counsellors — overruled his captain. They would go on as originally planned. So the BISMARCK turned southwest and pushed on deep down into the Atlantic.
The Navy followed her. All afternoon and evening the NORFOLK, SUFFOLK and PRINCE OF WALES shadowed both German ships, sending out constant radio transmissions to Admiral Tovey, who swung his squadron on to a new interception course.
The BISMARCK knew she was being followed, but seemed to be undisturbed by this. Only once, briefly, did she show her teeth. About 6.30 in the evening, she turned on her tracks in a fog bank and opened fire on the SUFFOLK, but broke off the engagement almost at once, when the PRINCE OF WALES joined in. (It was not realized at the time that this was merely a diversion to let the PRINZ EUGEN break away to a German oiler, where she refuelled and made her way safely to Brest.)
The BISMARCK now turned to the west and the British shadowers followed, Admiral Tovey's squadron still pursuing.
But Tovey's KING GEORGE V, REPULSE and VICTORIOUS were now only three out of many ships converging on the German capital ship.
The battleship REVENGE was ordered out from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Vice-Admiral Somerville's Force H — the battle cruiser RENOWN, the now legendary ARK ROYAL and the cruiser SHEFFIELD — were ordered up from Gibraltar. The battleship RAMILLIES, then with a mid-Atlantic convoy, the cruiser EDINBURGH, down near the Azores and the cruiser LONDON, with a convoy off the Spanish coast, were all ordered to intercept. Last, but most important of all, the battleship RODNEY was pulled off a States-bound convoy. The RODNEY herself was going to Boston for an urgent and long overdue refit, as her engines and boiler-rooms were in a sorely dilapidated state: but the RODNEY'S great 16-inch guns, and the magnificently Nelsonian capacity of her commander, Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton, to turn a blind eye to what he considered well-meant but erring signals from the Admiralty were to prove more than counter-balance for the parlous state of her engines. The greatest hunt in naval history was on.
Late that evening — just before midnight — Swordfish torpedo bombers from the VICTORIOUS, nine in all and led by Lieutenant-Commander Esmonde — who was later to lose his life but win a posthumous Victoria Cross for his attack on the GNEISENAU and SCHARNHORST — launched an attack against the BISMARCK in an attempt to slow her. But only one torpedo struck home, exploding harmlessly against the BISMARCK'S massive armour plating.
Or so the official Admiralty communique claimed. For once, however, the claim was an underestimate. Baron von Mullenheim Rechberg (today the German consul in Kingston, Jamaica) but then the lieutenant-commander in charge of the BISMARCK'S after turret — and the ship's senior surviving officer — said recently, when questioned on this point, that the BISMARCK had been torpedoed three times by aircraft from the VICTORIOUS. Two of the torpedoes had little effect, but the third, exploding under the bows, caused severe damage and slowed up the BISMARCK still more.
And then, at three o'clock on the morning of the 25th, that which both the Admiralty and Sir John Tovey had feared above all else happened — the shadowing ships, zigzagging through submarine infested waters, made their first and only mistake, broke contact and completely failed to regain it. The BISMARCK was lost, and no one knew where she was or, worse still, where she was heading.
Later on that same morning, Admiral Lutjens addressed the crew of the BISMARCK. The optimistic confidence with which, only twenty-four hours previously, he had scoffed at Captain Lindemann's suggestion that they return to Bergen, had vanished completely. He was now a tired and anxious man, a man who realized all too clearly the enormity of his blunder. Incredibly, it seems that he was unaware that they had shaken off their pursuers — it was thought that they were still being shadowed by radar — and when Lutjens spoke the first overtones of desperation were all too clear in his voice.
The British, he said, knew where they were and it was only a matter of time before their big ships closed in, and in overwhelming force. They knew what the outcome must be. They must fight to the death for the Fuehrer, every last man of them, and, if needs be, the BISMARCK herself would be scuttled. It is not difficult to imagine what effect this brief speech must have had on the morale of the BISMARCK'S crew.
Why had Lutjens been so sure that capital ships of the Royal Navy were bearing down on them? In the first place, wrongly believing that he was still being trailed by the NORFOLK and SUFFOLK, he naturally assumed that they were guiding the British battleships to the scene. Secondly, the BISMARCK had just been in wireless contact with the German Admiralty — who, says von Mullenheim, were unaware of the true position — and had just received from them, doubtless on the basis of reports from Doenitz's U-boats, information about the whereabouts of her hunters which was not only misleading in itself but made doubly so by errors in transmission. British battleships were reported to be in the close vicinity and, acting on this false information, Lutjens ordered alterations in course which lost the BISMARCK those few irreplaceable hours that were to make all the difference between life and death.
The BISMARCK'S radio transmissions were picked up by listening posts in Britain, and the bearings taken. The Admiralty's incredulity that the BISMARCK should thus suicidally break radio silence and betray its position — they didn't know, of course, that the BISMARCK still thought she was being shadowed — was equalled only by their immense relief and the alacrity with which they sent these bearings to their Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Tovey.
By an ironic and amazing coincidence — and it happened almost exactly at the same time — just as Lutjens aboard the BISMARCK had received a completely misleading report on the position of the enemy, so did Tovey on the KING GEORGE V. In Tovey's case, however, the bearings had been correctly transmitted but were wrongly worked out on the plot of the battleship. The result, however, was the same. Both admirals were misled, and misled at a vital moment.
The calculations made on the KING GEORGE V showed that the BISMARCK was north, instead of, as expected, south of her last reported position. This could mean only one thing — she was headed for Norway and home, instead of Brest, as everyone had thought. There wasn't a moment to lose — even now it might be too late. Tovey at once ordered his far-scattered fleet to turn in their tracks and make for the North Sea.
This every ship did — with the major exception of the RODNEY. Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton on the RODNEY doubted that the BISMARCK was, in fact, making for the North Sea and as he was then sitting nicely astride her escape route to Brest he decided to remain there. Some time later the Admiralty, too, sent him a signal to the same effect, but Dalrymple-Hamilton ignored it, backed his own judgment and stayed where he was.
Later in the afternoon, in an atmosphere of increasingly mounting tension and almost despairing anxiety, further BISMARCK position reports came in to Tovey that made it clear that the previous estimated BISMARCK positions had been wrong and that she was indeed heading for Brest. Tovey was deeply worried, for the Admiralty, he knew, had the same information and yet were acquiescing in the Home Fleet's search to the north-east. It is now obvious that some powerful person in the Admiralty — we shall probably never know who it was as their Lordships can hardly be accused of garrulity as far as the admission and explanation of their mistakes are concerned — was going in the face of all the evidence and backing his wildly wrong hunches.
Admiral Tovey backed his own hunch, decided he could not wait for the Admiralty to make up its mind and turned his fleet for Brest. Or, rather, such as was left of his fleet, for, apart from his own ship, the NORFOLK, the RODNEY, the DORSETSHIRE coming up from the south, and the RENOWN, ARK ROYAL and SHEFFIELD of Force H, all the others were one by one being forced to retire from the chase by reason of the Admiralty's non-existent fuelling arrangements.
The BISMARCK, too, was now short of fuel — desperately short. Through some almost unbelievable oversight or carelessness she had left home 2,000 tons of fuel short, and when the PRINCE OF WALES shell, during the action with the HOOD, had smashed into her bunkers, many hundreds of tons more had been lost, either directly to the sea or by salt water contamination. She had hardly enough oil left to reach Brest, even at an economical steaming speed — at a moment when she needed every knot she possessed.
The crew knew this, as crews always get to know these things, and to counteract the breaking morale and steadily mounting despair reports were circulated that an oil tanker was already en route to refuel them, and that, before long, the seas around them would be alive with their own U-boats and the skies black with the bombers of the Luftwaffe, to escort them safely into harbour.
But the oil tanker never came. Neither did the U-boats nor the Luftwaffe. What came instead, after thirty-one hours of increasingly frantic searching by British planes and ships, was a long range Catalina of the Coastal
