A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  * Efforts to publish any account of Baker Street’s work were blocked by the British government until, finally, in 1966, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office produced a History of Special Operations Executive in France, by the Cambridge historian M. R. D. Foot. Even this lifted only a corner of the curtain and was restricted to that one region. Foot was obliged to state that he had been forbidden personal contact with survivors.

  * Kieffer was executed by the British three years later, convicted of shooting prisoners in uniform who had been captured during the D-day landings.

  PART

  III

  IMPEACHABLE

  OFFENSES

  “I am becoming more and more convinced that the British face imminent defeat unless they are given immediate aid by the United States in the matter of getting an adequate amount of shipping into United Kingdom ports. . . .”

  —Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy,

  in a note to President Roosevelt, April 1941

  “We will want to be notified by you in great secrecy of movements of convoys so that our patrol units can seek out the ship of an aggressor nation. . . .”

  —Franklin Roosevelt, in a note to INTREPID and Winston Churchill, April 1941

  28

  “Suppose the Bismarck does show up in the Caribbean? We have some submarines down there. Suppose we order them to attack her and attempt to sink her? Do you think the people would demand to have me impeached?” These words by President Roosevelt were said on May 24, 1941, as reported by Robert Sherwood. The BSC Papers recorded the substance of the same conversation with the observation that U.S. opinion had become highly critical of Britain’s poor performance against the enemy during this period, making it harder again for Roosevelt to display too much open support.

  The President kept secret a flagrant breach of the Neutrality Act that led to the most celebrated victory in modern British naval annals. Bismarck, the most powerful warship then in existence, pride of the German Navy, was sunk after the longest running fight in naval history. The action brought into play every facet of warfare, from secret agents to aerial torpedoes. Every contemporary electronic device was used. What caused the President to brood before Bismarck met her fate was that the greatest sea epic in history might end in a terrible, perhaps fatal, British defeat. Bismarck had taken to sea and disappeared. Britain’s future hinged dramatically on one final despairing air search.

  Roosevelt was drawn into the drama from the moment the monster Bismarck broke out of the Baltic Sea and began a wild rampage by destroying the most famous warship in the world, “Britain’s mighty Hood,” as it was then known. Hood went down with 90 officers and 1,400 men near the pack ice northwest of Iceland, victim of a plunging shell that struck her magazines. In the several masterly accounts of the epic engagements that followed, the key role of American naval and intelligence missions has been unacknowledged, for officially it did not exist. Nonetheless, the United States was essential to the avenging of Hood and stemming a disaster so great that its effects are even now incalculable.

  The first hint of the crisis to come reached the President in a signal relayed through INTREPID from a Baker Street Irregular, Odd Starheim. The son of a Norwegian shipowner in business with Stephenson, Starheim had escaped the Nazi occupation and was an active and daring member of the Norwegian resistance force. He was primarily engaged with a group working to destroy Germany’s source of heavy water for atomic research. But on May 21, 1941 he spotted two German warships in the Sperr Zone of the Norwegian coast, an area forbidden to all vessels not involved in transporting atomic materials. He took the risk of transmitting a warning to the Norwegian Section of BSC. His brief description, “Two large enemy warships,” was sufficient to tell the Admiralty in London that the two missing giants, Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, were preparing to make a run for the Atlantic. If they succeeded in joining the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Churchill immediately informed Roosevelt, “they could alter the whole course of the war.” The two battle cruisers alone had already accounted for 115,622 tons of shipping sunk in two months’ raiding. These losses were such that Churchill feared the fatal cutting of Britain’s arteries. On that Wednesday morning, the peril became far more than doubled. The two newly loosed leviathans cast an immediate threat upon eleven British convoys then at sea and a future threat upon Britain’s life line.

  The following day a signal from Hitler to Admiral Erich Raeder was intercepted and decoded by ULTRA. The German Navy was to shatter British sea links. The Führer could not know that already the new battleship Prince of Wales, Hood, and six destroyers were making full speed to join the two British cruisers already in the vicinity of the Norwegian fjord where the two massive German warships had been seen. Before this sweeping action was over, the British would commit to it eight battleships, two aircraft carriers, eleven cruisers, twenty-one destroyers, six submarines, several squadrons of aircraft—and a U.S. Navy ensign, Leonard Smith.

  Ensign Smith, a young man from Missouri farm country, was one of eighty U.S. Navy airmen lent, together with PBY Catalina amphibians, in response to Stephenson’s urgent request for help from the President. The long-range multipurpose planes were then the most effective aerial counterweapon to German raiders. Britain had nothing like them, or their radio equipment, or their crews. Smith’s part in sinking the Bismarck was interred in official files.

  In the afternoon of Hitler’s signal, a Royal Navy aircraft flew through thick weather to penetrate the fjord where Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were thought to be hiding. The pilot risked piling into precipitous cliffs and mountains, his vision frequently reduced to zero by fog, sleet, and thunderclouds. He returned with devastating news. Both German warships had vanished.

  On Thursday, May 22, Roosevelt was informed that Churchill was spending all his time in the Admiralty War Room directing the hunt for Bismarck, the more dangerous of the two raiders. But his full attention could be focused on this new threat only at intervals. In the Mediterranean, heavy Royal Navy losses, including the destroyer Kelly, whose captain, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had just been rescued from the sea, threatened the slippery British grasp of territory around Cairo.

  At Scapa Flow, east of Scotland’s aptly named Cape Wrath, the commander of the Home Fleet now decided to move out a powerful force to block the Germans’ likeliest exits. Admiral Sir John Tovey, small and sharp-witted, who loved Americans and hated “yes men,” had known Roosevelt from World War I, when he commanded a destroyer at Jutland. Now he was flying his flag in the new battleship King George V.

  “It is likely to be an anxious weekend,” signaled Churchill. For him, that most anxious weekend in naval history began early on Saturday. Of the widely spread net of warships, it was Hood and Prince of Wales that intercepted and engaged Bismarck. At 3:52 A.M., Hood fired her first salvo. Bismarck replied. Suddenly the Hood was bracketed by tall columns of fifteen-inch-shell splashes. The enemy’s shooting was astonishingly accurate. Then a direct hit plunged through the Hood’s armor and penetrated a magazine. A violent explosion tore the ship apart. Within three minutes nothing was left of her except some debris and three survivors. Prince of Wales was hit, and crippled so badly she had to retire from action to avoid annihilation. Bismarck was not unscathed, but her wounds were not disabling. The news of the engagement was so shocking that all over the world, from Berlin to Washington, there were requests for the message to be repeated. “Hood sunk?” Roosevelt was supposed to have cried. “It’s the end of Rule Britannia.”

  Bismarck was loose in the Atlantic, and Prinz Eugen, too. Moreover, gloomy news was coming from all the war fronts. Churchill heard “situation hopeless” from one commander in the Middle East; from another, an estimate that two-thirds of the Mediterranean Fleet had been damaged by a merciless Axis pounding during operations around Crete. Then Tovey reported that Bismarck had again given her pursuers the slip and was vanishing into a screen of foul weather. The War Cabinet atmosphere was foul, too, reported Foreign Office Under
-Secretary Alexander Cadogan. “Winston almost threw his hand in. . . . But there is a bit of the histrionic in that!”

  Histrionics had their place in the White House, too. “There was all sorts of speculation,” said Stephenson. “Some thought the Germans would even shell New York and then sail into South American ports to make propaganda. Roosevelt thought the Bismarck might make a grab for Martinique, the Vichy French island in the Caribbean. That was when the President speculated about ordering American submarines to sink her.”

  Robert Sherwood described the moment in his Roosevelt and Hopkins:

  Roosevelt was speaking in such a detached, even casual manner that one might have supposed he was playing with some time-machine fantasy, such as “Suppose you found yourself living in the middle of the thirteenth century. . . .” Yet here was the reality of one murderous ship, off on some wild, unpredictable career, guided by the will of one man who might be a maniac or a genius or both, capable of converting one inexplicable impulse into a turning point of history. And here was the President of the United States, sitting in the White House in an atmosphere of oppressive calm, wondering what the next naval dispatch would tell him, wondering what he would be able to do about it. He was behind his desk in the Oval Study, and he had his coat off. It was a very hot day. . . . The windows were open. Outside, to the southwest, was a big magnolia tree supposedly planted by Andrew Jackson. It was covered with big white blooms and their lemony scent drifted into the Study. You could look from these windows across to Virginia, which, when Lincoln lived in this house, was enemy territory. But Roosevelt was wondering whether he’d be impeached.

  The U.S. role in what then happened is missing from contemporary accounts. Even long after the war, the British still felt that any American administration would be loath to collaborate in secret intelligence if that collaboration seemed in danger of being revealed later. The Royal Navy broke with its tradition as the Silent Service to give unusually full details of the running battle—in order to hide a deeper truth.

  By Sunday, May 25, 1941, the British Admiralty had gathered forces from all over the Atlantic to weave a net that was intended to entangle Bismarck whichever way she turned. From Gibraltar came Force H, under Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville in the battle cruiser Renown, and comprising the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, a cruiser, and six destroyers. The battleships Rodney and Ramillies left the convoy they were escorting and converged south of Iceland. Out of Canadian and U.S. ports sailed additional warships. And hard on Bismarck’s heels came the carrier Victorious, with lumbering old Swordfish torpedo planes. The Swordfish were astonishing combinations of wood and fabric, open cockpits, twanging wires, and fixed undercarriages—and the first airborne radar, about which the enemy knew nothing. But although these elements were at the disposal of British naval commanders gathered in London like chess players, and although their every move on the big charts was immediately translated into action far away, Bismarck was still unfound.

  Bismarck was lost to these forces for thirty hours. Early in this period, however, she transmitted a thirty-minute report to Germany. By then, Roosevelt had asked that all U.S. radio direction-finding stations should watch out for such a signal. These listening posts, as the BSC Papers noted, were extremely good at locating the source of transmissions. The stations included those of the Radio Intelligence Division of the Federal Communications Commission, whose primary duty was to run to earth unlicensed broadcasters. But they were also unofficially intercepting signals from Europe, and the information was passed along to BSC. When Bismarck broke radio silence, these stations took bearings. A stream of information came to the Admiralty in London from such sources and from teleprinters and telephones at British listening posts. By 8:30 on Sunday morning, Bismarck’s thirty-minute indiscretion made it possible to calculate that she had gone southeastward since last seen.

  But an error in plotting these bearings when they were fed to King George V led the British Home Fleet to suppose the enemy was heading the other way, back toward the North Sea. By Sunday evening, the mistake was rectified, and the pursuers realized that Bismarck was making for a French port in the Bay of Biscay.

  The British mistake was a costly one. The Home Fleet, searching in the wrong direction, ran low on fuel. What helped to save the day was the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Modoc.

  Modoc was supposed to be on weather-reporting duties. In the Bay of Biscay? Well, that was the story her crew would have given an inquisitive German. Modoc was also carrying out Roosevelt’s order to all U.S. vessels to search the seas for survivors from German attacks. On Sunday evening, the Americans had the extraordinary experience of seeing Bismarck’s fighting tops rise over the horizon and then slowly recede. Modoc got off a signal.

  Soon after midnight, a long-range Catalina lent by the United States to British Coastal Command left the Northern Ireland port of Londonderry to join the search. This unarmed patrol bomber was piloted by Ensign Smith and manned by a mixed British and U.S. Navy crew. They droned steadily south through foul weather, and six hours later arrived in the general area of the Modoc.

  By this time, Bismarck had confused the Admiralty War Room and shaken off her pursuers so successfully that she seemed certain to come soon under the protection of German land-based warplanes. The shelter of heavily defended French ports was within her reach.

  At 8:30 on Monday morning, exactly twenty-four hours after Bismarck’s ill-conceived signal had given the British an opportunity to find her, Ensign Smith thought he glimpsed a warship through a break in the dense cloud cover. Piloting his Catalina above the rough seas, he swung around. The light was bad, the clouds intermittent at several levels. He could either fly higher to try to catch sight again of the distant vessel, or drop closer to the sea, where his range of vision would be greatly reduced. He chose to descend through the rain clouds, and had to concentrate on his instruments while flying blind. Suddenly he was in clear air again. Almost dead ahead, horrifyingly close, was Bismarck. Her gunners opened fire. Their aim was good, their reactions swift, because they had earlier fought off attacks by Swordfish torpedo planes in the savage encounters immediately following Hood’s destruction. The Swordfish were so slow that German gunners overestimated their speed, never believing warplanes would fly at less than a hundred knots as these did. Thus, though surprised after eluding the hunt for so long, Bismarck was ready. The Catalina, also relatively slow, shuddered under the impact of explosions and flying shrapnel.

  Smith made a tight 180-degree turn into the cloud. His message, sealing Bismarck’s fate, was in the Operational Intelligence Center in London within seconds:

  BATTLESHIP BEARING 240 DEGREES DISTANCE FIVE MILES COURSE 150 DEGREES MY POSITION 49:33 N, 21.47 W. . . .

  Fifteen clumsy-looking Swordfish were armed and fueled on the British carrier Ark Royal. They staggered off the heaving deck at lunch-time and were lost at once in driving rain, low cloud, and mist. They flew for what seemed the right length of time, and a contact appeared on their primitive radar. The first flight dived, and pilots cursed when they saw their torpedoes explode on hitting the water. The second flight wheeled to attack. Some torpedoes ran true. But the pilots saw with horror that they had struck at one of their own ships—the cruiser Sheffield, which luckily saw the torpedoes and took evasive action.

  “The hunt for Bismarck was a series of catastrophes, mistakes, and errors,” said one of the pilots later. “The near-disaster with Sheffield exposed the danger of relying on that early kind of radar equipment and revealed a defect in the magnetic pistols with which some torpedoes had been armed. The Home Fleet had dashed off in the wrong direction for so long that all ships, except Sheffield and King George V, were out of fuel and out of the fight. I remember thinking there was going to be one hell of a row back at the Operational Intelligence Center.”

  The Center in London was, however, too busy. Bletchley had reported a volume of sudden and unusual traffic on the German naval network of Group West in France. This, with all the other
intelligence, indicated Bismarck’s intentions. She was seeking safe haven in France because she was leaking oil from damage previously not suspected. German radio traffic disclosed the preparations to help Bismarck by German air and naval forces on the French coast.

  Ensign Smith’s report of Bismarck’s position was intercepted by the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, escorting a British troop convoy. Destroyers Cossack, Maori, Zulu, Sikh, and the Polish Piorun swung to intercept, spreading out as they plowed into a gale and towering seas. Far astern of Bismarck was King George V, the remaining vessel in the Home Fleet still able to give chase, but forced to tell London that unless the enemy’s speed could be reduced by midnight, she would have to break away for lack of fuel.

  Ark Royal’s Swordfish were launched again toward evening. They picked up Sheffield, which was now twelve miles astern of Bismarck, and were redirected toward the enemy. Gale-force winds and poor visibility made it impossible for the torpedo bombers to work as a pack. They were known fondly as “Stringbags” because they did indeed seem to be held together by string. They were also, however, remarkably sturdy. Each came separately upon Bismarck and delivered an independent attack at a stately speed of somewhat more than ninety miles an hour, reduced by head winds and the German battleship’s own speed so that each aircraft at some stage in its attack kept pace with Bismarck’s fearsome guns. One torpedo jammed the battleship’s two giant rudders, damaged her propellers, and put the steering gear out of action. Three hours before his self-imposed deadline, Admiral Tovey got what he wanted—a reduction in Bismarck’s speed. As darkness fell, the 4th Destroyer Flotilla made contact with the crippled battleship. In darkness and heavy seas, the destroyers stationed themselves around the doomed giant and crept in to launch torpedoes. Throughout that dreadful night, Bismarck was caught in the grip of the northwesterly gale and swung helplessly into it. By daybreak, King George V was on the scene. Tovey saw once again that the Germans could build warships that were almost indestructible by gunfire. Bismarck’s guns were silenced one by one and still she floated. Anxious to make an end, Tovey signaled for any ships with torpedoes unexpended to close and sink the battleship.