
“The three big battleships are turning away under cover of smoke along with the majority of the cruisers. That Frog battlecruiser looks about done for, and that pocket battleship and heavy cruiser will soon have more than enough to deal with when the destroyers catch up,” Gordon said, pointing as he talked. Exeter’s master turned to give his orders.
“Tell Lieutenant Commander Gannon his target is the pocket battleship! Guns are to…”
The crescendo of incoming shells drowned Gordon out, this time ending with the Exeter leaping out of the water and shuddering as she was hit. Once again the bridge wing was alive with fragments, and for the second time Eric felt a splash of wetness across his side. Looking down, he saw his entire left side was covered in blood and flesh. For a moment he believed it was his, until he blissfully realized that he felt no pain.
“Damage report!” Gordon shouted again. “Litter party!”
“Sir, I believe I am hit,” the OOD gasped. Eric turned to see the man’s arm missing from just below the elbow, blood spraying from the severed stump.
“Corpsman!” Gordon shouted angrily, stepping towards the lieutenant. The captain never made, it, as the OOD toppled face forward, revealing jagged wounds in his back where splinters had blasted into his body.
“Helmsman! Zig zag pattern!” Gordon barked. “Someone get me a damage report! Midshipman Green, inform damage control that we need another talker and an OOD here!”
“Aye aye, Captain!”
“Leftenant Cobb!”
“Yes sir?” Eric asked, shaking himself out of stupor.
“It might be prudent for you to go to the conning tower,” Gordon said.
“Sir, I’d prefer to be here than in some metal box,” Eric said. “With the shells that bastard’s tossing it won’t make a lick of difference anyway.”
“Too true,” Gordon said. “Looks like the heavy cruisers and that pocket battleship are covering the bastards’ retreat.”
Gordon’s supposition was only partially correct. In truth, the pocket battleship Lutzow had received damage from the Exeter and Norfolk that had somewhat reduced her maximum speed. This had prevented her from fleeing with the rest of the screen, their retirement encouraged by a few salvoes from the Nelson. Realizing that she could not escape the closing British destroyers, Lutzow’s captain had decided to turn and engage the smaller vessels in hopes of allowing Scharnhorst to open the distance between herself and the British. Unfortunately, Lutzow had failed to inform the heavy cruiser KMS Hipper, trailing in her wake, of her desire to self-sacrifice while ignoring Admiral Bey’s signal to retire. Thus the latter vessel, her radio aerial knocked out by an over salvo from the Nelson’s secondary batteries, found herself committed to engaging the rapidly closing British destroyers along with the larger, crippled Lutzow.
The British destroyers, formed into two divisions under the experienced Commodore Philip Vian, first overtook the damaged French battlecruiser Strasbourg. Adrift, afire, and listing heavily to port, the Strasbourg wallowed helplessly as the British destroyers closed like hyenas on a paralyzed wildebeest. Just as Vian was beginning to order his group into their battle dispositions, flooding finally compromised the battlecruiser’s stability. With a rumble and the scream of tortured metal, the Strasbourg rotated onto her starboard beam and slipped beneath the surface.
That left the crippled Scharnhorst, the Lutzow, and the hapless Hipper. Still receiving desultory fire from Nelson and Warspite, the trio of German vessels initially concentrated their fire on the charging Exeter and Norfolk. After five minutes of this, all three German captains realized Vian’s approaching destroyers were a far greater threat. The Lutzow and Hipper turned to lay smoke across the retreating Scharnhorst’s stern, the maneuver also allowing both vessels to fire full broadsides at their smaller assailants. The Hipper had
just gotten off her second salvo when she received a pair of 8-inch shells from the Norfolk. The first glanced off the heavy cruiser’s armor belt and fell harmlessly into the sea. The second, however, impacted the main director, blowing the gunnery officer and most of the cruiser’s gunnery department into disparate parts that splashed into the sea or onto the deck below. For two crucial minutes, the Hipper’s main battery remained silent even as her secondaries began to take the approaching British destroyers under fire.
The respite from Lutzow’s fire had arrived just in time for Exeter, as the pocket battleship had been consistently finding the range. Staggering to his feet after another exercise in throwing himself flat, Eric looked forward to see just where the heavy cruiser had been hit this time. His gaze fell upon the devastation that had been Exeter’s “B” turret, where a cloud of acrid yellow was smoke pouring back from the structure’s opened roof to pass around the heavy cruiser’s bridge. Damage control crews were rushing forward to spray hoses upon the burning guns, even as water began to crash over the cruiser’s lowering bow.
“Very well then, flood the magazine!” Gordon was shouting into the speaking tube. “Tell the Norfolk we shall follow her in as best we can.”
Looking to starboard, Eric could see the aforementioned heavy cruiser starting to surge ahead of Exeter, smoke pouring from her triple stacks and her forward turrets firing another salvo towards the Hipper.
“We are only making twenty-three knots, sir,” the helmsman reported.
“Damage control reports heavy flooding in the bow,” the talker stated. “Lieutenant Ramses states we must slow our speed or we may lose another bulkhead.”
Gordon’s face set in a grim line.
“Torpedoes reports a solution on the pocket battleship,” the talker reported after pausing or a moment.
“Range?!” Gordon barked.
“Ten thousand yards and closing.”
“Tell me when we’re at four thousand…”
