Gneisenau had managed to land two ineffective hits on Warspite, her target in the line, but was in serious danger of losing her part in the duel due to the undivided attention of Queen Elizabeth, with each of the shell strikes against her causing serious damage. Her main directors were quickly put out of action, her three turrets left firing under their own local control with a resultant loss of general accuracy, while one hit on her funnel had fouled her exhaust, cutting her speed and making her an even easier target for Queen Elizabeth’s ceaseless broadsides. Within just ten minutes she was already pulling out of the rear of the German line, taking on water and so badly damaged that she was unable to continue. As Gneisenau ceased firing entirely and her change in course was noted, Queen Elizabeth’s captain rightly dismissed her as hors-de-combat and was able to turn his ship’s attention the next ship in the enemy formation.
Warspite had by that stage already also managed to inflict some severe damage on Scharnhorst, particularly as fire from the stricken Gneisenau had fallen away entirely. With just her third salvo, she’d landed a direct hit against Scharnhorst’s superstructure forward of turret ‘Caesar’ – her single main turret aft. German turret ‘naming’ practice was to accord names in alphabetical order, working backwards. As such, all four of the Kriegsmarine battleships present that day carried the titles of ‘Anton’, ‘Bruno’ and ‘Caesar’ for their three main gun turrets.
The hit in Scharnhorst caused little real damage, but did send debris skyward and started fires that poured a trail of smoke into the air. Her next two ‘on target’ salvoes landed three palpable hits on the battlecruiser as Queen Elizabeth behind landed her own devastating hits on Gneisenau. The two British sister ships, both veterans of the First World War, were quickly gaining the better of their two newer opponents, whose returned broadsides of 15-inch shells were still mostly falling long on their own targets.
Warspite landed hit after hit on Scharnhorst with relentless efficiency as the minutes passed, putting the ship’s two forward turrets out of action and forcing her to also pull out of the battle line with thick clouds of smoke rising into the grey sky as great fires burned along her decks. Queen Elizabeth fired her first ranging salvo on Scharnhorst as Warspite’s next broadside resulted in more devastating hits, one penetrating her engine room and shattering the battlecruiser’s boilers. The resulting savage explosion tore deep rents along the rear of the ship’s hull, above and below the waterline, and Scharnhorst instantly began to settle by the stern as the North Sea poured into her. Her captain gave the order to abandon ship.
As quickly as the battle had turned against the Kriegsmarine at the rear of the battle line, it turned back to their favour at the formation’s head. Bismarck had found Hood’s range quickly and unleashed the full power of her devastating arsenal against the smaller battlecruiser without mercy. Her first ‘on target’ barrage gained one direct hit as a huge, armour-piercing shell tore through the ship’s hull like paper between her fore and aft superstructure and vaporised her seaplane crane, catapult and the decks beneath, leaving serious internal damage.
The very next salvo from the German behemoth landed two more hits on Hood, the first of which punched through her deck at a sharp angle and blew a large hole in her bow that flooded the ship with thousands of tonnes of seawater. The second of the strikes slammed into the battlecruiser’s hull in line with her B-turret, the steel armour belt more than thirty centimetres thick at the point of impact but still not enough to stop the tonne-and-a-half shell. It tore its way deep into the hull before finally detonating within one of the ship’s main magazines, and the resulting explosion vaporised several hundred tonnes of cordite and dozens of 15-inch shells in an instant. The massive blast threw water and debris high into the air as it broke poor Hood’s back and blew her completely in half, sinking her in less than a minute and leaving just three survivors.
Tirpitz also made relatively short work of her target in the battlecruiser Renown, the power of her nine guns quickly battering the lighter armed and armoured ship into submission within just a few minutes and a few savage, direct hits. A lucky first hit hammered through her quarterdeck and shattered the vessel’s steering gear, causing her to veering sharply out of line to starboard with a jammed rudder. Renown initially continued to fire on Bismarck, although she was unable to find much accuracy as her course continued to change dramatically, but Tirpitz’s next salvo slammed into her again with no less than three hits, two of which breached her hull below the waterline and flooded her badly.
She began to take on more water than her watertight compartments or counter-flooding could handle and began to sink. Two more salvoes hit her again as she slowed and settled in the water, and just moments later, Renown capsized and her stern began to rise. The Dogger Bank was well-known to be quite shallow in parts, and the dying battlecruiser’s sinking bow struck the thick sandy bottom of the sea below before her upright stern had disappeared below the waves. She would remain that way for several weeks, her nose embedded in the bank and her stern still buoyant due to air trapped within, before finally coming loose once more and disappearing for the last time during a late October storm. Propaganda newsreel footage of her angled, exposed stern with damaged rudders and screws still turning would provide the Nazi press with images that would be seen around the entire globe in the aftermath of the invasion, and no more than a few hundred of her crew would survive the incident.
Just fifteen minutes after the commencement of battle, the numerical odds had shifted but remained theoretically in the Home Fleet’s favour to the tune of three ships to two, although such statistics weren’t indicative of the true situation. While the three RN battleships were now able to concentrate fire upon the two remaining enemy warships, those opponents were a pair of superbattleships that were the pride of the entire Kriegsmarine. Bismarck and Tirpitz had been designed to take punishment from guns of a similar calibre to their own – guns that threw shells almost double the weight and penetrating power of those the British could bring to bear against them. The hardened steel armour that clad their hulls, decks and turrets was in some places up to sixty centimetres thick, and although three separate warships had landed a number of hits on both vessels during the battle so far, none had been able to inflict anything more than some insignificant, superficial damage.
Responding to distress calls from first Gneisenau and then Scharnhorst, the two superbattleships next turned their attention on the rear of the British line and the two Great War veterans, Warspite and Queen Elizabeth. Shrugging off successive impacts from 15-inch shells that dented her hide but did no real damage other than neutralising some of her lighter flak guns, Tirpitz quickly gained the range of Queen Elizabeth and slammed her with salvo after salvo of increasingly accurate fire. One shell penetrated and shattered her rear X-turret, smoke pouring from every opening as its guns lay pointing uselessly at the deck. Another shell smashed into her rear superstructure, killed hundreds and started several large fires, while a third and fourth punched holes in her hull and caused massive flooding.
A fifth shell penetrated and detonated a secondary magazine aft, the explosion not enough to destroy the ship but certainly powerful enough to inflict incapacitating damage. Queen Elizabeth suddenly found herself devoid of power as her main dynamos went offline along with her boilers, and she stopped almost dead in the water, pouring smoke into the air as debris from the magazine explosion sprayed into the air in all directions. The battleship began to take on a significant list to starboard.
Bismarck ranged and went ‘on target’ on Warspite at about the same time her sister ship was firing on Queen Elizabeth. In a savage and rather one-sided, five-minute duel, the Jutland veteran lost three turrets, her main fire director and most of her electrical power, with little damage inflicted in return. She also lost a substantial number of her crew, including all of her command, and she was soon drifting out of action and burning as furiously as Queen Elizabeth. As was often the case with the unpredictable and fluid natur
e of battle, advantages, either real of imagined, were often fleeting, and the advantage in this particular battle that had seemed to favour the British just moments before had now suddenly and dramatically turned against the Royal Navy once more.
Harwood had been forced to assume command of the fleet the moment Hood had been obliterated, taking Sir John Tovey with her. He could clearly see that although they’d initially had some success, it was becoming increasingly obvious their firepower simply wasn’t great enough to damage the remaining enemy ships at that range. Nelson had been firing on Tirpitz throughout the engagement and hadn’t yet managed to inflict any more than minor damage, although several small fires were now burning around the enemy ship’s superstructure; nor had the added fire of Queen Elizabeth and Warspite improved the situation. Rear-Admiral Henry Harwood realised that some kind of change was needed, and that change was needed quickly.
It was Nelson that would ultimately provide the Royal Navy with its last fleeting hopes of success. Harwood’s resulting actions would earn him, among others, a posthumous Victoria Cross and would guarantee his place in history in what would eventually become known as the ‘Second Battle of The Dogger Bank’. As he watched the burning Warspite drift out of the battle line, leaving Nelson to carry on alone, Harwood immediately gave orders for the ship to turn onto a sharper angle of approach toward the enemy fleet that would nevertheless allow her to present a full ‘broadside’ due to the unique disposition of Nelson’s main armament in three forward turrets.
“England expects that every man will do his duty!” That broadcast, which Harwood then made to his crew over open radio channels for all within range to hear, was a reiteration of the words of Viscount Horatio Nelson at the opening of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and it somehow seemed singularly appropriate aboard the ship that held that great commander as her namesake. There would be many who would later privately feel the award of the VC was as much for those famous last words as for any action that followed.
The statement certainly seemed to inspire his crew as Nelson turned onto her new course and increased speed to 22 knots. The sudden change in direction ruined the firing solutions of both German warships as they abandoned fire on their shattered opponents and tried to draw a bead on her, and they wasted many minutes in adjustments to their fire control as Nelson let rip with a broadside aimed directly at the tall silhouette of Tirpitz. That salvo and the one following produced only misses, some close, as shells fell about the battleship however the third broadside was far more fortunate. Four shells from that miraculous nine-gun blast struck the battleship, and although her heavy armour was able to shrug off two of them, the other two finally managed to deal the behemoth some serious damage.
Perhaps as a result of striking areas already weakened by prior impacts, one managed to penetrate the top armour of turret ‘Anton’, and the resultant internal explosion almost tore it from its mountings, setting it askew with its trio of guns left useless and pointing randomly into the air off Tirpitz’s port bow. The second shell tore through the hull amidships, spreading chaos in her boiler rooms, and two dozen men were lost to fire caused by the explosion before preventative flooding could quell the flames, adding their names to the hundred-odd killed instantly by the hit on A-turret.
The next combined return salvo from Bismarck and a subdued Tirpitz missed Nelson completely, at that point the only British ship that had managed to so far remain completely unscathed. Nelson’s fourth salvo struck Tirpitz again, two direct hits absorbed by the superbattleship’s thick hide of hardened steel as a third tore through the superstructure and killed dozens of officers and men. Fire control and power to turret ‘Caesar’ was suddenly cut completely by the damage inflicted, leaving the battleship with just one functional main turret and placing greater strain on her overloaded remaining boilers. She began to lose power, and with just one turret operating, Lütjens had no option but to order her out of the battle line.
The second German salvo against Nelson, now from only the guns of Bismarck, again missed her completely as the British ship suddenly changed course. She altered her direction 120̊ to starboard in a battleship’s equivalent of ‘tacking’, reversing her oblique angle of approach and allowing her nine guns to bear from the other side of her bow as she again threw out her enemies’ firing solutions. One shell of the next barrage did detonate against the upper part of her smokestack, killing a number of exposed ratings with shrapnel, but that was relatively minor damage all the same.
Nelson continued to direct her increasingly successful fire upon Tirpitz as the superbattleship began to pull out of line to starboard. Contact from the mainland advised that air support was no more than fifteen minutes away, but even so it seemed to Lütjens that perhaps the unbelievable was happening… that this single surviving British battleship might potentially turn what was already a disaster into an outright, crushing defeat.
Nelson fired again, and the gunnery direction behind that salvo was inspired. It would subsequently earn the officer in control of the fire directors – a man who’d be one of the few dozen of her crew to survive the battle – a Victoria Cross for his efforts. Five armour-piercing 16-inch shells out of nine fired hit the German warship, and of those, no less than three were able to punch through her weakened and abused top armour to reach the vulnerable decks below. One of them found Tirpitz’s forward main magazines, and the combined explosion of propellant and 460mm shells literally blew the warship to pieces forward of her superstructure. As a gigantic, boiling mushroom cloud of smoke and flame rolled skyward, and debris rained over many square kilometres of sea around her, everything forward of the superbattleship’s bridge simply disintegrated. She instantly began to take on water through her shattered forward hull at a rate no damage control could ever hope to contain. Within three minutes, Tirpitz’s stern lifted into the air and she slid beneath the surface of the North Sea.
The next salvo from Bismarck found accuracy that was as much out of desperation as any quality of training, and she finally managed to bracket the oncoming Nelson properly and switched to ‘on target’. Two of Bismarck’s 460mm shells hit her then, the first of those striking her a glancing blow across her foredeck and flooding her forward compartments with seawater, while the second ripped through her superstructure, grazing the port side of the bridge before exploding against her funnel. Shrapnel and fragmentation from the second blast tore through her superstructure, killing many on the bridge including Harwood, yet still she came on as her hard-won speed began to fall off dramatically. The only man left alive on the bridge, her XO, instantly took control of the situation and ordered her onward, the fleeting opportunity that lay before them crystal clear. He changed tack once more, trying to buy some more time as Nelson came about once more to port, and she this time fired her last, defiant broadsides at the remaining enemy vessel: Bismarck.
Three shells of Nelson’s third salvo struck the massive ship, one passing completely through her funnel to explode against the surface of the ocean, several hundred metres beyond. The second impacted against Bismarck’s superstructure, tearing apart one of the superbattleship’s triple 128mm secondary gun turrets in the process, while the third smashed through her broad, open quarterdeck at a sharp angle and destroyed the helicopter hangar below along with all five aircraft inside.
Luck seemed to remain with Nelson momentarily, as Bismarck’s next nine-gun barrage provided the only two duds of the entire engagement, both of them otherwise quite palpable hits. The first passed completely through the British ship’s starboard side at a sharp angle, exiting barely above the waterline and killing just four people unlucky enough to be directly in its path. The second scudded off the side of Nelson’s ‘X’ turret and embedded itself in the ship’s lower decks, most of its energy already spent.
Her good fortune vanished a moment later however as she was torn apart by no less than six massive explosions along the entire length of her port side.
During the course of the Realtime war, the Hei
nkel Model 177 Grief had entered service in 1942 as the Luftwaffe’s only true heavy bomber. A ludicrous insistence in also using the aircraft as a huge dive bomber resulted in numerous teething problems and an initial reputation of unreliability that it later found difficult to shake, regardless of some clear success in its designed role as a strategic bomber. The world of Reuter’s devising had created no such problems of ‘identity’ for the He-177, and it had entered service with the Luftwaffe in the middle of 1940 with the designation B-8B. A number of variants had been developed, including one for the expanding air arm of the Kriegsmarine (B-8E) that was proving to be an excellent long-range patrol and anti-shipping aircraft. The Grief could lift 6,000kg of ordnance into the air, and deliver it to a combat radius of over 1,500 kilometres, and the Kriegsmarine had found it perfect as a carrier aircraft for its newest and most secret weapon.
The Fiesler Fi-103 was known officially within the OKW as the SAR-2A ‘Dreizack’ (‘Trident’), and was the world’s first air-to-surface guided missile. Developed by the company that in Realtime would’ve produced the V1 ‘buzz-bomb’ (also given the designation Fi-103 in that original version of history), the Trident was eight metres long, and had moderately swept wings with a span of almost five metres. Weighing more than two tonnes each, they were far too large to be carried in the bomb bay of any aircraft, but two could be carried beneath the inner wings of the B-8E.
It could be directed onto targets up to fifty kilometres away by radar systems on the releasing aircraft, and was able to guide itself with its own active systems during the ‘terminal’ phase of the attack from ranges of approximately ten kilometres out. It drew its inspiration from a simple yet quite effective Soviet anti-ship missile of the Realtime 1950s that was known as the P-15 Termit (SS-N-2 ‘Styx’ by NATO designation), and its 500kg shaped-charge warhead could devastate all but the largest of vessels.
England Expects (Empires Lost) Page 88
