day, a Maryland bomber from the Hatston naval air base in the Orkneys, skimming low over the water in appalling flying conditions, flew over Grimstad and Bergen and reported that the BISMARCK was no longer there.
The BISMARCK was out, and there could be no mistake where she was going. There were no Russian convoys to attack — Russia was not yet in the war. She could be racing only for the Atlantic, with the 'Hipper' cruiser — later identified as the PRINZ EUGEN — as her scout, there to savage and destroy our Atlantic convoys, our sole remaining lifelines to the outer world. The 'Hipper' itself, only a 10,000 ton cruiser, had once fallen upon a convoy and sent seven ships to the bottom in less than an hour. What the BISMARCK could do just did not bear contemplation.
The BISMARCK had to be stopped, and stopped before she had broken loose into the Atlantic, and it was for this single, precise purpose of stopping her that Admiral Sir John Tovey, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, had so long and so doggedly held his capital ships based on Scapa. Now was the time for the Home Fleet to justify its existence.
Admiral Tovey, a master tactician who was to handle his ships impeccably during the ensuing four days, was under no illusions as to the grave difficulties confronting him, the tragic consequences were he to guess wrongly. The BISMARCK could break southwest into the Atlantic anywhere between Scotland and Greenland — a bleak, gale-ridden stretch of fully a thousand miles, with the all-essential visibility more frequently than not at the mercy of driving rain, blanketing snow and great rolling fog banks.
He had to station two squadrons, with two battleships in each squadron — he had no faith in the ability of any one ship of the line to cope with the BISMARCK — at strategically vital positions some hundreds of miles apart, the HOOD and the PRINCE OF WALES south of Iceland, and his own flagship, the KING GEORGE V, the REPULSE and the carrier VICTORIOUS west of the Faroes, where, he hoped, they would be most favourably situated to move in any direction to intercept the BISMARCK.
But they couldn't move until they knew where the BISMARCK was, and Admiral Tovey had had his watchdogs at sea for a long time now, waiting for this day to come. Between Iceland and the Faroes patrolled the cruisers BIRMINGHAM and MANCHESTER, while up in the Denmark Strait the SUFFOLK and the NORFOLK were coming to the end of a long long wait.
7.20 p.m., 23 May, 1941 and the SUFFOLK was steaming southwest down the narrow channel between the ice and the fog. If the BISMARCK came by the Strait, Captain Ellis guessed, she would almost certainly come through that channel: the ice barred her way to the west, and, over on the east, no captain was going to take the risk of pushing his battleship through a dense fog at something like thirty knots, especially a fog that concealed a known minefield forty miles in length. If she were to come at all, that was the way she would come.
And that was the way she did come. At 7.22 p.m. the excited cry of a sharp-eyed lookout had Captain Ellis and all the watchers on the bridge peering intently through their binoculars out over the starboard quarter, the reported bearing, and one brief glance was enough for Ellis to know that their long exhausting wait was indeed over. Even for men who had never seen it, it was almost impossible to mistake the vast bulk of the BISMARCK anywhere. (Or so one would have thought — it was to prove tragically otherwise less than twelve hours later.)
Captain Ellis was not disposed to linger. He had done the first — and most important — part of his job, the BISMARCK and the PRINZ EUGEN, he suddenly realized, were only eight miles away, the BISMARCK'S guns were lethal up to a range of at least twenty miles, and there had been nothing in his instructions about committing suicide. Quite the reverse — he had been ordered to avoid damage to himself at all costs, to shadow the BISMARCK and guide the battleships of the Home Fleet into her path. Even as the SUFFOLK'S radio room started stuttering out its 'Enemy located' transmissions to Ellis's immediate commander, Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker in the NORFOLK and to Sir John Tovey in his battleship far to the south, he swung his cruiser heeling far over in a maximum turn to port and raced into the blanketing safety of the fog that swirled protectively around them only moments after they had entered it.
Deep in the mist, the SUFFOLK came round, manoeuvring dangerously in a gap in the minefields, the all- seeing eye of its radar probing every move of the German battleship as it steamed at high speed down through the Denmark Strait. Then, once it was safely past, both the SUFFOLK and the NORFOLK moved into shadowing positions astern, and there they grimly hung on all through that long, vile Arctic night of snow-storms, rain-squalls and scudding mist, occasionally losing contact but always regaining it in what was to become a text-book classic in the extremely difficult task of shadowing an enemy craft at night. All night long, too, the radio transmissions continued, sending out the constantly changing details of the enemy's position, course and speed.
Three hundred miles to the south, Vice-Admiral L. E. Holland's squadron, consisting of HMS HOOD, HMS PRINCE OF WALES and six destroyers, were already steaming west-northwest at high speed on an interception course. The excitement, the anticipation aboard these ships was intense. For them, too, it was the end of a long wait. There was little doubt in anybody's mind that battle was now inevitable, even less doubt that the battle could have only one ending, that the BISMARCK, despite her great power and fearsome reputation, had only hours to live.
With her ten 14-inch guns to the BISMARCK'S eight 15-inch the PRINCE OF WALES herself, our newest battleship, was, on paper at least, an even match for the BISMARCK. (Only her commander, Captain Leach, and a handful of his senior officers were aware that she was far too new, her crew only semi-trained, her 14-inch turrets, as new and untried as the crew itself, so defective, temperamental and liable to mechanical breakdown that the builders' foremen were still aboard working in the turrets, desperately trying to repair the more outstanding defects as the battleship steamed towards the BISMARCK).
But no one, not even the most loyal member of her crew, was staking his faith on the PRINCE OF WALES. And, indeed, why should he, when only a few cable lengths away he could see the massive bows of the 45,000-ton HOOD thrusting the puny waves contemptuously aside as she raced towards the enemy. When the HOOD was with you, nothing could ever go wrong. Every man in the Royal Navy knew that.
And not only in the Navy. It is seventeen years now since the HOOD died but none of the millions alive today who had grown up before the Second World War can forget, and will probably never forget, the almost unbelievable hold the HOOD had taken on the imaginations and hearts of the British public. She was the best known, best loved ship in all our long naval history, a household name to countless people for whom REVENGE and VICTORY were only words. The biggest, most
powerful ship of the line in the interwar years, she stood for all that was permanent, a synonym for all that was invincible, held in awe, even in veneration. For millions of people she WAS the Royal Navy, a legend in her own lifetime… But a legend grows old.
And now, with the long night's high-speed steaming over, the dawn in the sky and the BISMARCK looming up over the horizon, the legend was about to end forever.
Safely out of range, but with a grandstand view of the coming action, the men of the NORFOLK and the SUFFOLK watched the HOOD and the PRINCE OF WALES, acting as one under the command of Vice-Admiral Holland, bear down on the BISMARCK and the PRINZ EUGEN. But even at that distance it was obvious that the two British ships were too close together, that Captain Leach of the PRINCE OF WALES was being compelled to do exactly as the HOOD did instead of being allowed to fight his own ship independently and to the best advantage, and, more incredibly still, that the closing course, their line of approach to the enemy, was all that a line of approach should not be. They were steering for the enemy at an angle broad enough to present the Germans with a splendid target but, at the same time, just acute enough to prevent their rear turrets from being brought into action, with the result that the BISMARCK and PRINZ EUGEN were able to bring their full broadsides to bear against only half of the possible total of the British guns.
Even worse was to follow. The HOOD was the first to open fire, at 5.52 a.m., and, for reasons that will never be clearly known, she made the fatal error of concentrating her fire on the PRINZ EUGEN, and did so throughout the battle. The mistake in identification was bad enough, but no worse than the standard of her gunnery: the PRINZ EUGEN emerged from the action unscathed.
The BISMARCK and PRINZ EUGEN, consequently, were free to bring their entire armament to bear on HMS FLOOD, who, because of her approach angle, could only reply with her two fore turrets. True, the PRINCE OF WALES had now opened up also, but the blunt and bitter truth is that it didn't matter very much anyway: her first salvo was more than half a mile wide of the target, the second not much better, and the third also missed. So did the fourth. And the fifth.
The Germans did not miss. The concentrated heaviness of their fire was matched only by its devastating accuracy. Both were on target — the HOOD — almost at once, the PRINCE EUGEN'S 8-inch shells starting a fire by
