Hunt the Bismarck

by Angus Konstam

  The other big advantage Tovey enjoyed over his German rivals was the aircraft carrier. It was the British who first perfected this type of warship during World War I – in fact, in 1917 the first successful carrier landing took place in Scapa Flow. The big fleet carriers of 1939–40 were formidable weapons of war, capable of carrying a mixed bag of fighters and multipurpose bomber and torpedo planes. Although most carried the antiquated Fairey Swordfish as their main strike aircraft, this biplane was still effective.21 Affectionately known as ‘Stringbag’, the Swordfish could carry a torpedo or bombs, or simply act as a reconnaissance plane, which made it extremely versatile, albeit slow and with a limited strike range. Still, in December 1940 both the fleet carrier and the Swordfish demonstrated their effectiveness at Taranto in southern Italy when they put most of the Italian battle fleet out of action.

  So, all things considered, these fleet carriers were powerful naval assets. The trouble was that there simply wasn’t enough of them. Two had been lost in 1939 and 1940, which, apart from two light carriers serving overseas, only left Ark Royal and Furious. Then, in 1940, the first two Illustrious class fleet carriers entered service. A third – Victorious – joined the fleet in the late spring of 1941. However, in May 1941 Ark Royal was in service with Force H in Gibraltar, and Furious, Illustrious and Formidable were in the Mediterranean.22 That just left Victorious. She departed the Vickers-Armstrongs yard in Tyneside in April 1941, and in mid-May, after her sea trials, she joined the Home Fleet, accompanied by a ship’s company and airmen who were both inexperienced and whose training was still incomplete. Still, she was all there was, and Tovey had little option but to press her into service, ready or not.

  As well as these capital ships, Tovey had at his disposal a powerful force of cruisers and destroyers. The cruisers were his ‘eyes and ears’, whose main job was to maintain the patrol line running between Greenland and Shetland.23 They consisted of 8in. gun heavy cruisers and 6in. gun light cruisers, but in the event of a German sortie both cruiser types had the same job. They lacked the firepower and armour to take on a German capital ship, but they had radar, and radios. So, once the enemy were spotted they could shadow them and send Tovey regular reports, which would allow him to dispatch his capital ships to intercept the enemy. This of course was a dangerous game: one false move and they could be blown apart by heavy German guns.

  As for the destroyers, their main role was to protect larger warships from enemy U-boats. They could also join the patrol line, though, and by May 1941 most of them were fitted with a search radar. This meant that they could actually augment the cruiser patrols, making sure nothing slipped through the British net. Also, when the need arose and in the right circumstances, they could carry out high-speed torpedo attacks. On the downside, their effectiveness was reduced by their limited range and their inability to operate effectively in extremely rough seas. The first problem was solved by the proximity of refuelling bases in Iceland, but the latter was entirely dependent on the weather.

  So, in summary, Admiral Tovey’s Home Fleet comprised an assortment of ships. He had a few battleships and battlecruisers, both old and new, most of which had some form of limitation to them – be it age, speed, crew experience or persistent technical problems. His one carrier was a great asset, but her raw air crew needed time to learn their job. These were the ships that would have to take on the Bismarck if she tried to make a sortie. Supporting them was an equally varied selection of cruisers and destroyers, whose main role was to locate and shadow, not to fight. That was the job of Tovey’s capital ships. Above all, though, the whole thing centred around intelligence reports. Once Tovey knew the Germans were making their move, he could do something about it. Until then, he simply had to remain at anchor in Scapa Flow and wait for that green telephone to ring.

  Chapter 4

  Preparations

  Detained in Hamburg

  In Hamburg, as the bulk of Bismarck’s crew rejoined their ship after Christmas leave, they found her a hive of activity. Stores were being loaded on board, filling her with everything from 15in.shells and powder charges to potatoes, razor blades and toilet paper. Finally, on 24 January 1941, Kapitän Lindemann reported to Berlin that Bismarck was ready for active operations.1 The plan was to sail her through the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal to Kiel, but the narrow waterway (now the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal) was blocked by a merchant ship, an ore carrier that had been sunk during an Allied bombing raid. Therefore, the Bismarck remained in dock, and her crew were able to enjoy the dubious wartime delights of Hamburg for a few more weeks as salvage divers worked to clear the canal.

  Meanwhile, at a nearby berth on the Blohm+Voss shipyard, a new U-boat was being fitted out.2 She was the U-556, a Type VIIC boat, and was due to be commissioned into service in early February. Her commander was Kapitänleutnant Herbert Wohlfarth, a veteran U-boat commander with 21 sinkings to his name, and seven war patrols. In the U-boat service he was nicknamed ‘Parsifal’, after the hero of Arthurian legend, medieval poetry and a Wagner opera who never stopped searching for the Holy Grail. While the U-boat was being prepared, he and his men were busy planning their U-boat’s commissioning ceremony, which was set for early February. Every day, they kept hearing the Bismarck’s band practising on the quayside above them. So, when they learned the Bismarck’s sailing had been delayed, and with their own big day approaching, Wohlfarth hatched a plan.

  There has long been a tradition, called Patenschaft, of towns and cities ‘adopting’ or ‘sponsoring’ a warship or regiment. Wohlfarth and his officers therefore decided to adapt this for their own ends, drafting a certificate of sponsorship between U-556 and the Bismarck and ageing it by ripping and burning its edges. This document declared: ‘We U-556 (500 tons) hereby declare before Neptune, the ruler of oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, streams, ponds and rivulets that we will assist our big brother, the battleship Bismarck (42,000 tons), in every situation, in water, underwater, on land and in the air.’3

  It was dated 28 January. The U-boat commander even added two cartoons – one showing Parsifal deflecting enemy aircraft and torpedoes from the battleship using his sword and shield, and the other showing Bismarck being towed home by the tiny U-boat. Wohlfarth then visited Kapitän Lindemann and presented him with the certificate of adoption. Lindemann was highly amused, and had it framed before hanging it up in the battleship’s wardroom. In return, Wohlfarth achieved his goal: Bismarck’s band played at the U-boat’s commissioning ceremony just over a week later, on 6 February.

  Although the intention was that the ship should sail by 5 February, two days before this date the sailing was cancelled because the thick layer of winter ice in the canal was delaying the clearance work. In fact, the job of clearing the canal continued throughout February and into March. The other option – moving the battleship to the Baltic around the top of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula – was deemed too risky by Naval High Command. So, the waiting continued.

  There was another problem, too. Bismarck had returned to Hamburg for minor repairs following her sea trials, but the extreme cold had also caused issues in her engine room, damaging some of her pressure gauges and the electrical lines to her boiler room ventilators. Until these had been repaired, she couldn’t go to sea. In the end, they were fixed by the middle of February, but of course the canal was still blocked. Kapitän Lindemann was furious. At the end of February, he wrote in the ship’s war diary: ‘The ship has been detained in Hamburg since 24 January. Five weeks of training time at sea have been lost!’4 Not one to sit idly by, Lindemann made sure that the time was used to conduct training and battle drills in Hamburg harbour.

  Finally, on 5 March, word reached the men that the canal had been cleared. Immediately, Lindemann ordered the ship to prepare to sail. Then, as Müllenheim-Rechberg described it: ‘On 6th March, we cast off from the wharf at the Blohm & Voss yard, and steamed out into the Elbe, and once again headed downstream. As the familiar silhouette of Hamburg slowly sank astern, I had the feeling that our absence from the
beautiful Hanseatic city would be for longer.’5 In fact, the Bismarck would never return to her birthplace.

  Forty miles downriver lay the town of Brunsbüttel, and the western entrance to the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. Bismarck steamed down the wide, slow river, watched by groups of onlookers on the riverbank. It would have been hard not to feel a surge of pride as this beautiful and powerful ship made her stately way past.

  By noon, the battleship had reached Brunsbüttel, and at 12.24 she dropped anchor off the western entrance to the canal. Kapitän Lindemann planned to begin his transit of the canal the following morning, which would allow him to make the whole journey in daylight. So, all that afternoon and the next, Luftwaffe Bf 109 fighters flew overhead, while an icebreaker and two blockade breakers (Sperrbrecher) were anchored close by, as protection against an attack by British torpedo bombers.

  At 08.22 the next morning, Bismarck raised anchor and, nudged by two tugs, she gingerly entered the canal. Although it had been enlarged, the canal was designed for Great War-era dreadnoughts, not the largest battleship in the world. In consequence, progress was slow, and as dusk approached the battleship was still inside the canal, at its eastern end. Lindemann wisely ordered her to be tied up for the night, as the final and hardest part of the transit – the passage through the Kiel-Holtenau lock system – lay just ahead. Lindemann was right to be cautious. At 08.45 the following morning, as the Bismarck approached the lock system, she grounded on the southern bank of the canal.6 It hadn’t been dredged deeply enough. It took an hour to free her, under her own power but assisted by a tug. She then passed through the locks without further incident, and that afternoon the battleship dropped anchor in Kiel fjord.

  Working up

  On the morning of 9 March, more tugs eased the Bismarck into the largest dry dock at the Deutsche Werke shipyard so that her underside could be inspected for any damage caused during her grounding. This allowed Lindemann to repaint the ship’s hull. Then, on 14 March the battleship was refloated and a tug towed her round to the Scheerhafen, the main naval quayside near the eastern entrance to the canal. Bismarck was berthed on the commodious North Mole, where a small mountain of stores was waiting for her. The next two days were spent loading these, along with ammunition, fuel, fresh water and other necessities, including two crated-up spotter aircraft. While all this was going on, the ship’s gunnery department busied themselves with calibrating and aligning their batteries, ready for the combat training that was due to begin the following week. Others in the crew were ordered to continue the repainting of the ship, so that by the time she started her working up she would look her best.

  So it was that on the morning of 17 March Bismarck cast off and headed up the Kiel fjord towards the Baltic Sea.7 Ahead of her was the blockade runner Sperrbrecher 36 and the old pre-dreadnought battleship Schlesien. An Imperial Naval veteran of Jutland and an inter-war training ship, the Schlesien was now used as an icebreaker. That March there was still ice in the western Baltic, and so she now led the way – a German battleship of a bygone era, followed by the most modern battleship afloat.

  Their destination was Gotenhafen (now Gdynia), a suburb of Danzig (or Gdansk), 340 miles to the east. Bismarck dropped anchor off the port on the afternoon of 17 March.8 This would be their base for the next two months as the crew of Bismarck honed their battle skills and the ship was prepared for her first operational sortie. The naval term for this thorough period of crew training, weapons drill and damage control exercises was ‘working up’ – using these drills to bring the ship and her crew to the peak of efficiency. The advantage of doing so in Gotenhafen was that it was beyond the range of British bombers. What’s more, the entrance to the Baltic was effectively sealed off by minefields and naval and air patrols, so effectively the enclosed sea was safe from predators. This meant that all the Bismarck’s crew had to worry about was perfecting their skills.

  A day after their arrival, Bismarck’s sister ship Tirpitz also arrived off Gotenhafen. She was still conducting sea trials, and so on 19 March her commander, Kapitän Topp, invited Lindemann over for dinner. During the meal, Topp passed on some important information.9 Topp had hoped to sortie alongside Bismarck, but according to what he was told by the Naval War Staff, this wouldn’t be happening. Instead, Tirpitz would complete her sea trials and then undergo her own extensive working up in the Baltic. This was what Lindemann expected. What came next was more of a bombshell. At headquarters, Topp had been told that in any case, a joint sortie was out of the question since Bismarck would be making her own first operational voyage earlier than had been intended. Lindemann had been instructed to have Bismarck ready for active service by the end of May. This meant that if the report were true, she would have to be ready three or four weeks earlier – the end of April.

  In response, Lindemann called his officers together and demanded that they hasten the working up. This involved conducting almost continual drills and exercises, something that all of the ship’s officers accepted as necessary since they knew this was crucial if their battleship were to carry out her mission effectively. For the most part, the working up centred around her armament, against surface and air targets, so that the battleship would be fit to sail out into the Baltic, sometimes alone and at other times in company with other ships. The battleship’s main guns were therefore fired – the blast coming as something of a shock to some of the inexperienced recruits – and the secondary guns were tested, too, while aircraft flying from nearby airfields flew by the ship at a variety of heights, towing targets for the ship’s anti-aircraft guns to blast away at.

  In other preparations, the Arado Ar floatplanes were launched and recovered, until the aircraft handlers could do their job perfectly. Once in the air, these planes were used to spot the fall of shot of the Bismarck’s main guns, radioing the results back to the ship’s gunnery team, who would correct their aim until their shells were falling around the target. The crews of these aircraft also flew in search patterns, until they felt confident that they could spot an enemy convoy on the high seas and shadow it until the Bismarck could steam over the horizon to intercept the enemy.

  On 17 April, they were joined by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, commanded by V. Adm. Brinkmann, an old naval academy classmate of Kapitän Lindemann.10 She displaced almost 17,000 tons, and was armed with eight 8in. guns. The Naval High Command were planning for the two warships to make their operational sortie together, so it made sense that they should get used to operating as a team. The cruiser was remarkably similar in appearance to Bismarck – so much so that she resembled a scaled-down version of the battleship. This was a design feature that would pay dividends during their later joint operation.

  Kapitänleutnant von Müllenheim-Rechberg provided a useful account of this working up period:

  We conducted more high-speed trials and endurance runs, and tried out our hydrophone gear… The most important thing now was intensive testing of our batteries. Practice firing for the instruction of the fire control officers and gun crews alternated with carrying out projects for the Gunnery Research Command for Ships [a Kriegsmarine research body], an organisation that ran its own trials on new ships with a view to improving the ordnance of various ship types. For me, as a gunnery officer, these tests were exciting but for the crew they just meant drill and still more drill. Battle practice in the daytime, battle practice at night! The men did not complain however; they were in the swing of things, and were becoming more and more anxious for our first operation to get under way.11

  In fact, Lindemann deliberately cut short the Gunnery Research Command’s evaluation programme, ending it on 2 April. This allowed him to concentrate on bringing his ship and crew up to full operational readiness. During one of these gunnery exercises – a sub-calibre shoot for the 4.1in. heavy flak guns – the U-556 surfaced nearby, and Wohlfarth flashed a signal to the Bismarck’s bridge, asking permission to fire off a few rounds first, using his 3.46in. deck gun.12 Permission was granted and, to the delight of the onlook
ers, the U-boat’s gun crew hit the target float with their second round, then kept pounding it. Graciously, Lindemann signalled: ‘I hope you’ll be as successful in the Atlantic, and earn the Knight’s Cross as well.’ Wohlfarth flashed back: ‘I hope we may both earn the Knight’s Cross, in joint action together.’ The U-boat then chugged away, leaving the Bismarck’s gun crews free to demolish what was left of the target.

  As well as the Prinz Eugen, which took part in several joint gunnery drills with Bismarck, the battleship also conducted exercises with the 25th U-boat Flotilla, a training flotilla based in Danzig, which supervised the torpedo training of newly commissioned U-boats. It was for this reason that the U-556 had been in the area. The flotilla’s presence was of benefit to Lindemann since it allowed the Bismarck’s hydrophone operators to practise detecting the sounds of approaching submarines and torpedoes, and for the communication staff to work together with the U-boats that might soon be guiding the battleship towards a British convoy. Another vital skill was refuelling at sea. With no friendly bases in the North Atlantic, both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen would have to rely on tankers for their fuel. Accordingly, the tanker Bromberg was assigned to them, so that both ships could practise refuelling at sea.

  One of the crucial parts of a ship’s working up was the training of her crew in damage control. That meant repairing damage to the ship and her weapons or propulsion systems, to make sure she could still fight, and it also involved dealing with any fire and flooding. During one of these drills, held in the after steering compartment, seaman Herbert Blum asked his officer if he and his shipmates could play dead, as if the compartment had been knocked out.13 The officer agreed, and told them to put their caps on back to front and lie on the deck. Afterwards, Blum remembered the lieutenant telling him that ‘the chances of getting a hit there are a hundred thousand against’. Almost exactly a month later, those long odds would come home.