by John Nichol
For Frank Tilley it was one of his first times staying away from home base:
so there was a sense of doing something adventurous. The girls were pleased to see us, though I think they were quite used to seeing rough old aircrew turning up in flying kit, trying to impress them. It was a bit macabre I suppose. Here we were dancing, enjoying female company, having a beer, and the next day we were off to drop bombs on German sailors. Of course we didn’t talk about it. You didn’t reveal your feelings to others; you just got on with it and lived in the moment.32
It started to snow that evening, and by the time they were preparing to take off at three the following morning, the snow on the runway was two feet deep. ‘It was a filthy night,’ Tony Iveson recalled, ‘dark and cold, and the aircraft had hoar frost on the wings. There we were on a bleak and pitch-dark Scottish airfield, with a twelve-hour flight in front of us, over mountains into a very difficult country, facing unknown conditions and maybe a waiting fighter squadron – it wasn’t like a Sunday afternoon trip on the Thames!’ The two aircraft ahead of Bruce Buckham’s camera plane got bogged down in the snow, and he ‘had to taxi around them in flurries of snow’. Only nineteen aircraft managed to take off.
At Milltown, conditions were equally bad. It was so cold that, after taxiing to the end of the runway, the aircraft had to shut down their engines to have their wings resprayed with de-icing fluid because they were in danger of icing up. It was a pitch-dark, moonless night, with cloud cover obscuring the stars. The crews taxied in turn onto the runway, were given the green Very light from the caravan and then roared off with the engines bellowing on full emergency power as the pilots struggled to coax their aircraft, with their monstrous load of fuel and ordnance, off the ground. The Milltown runway terminated right at the water’s edge so ‘it was a question of take off or swim’.33
Once airborne, they climbed to 1,000 feet and flew north in radio silence. Their planned route was to fly up the North Sea for several hundred miles before crossing the Norwegian coast, where there was a known gap in German radar cover – though it has been suggested that the Germans might already have repositioned their radar towers to fill the gap in their defences that 617 had previously exploited.34 As they approached the Norwegian coast the sky was just starting to lighten at the approach of dawn.
Climbing to 7,000 feet to clear the Norwegian mountains, they then flew north up the border between Norway and Sweden, trying to avoid detection by German radar for as long as possible. Even with the burden of their mission on their minds, the beauty of the snow-covered mountains with their glaciers and peaks tinted by the Northern Lights made an indelible impression on the aircrews.
In the pre-dawn of the morning of 12 November, with just a sliver of daylight, ‘a silver thread on the horizon’, the Lancasters arrived at their rendezvous point over Akkajaure Lake in Swedish Lappland. They had all flown individually, without seeing another soul, but within a very short time they all appeared out of the black western sky – another remarkable feat of flying and navigation. ‘It gave me quite a shiver down the spine to see that,’ Tony Iveson said. ‘These guys had flown for about five hours, through total darkness with rather primitive navigation aids, but they made it. It made me feel proud to be part of it all.’
After circling for a few minutes, Willie Tait ordered a Very flare to be fired, signalling them to set course for Tromsø Fjord. They began their run out of Sweden at twenty to eight that morning. This time, dawn broke with clear skies, no cloud cover and perfect visibility. ‘I had a good feeling about this one,’ Iveson said. ‘We had the weather, the dawn was breaking, conditions were ideal and there was a sense of excitement at what we were going to do. It was a big task, a big target; it wasn’t just dropping bombs on German cities.’
As they climbed to their individual bombing heights, the bomb-aimers had an unimpeded view of the target, visible from 30 miles away. ‘It was a magnificent sight to see the large snow-covered island of Tromsø … and Tirpitz anchored facing towards us.’35 ‘In the distance, the sun was just shining brilliantly over the ship, shimmering in the water.’36
From 15,000 feet, even though she was well over 800 feet long, ‘the Tirpitz must have looked like a dinky toy to our bomb-aimer,’ Tony Iveson said. ‘It was a gin-clear sky, perfect for our purposes, but then a little thought came into our minds: it’ll suit the fighters pretty well too … I thought, I hope to Christ the fighters don’t get near us. If I get an Me 109 up my backside with his cannon, there’ll be very little left of me.’
As the Lancasters climbed, they revealed themselves to German radar, which picked up the first trace of the raiders at eight o’clock, UK time, when they were still forty minutes from the target. An alert was radioed to the battleship, which at once went to action stations. The Commandant, Captain Robert Weber, made an announcement over the ship’s tannoy: ‘Twenty four-engine aircraft, south-west, 100 kilometres away,’ which ‘filled the air with electrifying tension’, though the ship’s gunners felt full of confidence, having driven off the raiders with only minimal damage a fortnight before.37
At 8.09 the Tirpitz’s own radar detected the bombers, and an officer, Alfred Zuba, began tannoy announcements, counting down the distance, kilometre by kilometre, as the bombers approached. At 8.27, lookouts on the bridge sighted the approaching Lancasters for the first time. Gunner Klaus Rohwedder watched the raiders as they flew towards the ship and thought to himself: ‘If it’s the same aircraft and bombs that were dropped last month, we won’t survive.’38
Soon afterwards the battleship’s main 15-inch guns began firing at maximum elevation using shells with short-delay fuses, even though the raiders were still over 20 kilometres away. The ship shuddered with each firing of the guns. Each shell weighed over a ton and, said Frank Tilley, ‘You could see them arcing up towards us. They seemed to rise up so slowly, but then there were great unfolding golden clouds’ as they exploded around the loose formation.39 ‘One shell could probably have taken two Lancasters out of the sky together,’40 but fortunately, although the German heavy guns and the subsequent anti-aircraft fire ‘hit our altitude exactly “cock-on”,’ Tilley said, ‘they were a little bit early; the flak was bursting a few yards in front of us.’
Crucially for the success of the op, the smoke generators on the ship itself were now defunct, and none had yet been installed on the surrounding shores and headlands to create a smokescreen to hide the ship. As he made his approach, the only smoke that the squadron’s commander, Willie Tait, could see was that drifting upwards from the Tirpitz’s funnel on the easterly breeze. As they closed on the target there was sporadic anti-aircraft fire from guns lining the fjord while ‘the Tirpitz ack-ack and gunfire from two flak ships on the fjord hotted things up.’41
Most of the Lancasters veered away to make their bombing runs from the planned direction, but Lofty Hebbard, the bomb-aimer in Joplin’s Lancaster and, like his skipper, a New Zealander, decided to head straight in on the track they had been following and ‘not bother with the briefed routing. I never did ask him if he had permission to do that!’ Frank Tilley recalls with a smile:
We ended up on the longest bombing run in history. The flak was very heavy again. It got so close that you thought you could reach out and touch it. We were in the midst of a flak storm, surrounded by puffs of smoke. It’s a fine dividing line between death and survival. You just have to hope and pray you’ll get through it. We were also expecting fighters, so my eyes were out on stalks looking out. And you also have to concentrate on what you are doing: the engines, speed and everything else. There was a lot going on!42
Colin Cole could see the flak heading his way and exploding around his aircraft. The crew had a narrow escape. ‘I collected some big chunks of shrapnel that blasted their way into the aircraft,’ he recalls. ‘There was a red-hot, fist-sized chunk lying on the steps near my position; I should have saved it as a souvenir!’43 The additional tanks were now empty of liquid fuel, but that merely increased the d
anger, for they remained full of highly explosive fuel vapour and it would take just one piece of shrapnel to turn the interior of the aircraft into an inferno. However, to the great relief of the Lancaster aircrews, there was still no sign of any German Focke-Wulf 190 fighters from their base at Bardufoss. They were only ten minutes’ flying time from Tromsø and would have offered a far more formidable threat than the flak, but, although the 617 crews did not yet know it, they were to have the freedom of the skies over the battleship.
While the rest of the Lancasters were at their optimum bombing height of 13,000 to 15,000 feet, Bruce Buckham’s camera plane had gone in at 6,000 feet, but ‘this was too unhealthy so we descended to about 2,000 feet and isolated the guns lining the fjord. One of the flak ships became somewhat pestiferous so we shot her up a bit and she disappeared up to the end of the fjord; the other kept a respectable distance.’44
As the Lancasters began their bombing runs, each aircraft’s bomb doors swung open, exposing the gleaming metal casing of the Tallboy suspended there. The jolt to the aircraft as the 5-ton weight was released told the crew that their Tallboy was on its way to the target, even before the bomb-aimer’s call of ‘Bomb gone’. Bruce Buckham, watching from his camera plane, said the bombs ‘appeared to travel in ever so graceful a curve, like a high diver, heading with deadly accuracy towards one point, right amidships of Tirpitz’.45
Tait’s bomb, the first one, was dropped at 8.41 that morning. Its bright green paint made it stand out vividly against the background of blue sea and black rock and ‘you could see it go down like a dart.’46 By the time it reached the ship, the bomb was travelling at the speed of sound and it had impacted the armoured deck before the crewmen heard the whistle as it fell. ‘The bomb was so quick, we could not follow it with our eyes,’ Klaus Rohwedder remembers. It was followed in rapid succession by several more.
The first wave of nine aircraft had all dropped their bombs within one and a half minutes – ‘Just think of nine five-ton bombs coming down at you in the space of ninety seconds,’ Tony Iveson said. Bob Knights saw the first four strike on or near the starboard quarter, starboard bow, port bow and port amidships, near the funnel, and claimed his own bomb missed the port quarter by only 10 yards.47 Klaus Rohwedder confirms the accuracy of Knights’ observations: ‘The first hit was through the foredeck and it created a huge hole in the side. Then a bomb hit the funnel and went through the deck and exploded. The men moaned and howled.’ The screams of the injured and dying, echoing around the dying ship, are something Rohwedder has never forgotten.
The bomb that struck amidships at its terminal velocity of over 690 miles an hour had drilled through the 5-inch toughened steel armour plating of the battleship’s deck and exploded near the boiler room. An inferno of flame erupted from the deck and sent a column of brownish-black smoke billowing into the sky. The concussive blast wave from the bomb left most of the crewmen stunned. Klaus Rohwedder didn’t even see the explosion, ‘but I felt the quake. The ship made a half-metre jump. The next minute it began to capsize.’ The explosion below decks had blown a 45-foot hole in the Tirpitz’s side, and as thousands of gallons of seawater poured through it, the ship began listing to port.
The awesome power of the Tallboys was vividly demonstrated by one bomb that missed the Tirpitz and the fjord and struck the shore of Haakøy Island. Even though it struck solid rock, the bomb gouged out a crater 30 metres wide and 10 metres deep. And, when falling into the waters of the fjord, even near-misses by bombs with the Tallboy’s explosive power were devastating. The shockwaves buckled the ship’s plating and generated walls of water like tsunamis that smashed into it. As one man who later examined the hull of the Tirpitz remarked, ‘she had eleven inches of armour plate above the waterline and thirteen or fourteen inches below, but on one side the bow had been punched in like a tin can by a near-miss. If I had not seen it myself, I would have thought it just another tall story.’48 The near-misses further increased the flow of water into the ship, and another direct hit and another near-miss lengthened the gash in the side to about 200 feet.
Colin Cole watched his crew’s Tallboy in flight through the open bomb doors: ‘It was an amazing sight to see it dropping away, tracking to the target.’ Sydney Grimes had wanted to watch his crew’s bomb all the way to the target too, and ‘it was quite frustrating when the bomb doors were closed and we turned away. I really wanted to follow it down and see what happened!’49
By the time Arthur Joplin’s Lancaster dropped its Tallboy, the smoke from the previous hits was beginning to obscure the Tirpitz, but he held the Lancaster in level flight long enough for the camera to record the impact of the bomb, then ‘hauled us out of the firestorm. We were all more than happy to get out of the centre of that barrage!’ says Frank Tilley. ‘As we dived away down to sea level, I could see the Tirpitz had taken a terrible pounding and most of the big guns seemed to be out of action. I had the feeling it was curtains for her this time.’
His feeling was right. Deep below decks on the battleship, Alfred Zuba and his crewmates, slithering and stumbling on the steeply sloping deck, watched as their First Lieutenant snatched up the emergency telephone, called the bridge and asked permission to abandon ship. ‘Since he has to shout to make himself understood,’ Zuba said, ‘we can hear everything clearly and thirty men are waiting for the answer. It can perhaps give light, daylight and life; or you can keep them prisoners in the dark on the lowest deck of the ship,’ into which water was already pouring. The Lieutenant repeated aloud the order he had been given: ‘Don’t get out.’ They knew what that might mean, but all still remained at their posts: ‘We wait for our fate, enclosed in an iron space.’
By now the Tirpitz was completely shrouded in smoke, not from its usual smokescreen, but from the bombs and the fires raging on board. Following on from 617, the pilots of 9 Squadron had no clear view of the target and dropped their bombs into the heart of the pall of smoke. Deep inside the ship, Alfred Zuba and his crewmates could hear the sounds of fresh explosions above their heads, shaking the ship violently and increasing the angle of list still more. Almost every hit and near-miss was to the port side of the ship’s centre line, further destabilising it and accelerating the list to port. Within four minutes of the first bomb striking the Tirpitz, it was listing at 40 degrees, and Captain Weber finally ordered the lower decks evacuated. Zuba rushed for the emergency exit, where a score of men were already queuing, each one fearing for his life but knowing that only one man at a time could make his way through the narrow shaft. ‘So we stand there and wait, with the floor burning under our feet.’50
Unknown to them, as the ship’s angle of list continued to increase, Captain Weber was already giving his last order: ‘Save yourself if you can.’ Only minutes before he had been urging his men to remain at their stations, showing how quickly the prospects of the ship remaining afloat had disappeared.
Eventually Zuba clambered up the shaft, ran through a pitch-dark hold and reached the gun deck, ‘where something fearful awaits us’. None of them could climb up the smooth, slippery surface of the steeply sloping deck. They tried again and again but each time they fell or slid back. The shaft leading to the upper decks was out of reach 20 feet above them.
Water now surged in, ‘gurgling black and oily’, rising rapidly to their chests. As he heard fresh bomb strikes on the ship, Zuba, flailing with his arms, caught a hand-hold and dragged himself up. A comrade above him reached down a hand and pulled him up. He managed to cling to a pipe a few feet above the swirling water and after a couple of agonising minutes dangling by his hands, feeling the strength ebbing from him, he managed to get his feet onto a ventilator and stood upright on it. A voice shouted from the emergency exit shaft, but it was still over 6 feet away and the only way to reach the steel ladder leading through it was to jump and try to cling to it. If he failed, he would drop into the water and drown.
Alfred Zuba gathered his strength and launched himself. His flailing fingers closed around the bot
tom-most steel rung and he clung on. He hauled himself up through the hatch, then turned to help a comrade behind him. There was no one else and the water was rising so rapidly that it had almost reached them again. They clamped the hatch shut, then climbed on through the Mess, searching for a way out of their steel prison.
A few minutes earlier, Johannes Ullrich, one of the seamen who managed to escape before it sank, had paused for a moment, holding on to the ship’s rail and looking at the icy water 70 or 80 feet below him. He glanced at his watch – it read 8.47 – and then jumped. He was in full uniform and had no life-belt. Somehow the ship’s guns continued to fire for another two or three minutes, but by 8.50 the list to port had reached 70 degrees. The guns were then silenced as a huge explosion blew the C gun turret, with its 14-inch steel plating and twin 15-inch guns, completely off its armoured mounting and high into the air. As Ullrich swam away from the ship he heard the explosion and watched as ‘the roof of the gun turret disintegrated like paper in the air.’51 The turret crashed down into the water alongside the ship, crushing some crewmen who were trying to swim to safety.
Bruce Buckham’s camera plane had descended to 200 feet, its cine-cameras whirring as they recorded the action. As explosions ripped through the ship, ‘the Tirpitz appeared to heave herself up out of the water. It was awe-inspiring – a huge mushroom cloud of smoke rising thousands of feet.’ He had continued to fly close around the Tirpitz as the other Lancasters turned for home, but now decided to follow them, leaving the burning battleship and its towering pillar of smoke behind.
As he headed for the mouth of the fjord, there was another, smaller explosion from the ship, and his rear gunner called out, ‘I think she’s turning over.’ Buckham turned back and this time flew in at 50 feet. He watched with bated breath as, at 8.52 that morning, Tirpitz heeled over to port, ‘ever so slowly and gracefully’, and turned turtle, exposing the red-painted hull and embedding its superstructure in the seabed. ‘We could see German sailors swimming, diving, jumping, and by the time she was over to eighty-five degrees and subsiding slowly into the water of Tromsø Fjord, there must have been the best part of sixty men on her side as we skimmed over for the last pass.’ That was their final glimpse of the ship before they flew out of the fjord and headed for home across the North Sea.
