Command. At 10.30 on the morning of 26 May, the long wait was over and the BISMARCK found again, her last hope gone. She was then about 550 miles west of Land's End, and heading for Brest.
An illuminating comment on the state of the morale at that moment aboard the German battleship is provided by Baron Mullenheim, who says that the BISMARCK had all prepared for instant use a dummy funnel and set of Naval code recognition signals. But, so frustrated and self-defeated — von Mullenheim's own words — were the crew that neither of these were used at the very moment when it might have been the saving of the BISMARCK.
Sir John Tovey's relief, just as he was convinced that the enemy had finally escaped him, must have been immense — but it was shortlived. His ship and the RODNEY, with whom he was now in contact, were, he soon realized, much too far behind the enemy to cut him off before he reached Brest. Neither the NORFOLK, the DORSETSHIRE nor the five destroyers under the command of Captain Vian on the COSSACK, recently pulled off a southbound convoy, could even hope to stop the BISMARCK — they would have been blown out of the water before they had even begun to get within gun or torpedo range. The last remaining hope of stopping the BISMARCK lay with the aircraft of the ARK ROYAL, approaching rapidly from the south. Accordingly, at 3 p.m. in the afternoon of the 26th, torpedo carrying Swordfish took off in what was regarded at the time as a last desperate effort to stop the BISMARCK. In the words of the official communique, 'the attack proved unsuccessful'. This was hardly surprising in view of two facts that were not mentioned in the Admiralty's communique — many of the torpedoes, fitted with experimental magnetic warheads, exploded on contact with the water, which was just as well as, by what might have been a tragic mistake in identification, the attack was directed not against the BISMARCK but their own escorting destroyer, the SHEFFIELD.
Admiral Tovey was now in despair. There was, he felt, no stopping the BISMARCK now. Both he and the RODNEY, by that time desperately short of fuel, would have to turn for home in only a matter of hours and allow the BISMARCK to continue unmolested to Brest. It would have been the cruellest blow of his long and illustrious career.
The blow never fell. Sir John Tovey, and, indeed, the entire Royal Navy, were saved from this bitterest of defeats by a handful of young Fleet Air Arm pilots on the ARK ROYAL, who were desperately determined to redeem their ignominious blunder of that afternoon.
And redeem it they did. In almost a full gale, in rain squalls and poor visibility, they somehow, miraculously, took off from the treacherously wet, plunging, rolling flight deck of the ARK ROYAL, sought out the BISMARCK in appalling flying weather and pressed home their attack, in face of intense anti-aircraft fire, with splendid gallantry. Only two torpedoes struck home — von Mullenheim says three, but the number is unimportant. Only the last torpedo counted, and that one, exploding far aft on the starboard quarter, buckled and jammed the rudders of the great battleship. The BISMARCK circled twice, then came to a stop, unmanageable and dead in the water, 400 miles due west of Brest. The long chase was over and the BISMARCK was at bay.
PART THREE
Thus, with the crippling of her steering gear by the torpedo bombers of ARK ROYAL, began the agonizing last night of the brief life of the BISMARCK.
The greatest battleship in the world was about to go to her death, and it was almost as if nature knew that nothing could now stay her end, for the weather that night was in dark and bitter harmony with the moods, the thoughts, the bleak and sombre despair of the hundreds of exhausted men who still kept watch aboard the BISMARCK.
The wind blew hard, the cold, driving rain lashed pitilessly across their faces, the waves ran high and rough and confused and the darkness was as absolute as darkness ever becomes at sea: there was no moon that night, and even the stars were hidden by the scudding rain-clouds.
Dead in the water, engines stopped, the BISMARCK lay in the troughs between the great Atlantic combers rolling heavily, continuously, while the engine room crews worked frantically to free the jammed rudders. Their lives, the life of every man in the ship, depended on the success or failure of their efforts: Brest and safety were only twelve hours' steaming away, even six hours would have taken them under the protective umbrella of their own Luftwaffe, and there no British battleship would dare venture. But with steering control lost, they were helpless.
One rudder was freed and centred, and there it jammed, but even that was a major step forward: if the other could be freed, or even centred so as to eliminate its drag, there would still be hope, for the battleship could be steered by varying the relative speeds of the two great propeller shafts to overcome the contending forces of wind, wave and tide. But the rudder, buckled and twisted by the impact of the torpedo explosion, remained far over at its acute angle, immovably jammed.
The situation was desperate. Time was running out, and the engineers, haggard, exhausted men who had almost forgotten what sleep was, were now all but incapable of any effort at all, mental or physical: with the interminable plunging of the wildly rolling ship and the fumes of diesel oil seeping back from ruptured fuel tanks even the most experienced sailors among them were almost continually sick, many of them violently so.
It was announced that the man who succeeded in freeing the rudders would be awarded the Knight's Insignia of the Iron Cross — the highest award Germany can bestow. But there is no place for dreams of glory in the utter wretchedness of a seasick man, and even had a diver gone over the side into that black and gale-wracked sea he could have achieved nothing except his own death, and that in a matter of moments as the great ship, wallowing wickedly in the troughs, crushed the life out of him.
The engineer commander approached Captain Lindemann with a counsel of desperation — they should try to blow the rudder off with high explosive. Lindemann, who had had no sleep for six days and six nights replied with the massive indifference of one who has taken far too much and for whom nothing now remains. 'You may do what you like. I have finished with the BISMARCK.' These, surely, are the most tragic words that have ever been uttered by the commander of a naval vessel, but it is impossible to blame Captain Lindemann: in his hopelessness, in his black despair and utter exhaustion, he was no longer in contact with reality.
The order was given — it may have been by Admiral Lutjens himself — to get under way, and slowly the BISMARCK gathered speed until she was doing almost ten knots. With no steering control left, she yawed wildly from side to side, but her general course was north — towards the coast of England. This was the last thing Lutjens wanted, but there was no help for it: with the constant lifeless rolling in the great troughs, the turret crews had become so seasick that they were unable to fight their guns, and the ship itself had become a most unstable firing platform. More important still, a ship lying stopped in the water was a sitting target for any torpedo attacks that might be delivered in the darkness of the night.
And, inevitably, the torpedo attacks came. All night long the BISMARCK was harassed by a group of British destroyers, who, with their vastly superior speed and manoeuvrability, circled it like a pack of hounds waiting to bring down and finish off a wounded stag. But the BISMARCK, as the destroyers found, was not to be finished off so easily. Time and again, as a hound darts in to nip the stag, a destroyer raced in and loosed off its torpedoes, but soon discovered that this was an unprofitable and highly dangerous proceeding. Somehow, somewhere, the BISMARCK'S gun crews — and they were, after all, the pick of the German Navy — had found their last reserves of spirit and energy and drove off the British destroyers with heavy and extremely accurate radar-controlled fire from their 15-inch turrets.
During the running and intermittent battle, in the intervals between the crash of the gunfire and the momentary glaring illumination of the ship and sea around as the white and orange flames streaked from the mouths of the big barrels, a German naval officer, intent on boosting the morale of his men, kept up a commentary of the fight over the Tannoy system, 'One British destroyer hit… One hit and on fire… Ship blowing up and sinking…'
(In point of fact, none of Captain Vian's destroyers were hit, far less sunk, during the night. It is as well to remember, however, that all the inventiveness was not on the German side. The British destroyers claimed, a claim that was backed by the official Admiralty communique, that the BISMARCK had been torpedoed several times during the night: the truth is that the BISMARCK wasn't hit even once by a torpedo.)
Early on in the night, the Fuehrer himself sent a personal message to the BISMARCK: 'Our thoughts are with
