Fortress England

by Robert Jackson

  Chapter Fourteen

  HMS Victorious — 24 May 1941: 2200 Hours

  A formidable array of warships was now converging on the Bismarck. As well as Admiral Somerville’s Force H, coming up from Gibraltar to cut off the German commander’s escape route to the south, and Admiral Tovey’s force, the battleships Rodney and Ramillies were also released from escort duties to take part in the chase, while the cruisers Edinburgh and Dorsetshire were detached from escort work to join the other cruisers shadowing the enemy. The main concern now was to reduce the Bismarck’s speed, giving the hunters a chance to close in for the kill — and that was where the Victorious and her aircraft came in. At 1440 hours on the 24th, Admiral Tovey had sent her racing ahead of the main force to a position from which she could fly off her Swordfish against the Bismarck.

  The aircrews assembled in the carrier’s Air Operations Room knew nothing of the powerful reinforcements now closing in on the enemy. Baird, listening intently, was surprised when the Air Staff Officer, whose task it was to deliver the briefing, told them that the Admiralty had intercepted a signal, indicating for certain that the German battleship was heading directly for Brest, rather than St Nazaire, because of a worsening fuel situation. The signal, he told himself, would surely have been in code, and enemy codes took months to crack. He wondered how it had been done. Baird, of course, knew nothing of Ultra, or the seizure of the Enigma machine and its associated cypher books from the U-110; nor did he know that destroyer and corvette submarine killers were already making for a position in the Atlantic where six U-boats had been stationed in a line to cover the battleship’s retreat, their intentions also uncovered by the wizards at Bletchley Park.

  By 2200 hours the distance between the Victorious and the enemy battleship had closed to about 120 miles, and Captain Bovell ordered his Fulmars out to search for her, but they found nothing in the appalling weather conditions and two of the six aircraft sent out failed to return. It was a miracle that any managed to get back, and the fact that the Fulmars had been sent out in the first place was an indication of the desperation attached to the search for the enemy battleship. A two-seat fighter, developed from a lightweight version of the Fairey Battle light bomber and armed with eight machine-guns, the Fulmar was having some success against enemy bombers in the Mediterranean, but it was quite unsuited to bad weather reconnaissance work.

  The briefing over, the Swordfish crews waited for the call to go into action. Baird had taken over a Swordfish in the second flight; its usual pilot was in the sick bay, having just had his appendix removed. Baird’s reputation had preceded him, and his observer and gunner didn’t seem to mind the change in the least.

  “Hands to flying stations. Stand by to fly off aircraft.”

  The nine Swordfish squatted at the end of the slippery flight deck, each encumbered with an eighteen-inch torpedo slung below its belly. The deck crews started their Bristol Pegasus radial engines and the aircrews climbed aboard the big biplanes, a task made difficult by the bulk of their flying clothing.

  Victorious turned to starboard, heading into the teeth of a north-westerly wind, not quite a gale but close to it, that sent clouds of sleet driving before it through the darkness. One by one, the nine biplanes bounced down the deck and into the air, climbing away laboriously. Forming up overhead, they vanished into the darkness, helped along now by the strong tail-wind. Showers of sleet lashed into the open cockpits, blinding the crews and chilling them to the bone. They flew on, maintaining strict radio silence.

  An hour later, through a clear patch, Esmonde, in the lead, sighted a group of warships and identified them as the Prince of Wales, the Suffolk and the Norfolk. Somewhere in the semi-darkness beyond was the Bismarck. As each Swordfish flight passed over the Norfolk, a signal lamp from her bridge flashed, giving the pilots a bearing that would bring them to the enemy battleship.

  The Swordfish went up into the clouds, hoping to achieve surprise as they made their attack. Baird’s observer, Sub Lieutenant Nicholls, suddenly announced that he had an ASV radar contact ahead; it could only be the Bismarck. Esmonde and the other two crews in the leading flight had already re-emerged from the clouds and were in visual contact with the battleship, a black streak trailing a long arrowhead of wake.

  The Swordfish split up and dived away to make their attacks from different directions, and almost immediately the Bismarck began to take evasive action. Vivid flashes illuminated her superstructure as her anti-aircraft gunners opened up, laying down a barrage in the path of the incoming torpedo-bombers.

  “Here we go, chaps!” The leader of Baird’s flight dropped out of the clouds to make his attack on the Bismarck’s port bow. Dissatisfied with his run, he suddenly turned away, then went in again, so that his aircraft and Baird’s were flying almost parallel with one another.

  In spite of the cold, sweat poured down Baird’s body as he concentrated on holding his aircraft steady in the face of the withering barrage. He pulled a lever on the side of the cockpit, freeing a locking pin and arming the eighteen-inch torpedo. In front of him, the great black silhouette of the battleship, obscured by smoke and lit by a myriad flashes from the muzzles of its guns, was set squarely in the biplane’s sighting mechanism, a bar of a dozen small lamps set on the coaming of the instrument panel.

  Esmonde’s flight had completed its attack and was now turning aside from the fearsome barrage. Esmonde had begun his run at a distance of four miles and had suffered damage to his Swordfish’s ailerons, but he and the other two had survived.

  Baird flew on through a storm of shellbursts, hearing and feeling shell splinters slapping through the fabric of his aircraft. The Swordfish, making only eighty-five miles per hour, seemed to be standing still. But its low airspeed seemed to be confusing the enemy gunners, for most of their shot appeared to be falling well ahead.

  At a range of half a mile, and a height of fifty feet, Baird pressed the button on his control column and the Swordfish leapt as the heavy torpedo, with its 500-pound warhead, dropped away. It sliced into the water and ran towards the battleship, driven by its 220-horsepower motor.

  Baird opened the throttle wide and stood the Swordfish on its wingtip, turning steeply away from the glowing streams of tracer that reached out to ensnare him, flattening out above the wavetops, weaving away from the deadly fire as the third flight made its attack. As each aircraft turned away, the gunners, in their rear cockpits, looked eagerly for the waterspouts that would determine whether the torpedoes had run true.

  There was only one. One of the Swordfish pilots, Sub Lieutenant Lawson of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, had crept around to the battleship’s starboard side. His torpedo sent up a big column of water amidships, accompanied by a black burst of smoke from the Bismarck’s funnel, but it had struck one of her most heavily armoured points and she sailed on, her speed almost unchecked. The explosion killed one of her crew members and injured three more.

  Incredibly, not one of the Swordfish had been shot down, or even badly damaged, but they still had to get back to the carrier. The night was pitch black by the time they reached the spot where Victorious should have been, and to add to their problems the carrier’s homing beacon was not working.

  After a while, Baird’s instinct told him that they must have flown past the carrier, and he voiced his fears to Nicholls.

  “I think you’re right, skipper,” the observer said. “Do me a wide sweep to port, will you?”

  Baird did as he was asked, and five minutes later the observer announced that he had picked up the distinctive electronic signature of Victorious on his ASV. The relief in his voice was palpable as he gave the pilot a heading to steer. The relief was shared by Baird, who was aware that the fuel state was fast becoming critical.

  It was now raining heavily. Suddenly, through the downpour, Baird spotted a flash of light. It disappeared, then was repeated a few seconds later. The flashes came at regular intervals, and the pilot realised that he was looking at a signal projector, being
swept through the points of the compass by someone on a ship’s bridge. It could only be Victorious, and in view of the fact that prowling U-boats might be in the vicinity, someone was taking an incredible risk in exposing the light in order to guide the torpedo-bombers home.

  Within minutes, wet and weary, he and his crew were stepping down onto the carrier’s slippery deck. One by one, the other crews also sighted the friendly light and made their way back, until all were safely down. One gunner had to be virtually lifted from the cockpit, almost frozen stiff; the fuselage floor had been shot away from under him and he had been exposed to the elements during the long flight back. Considering that most of the crews had never made a deck landing at night before, the fact that they all managed to get down in one piece was little short of incredible.

  The crews were dejected, believing that their mission had failed. But they had no means of knowing that their attack had produced an unexpected result.

  The Bismarck’s twisting and weaving as she took evasive action against the torpedoes had aggravated the damage caused earlier to the forward oil tanks and to number two boiler room, which was now completely flooded and had to be abandoned. With water pouring in again, the ship was down by the bows, and her captain reduced speed to sixteen knots so that divers could go down to reset the collision mats and bring in extra pumps. It was more than an hour before she was able to increase speed to twenty knots, her most economical. Anything beyond that, and she would run out of fuel before she reached Brest.

  Admiral Lutjens made a careful assessment of his position, seeking a way out of the dilemma. He had only a few hours’ grace; the ship was now passing latitude fifty-seven degrees north — roughly the latitude of Aberdeen, in northern Scotland — and sunrise would be about 0400. With a carrier in the vicinity, a second air strike was bound to come in at first light.

  He had one loophole. The battleship’s radar and hydrophonic equipment told him that there were no British warships to starboard, that his shadowers were all on the port side. He knew that they were zig-zagging, a standard tactic when U-boats were believed to be in the area. At times, they were within twelve miles of his ship; at others, much further away.

  Lutjens decided to take a gamble. At 0300 he ordered a turn to starboard, a broad turn that took three hours to complete, taking Bismarck across the wakes of her pursuers. He then ordered Kapitan Lindemann to adopt a heading of one-three-zero degrees. She was now steaming south-east, making directly for the sanctuary of Brest.

  *

  Joint Operations HQ, Admiralty — 25 May 1941: 0515 Hours

  “Suffolk has just reported loss of contact, sir!”

  “Damn!” Captain Merriman, not given to oaths, was prompted to release one at the Signals Officer’s words. “How did they manage that?”

  Earlier reports from Suffolk, based on the observations of her radar operators, still led Merriman and the others in the Operations Room to believe that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were still in company. In fact, the heavy cruiser had slipped away as planned on the previous day under cover of a brief exchange of fire between Bismarck and her pursuers and was now heading due south towards mid-Atlantic.

  Merriman and Glendenning turned to study the plot, with the warships’ last known positions on it.

  “D’you think they’ve parted company?” the air commodore asked suddenly. The naval officer had already been furiously considering the various options open to the Germans.

  “Let’s take a look at the possibilities,” he said. “I reckon they’re still making for France, but it’s not a certainty. The trouble is, we don’t know how badly the Bismarck is damaged. If it’s only slight, she might be withdrawing to the coast of Greenland to repair it and take on oil from a tanker before going on to attack the convoys; if it’s worse than that, she might even now be heading back to Germany. But whichever way the coin flips, I’ve a feeling that air reconnaissance is our only hope of finding her. The best we can do is cover all the likely routes, and pray.”

  Admiral Tovey, as they learned later that morning, was of a similar opinion. At 0730 he ordered Captain Bovell to fly off seven reconnaissance Swordfish to search the area to the north and west. Six returned, having found nothing; the seventh was never seen again.

  At 0900, encouraging news reached the Operations Room. Bismarck had been transmitting lengthy messages to Germany, and the bearings of her radio signals had been picked up by direction-finding stations in Britain. The details were quickly passed to the operations staff, the bearings plotted on a chart and radioed to Admiral Tovey. All that was needed now was a cross-bearing to pinpoint the enemy battleship’s position, and that could be provided by one of two D/F-equipped destroyers under Tovey’s command.

  What the Admiralty did not know was that one of the D/F destroyers was back in Scapa with boiler trouble, and that the other’s equipment was unserviceable. Signals staff on the King George V, Tovey’s flagship, plotted the bearings and got them wrong, so that Tovey was given the false impression that the Bismarck was north of her last reported position, instead of south-east of it.

  That could mean only one thing: she was heading back to Germany by way of the Iceland-Faeroes gap.

  Merriman and Glendenning, both dog-tired, stared incredulously at the plot as signals continued to come in.

  “What the devil are they doing?” Merriman said. “They’re turning north-east. All of them.”

  Glendenning saw that he was right. The King George V, Prince of Wales, Victorious and their cruiser screen, together with Suffolk, had reversed course and were heading in the wrong direction. Rear Admiral Frederick Wake-Walker in Norfolk, a long way to the south, continued to steer as though Bismarck was still making for France, as did the battleships Rodney and Ramillies and the cruiser Edinburgh. It was 1050.

  *

  HQ RAF Coastal Command, Northwood, Middlesex: 1300 Hours

  The summons by Air Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill had not been unexpected, and Glendenning had arrived at Northwood, occupying the high ground of north-west Middlesex on the borders of Hertfordshire, within an hour of receiving it. This was the nerve centre from which Coastal Command, in close cooperation with the Royal Navy, prosecuted its day-to-day war against the enemy. Bowhill came straight to the point.

  “I don’t believe Bismarck is heading back to Germany,” he told the weary Glendenning. “I think she’s still making for Brest. In my opinion, she’ll steer down into the southern part of the Bay of Biscay and then turn north-east or north towards her harbour.”

  Bowhill was a former sailor, and knew what he was talking about.

  “If I were the Bismarck’s captain, I wouldn’t dream of making landfall on the Brest Peninsula, especially after a long detour out into the Atlantic. It’s a vile coast at the best of times, with some very treacherous tides. No, any sensible chap would make his first landfall at Finisterre. The coast is less rocky there, and being in neutral Spain, the Finisterre light is still burning. He can then cut directly across the Bay of Biscay, with air cover all the way.”

  The air marshal pushed a sheaf of papers towards Glendenning. “Now then,” he went on, “my navigation specialists have been working out some proposals for air searches. As you’ll see from those copies, the idea is to send out three Catalinas on a parallel-track search, flying from fifty-eight degrees north on a track of two-four-oh to twenty-eight degrees forty minutes west, then one-eighty degrees for forty miles, then one-one-eight degrees to datum line zero-two-eight degrees from fifty degrees north, twenty degrees west. The Admiralty chaps are generally happy with this, although they want the search to be flown in reverse order, the first leg to be shortened by a hundred and twenty miles, the last leg to be extended by a hundred and eighty miles, and the patrol to be extended to twenty-nine degrees west. What do you think?”

  Glendenning pondered, studying the diagrams before him. The Catalinas would, in effect, be patrolling a big wedge of ocean from west of the Bay of Biscay, out almost to mid-Atlantic, then swinging
in towards the Western Isles of Scotland. At length, he said, “It looks a good plan, sir, but I’d like to see more aircraft involved. If the weather out over the Atlantic stays the way it is, an aircraft could fly within five miles of the Bismarck and fail to see her. We’ve got two Halifaxes standing by under Wing Commander Armstrong’s command at Perranporth — they’re actually at Portreath, just down the road, because Perranporth is a bit on the small side — and we can use them to augment the recce force. They’ve got Bomber Command crews, but they are the best in the business.”

  “Let’s do that, then.” Bowhill looked at the clock on the wall. “The first two Catalinas are due off at 1400 and the third about half an hour later. Can you get the Halifaxes away by 1600?”

  “I’ll have to have a word with Armstrong, sir, but it should be possible. They arrived this morning, so refuelling should be completed by now.”

  Bowhill nodded. “Good. I should think — oh, excuse me a moment.”

  The telephone interrupted him. He lifted the receiver, listened intently, replaced it and then sat back in his chair, a small smile of satisfaction on his face. Glendenning looked at him expectantly.

  “The Germans have been transmitting again,” the air marshal said. “We’ve got a position fix. The Bismarck is within a fifty-mile radius of fifty-five degrees fifteen minutes north, thirty-two degrees west.”

  Bowhill rose and went over to the wall map. His finger tapped a spot in the North Atlantic.

  “That puts her here, nine hundred miles west of Ireland and seven hundred miles south-east of Greenland. She’s not going home, Glendenning — she’s going to France. Somebody had better tell Admiral Tovey,” he added. “There are going to be some red faces in the Home Fleet.”

  Chapter Fifteen