our victorious comrades' to which he received a reply, 'Ship completely unmanoeuvrable. Will fight to the last shell.'
It is difficult to imagine which of the two messages had the more dismaying effect. Probably the latter. For doomed men to be addressed as 'victorious comrades' is irony enough, but for Hitler to learn that all hope had been abandoned for the magnificent ship he had visited only a week or two previously and called the pride of the German Navy must have been a shattering blow.
As Lutjens said, the ship was completely unmanoeuvrable. The long dark night wore on, and in spite of every effort it proved impossible to bring the BISMARCK round on a course for Brest. For her own safety she had to keep moving, and with the set of the wind and the sea, there was only one way she could move — north.
Dawn was coming up now, a bleak, cheerless dawn with driving rain clouds and a grey and stormy sea. There was no longer any hiding from the crew the course they were steering, and the despair and the fear lay heavy over the BISMARCK. It was almost certainly to counteract this that an official message was passed round to the men at their stations — those who still fought off exhaustion and remained awake at their stations — that squadrons of Stukas had already taken off from Northern France, and that a tanker, tugs and escorting destroyers were steaming out to their aid. There was no word of truth in this. The Luftwaffe was grounded by the same high wind and low, gale-torn rain clouds as were sweeping across the BISMARCK, the tugs and tanker were still in Brest harbour and the destroyers never came.
There came instead the two most powerful battleships of the British Home Fleet, the RODNEY and the KING GEORGE V, beating up out of the west so as to have the BISMARCK between them and the lightening sky to the east. The men of the BISMARCK knew that there would be no escape this time, that the promised Stukas and destroyers and U-boats would never come, and that when the British battleships, bent on revenge for the sunken HOOD, finally turned for home again they would leave an empty sea behind them. The BISMARCK made ready to d
Over the guns, by the great engines, in the magazines and fire-control rooms, exhausted men lay or sat by their posts, sunk in drugged uncaring sleep. On the bridge, according to the testimony of one of the few surviving officers, senior officers lay at their stations like dead men, the helmsman was stretched out by the useless wheel, of the Admiral or any member of his staff there was no sign. They had to be shaken and beaten out of the depths of their so desperately needed sleep, awakened to the cruellest, the most bitter dawn they had ever known: and, for all but a handful, it was their last awakening.
Even before they were all roused, closed up at their battle stations and ready to defend themselves, the RODNEY, no more than four minutes after she had first been sighted, opened up with her great 16-inch guns. For the waiting men on the BISMARCK, the spectacle of a full-scale broadside from the RODNEY, with her three massive triple turrets all ranged together on her tremendously long fore-deck and firing simultaneously as they did later in the battle, was an impressive and terrifying sight: but no more terrifying than the express train shriek of the approaching salvo, the flat thunderclaps of sound as the shells exploded on nearby contact with the water, the waterspouts erupting two hundred feet up into the leaden sky.
But this first salvo missed. So, almost immediately afterwards, did the first from the KING GEORGE V, And now the BISMARCK retaliated and concluding, probably rightly, that the RODNEY was the more dangerous opponent, directed the first salvo at her. It fell a long way short, but the BISMARCK'S reputation for gunnery of a quite extraordinary accuracy, a reputation achieved in only four brief days, was solidly founded in fact: almost immediately she started straddling the RODNEY, which took swift avoiding action.
But still the RODNEY was firing from every gun that could be brought to bear, and the KING GEORGE V, temporarily ignored by the BISMARCK, was arrowing in head-on, her six big for'ard 15-inch guns firing time and again, as quickly as they could be reloaded. The NORFOLK, too, the cruiser that had doggedly followed the BISMARCK all the way from the far-distant waters of the Denmark Strait, now joined in the fight and shortly afterwards the DORSETSHIRE, who had taken a severe hammering all night long as she had raced north through gale-winds and heavy seas, appeared on the scene. Within fifteen minutes from the beginning of the action, the BISMARCK was being subjected to heavy and sustained fire from two battleships and two cruisers.
The odds were hopeless. Even for a ship capable of high speed and rapid manoeuvre, and with a fresh and confident crew, the sheer weight of enemy shells would have proved far too much: and the BISMARCK could now move only at a relative crawl, manoeuvre of any kind was impossible for her and her crew were exhausted, hopeless and utterly demoralized. In retrospect, over the gap of seventeen years, our sympathies tend to lie with the BISMARCK, a sitting target lying increasingly helpless in the water, being mercilessly battered into extinction. But there was no thought of mercy at the time, only of revenge and destruction, and understandably so: only four days had elapsed since the HOOD and fifteen hundred men had gone to their deaths — and the Stukas and U-boats might appear on the scene at any moment.
Already, within fifteen minutes of the first shots being fired, there was a marked deterioration in the BISMARCK'S rate and accuracy of fire. Heavy shells from the two British capital ships were beginning to smash into her, and the concussive impact of the exploding missiles, the clouds of acrid smoke and the bedlam of sound mingling with the crash of their own guns had a devastating and utterly demoralizing effect on the already dazed and exhausted gun crews crouched within their turrets.
Those few officers who still clung stubbornly to the bridge of the BISMARCK could see that the gunfire from the KING GEORGE V was falling off and becoming increasingly spasmodic (suffering from the same turret troubles as her sister ship the PRINCE OF WALES, the KING GEORGE V had, at one time, only two guns out of her ten capable of firing) and ordered every available gun to concentrate on the RODNEY. But it was too late.
The RODNEY, close in now, had the range and had it accurately. The big 16-inch shells, each one 2,700 pounds of armour-piercing high explosive, were crashing into the vitals of the shuddering BISMARCK with steadily increasing frequency. One 16-inch shell struck the fire control tower, blasting it completely over the side, and after that all semblance of concerted firing and defence ceased. Another 16-inch shell silenced both for'ard turrets at once, wrecking 'A' turret and blowing part of 'B' turret back over the bridge, killing most of the officers and men left there. Shells from both battleships were exploding deep in the heart of the BISMARCK, wrecking the engine rooms, destroying the fuel tanks and adding hundreds of tons of fuel to feed the great fires now raging in the entire mid- section of the ship, the roaring flames clearly visible through the great jagged gaps torn in the ship's side and armour-plating.
'Nightmarish' is the only word to describe the dreadful scenes now taking place aboard that battered, holed and flaming shambles of twisted steel and broken bodies that was all that was left of the BISMARCK and its crew.
Sixteen-inch shells from the RODNEY, by this time at a point-blank range of only two miles, were now hitting the BISMARCK two, four, even six at a time, and groups of fear-maddened men on the upper deck were running blindly backward and forward like crazed animals seeking escape from the twin terrors of these lethal broadsides and the red-hot deck-plates beginning to twist and buckle under their very feet: most of them chose the easy way out, a leap into the shell-torn sea and death by drowning.
In the turrets, sailors abandoned their now useless guns, mutinied and rushed for the turret doors. Some of the commanding officers of the turrets committed suicide, and others turned pistols on their own men, only to be overwhelmed: and then, the men found that the doors were warped and jammed fast, and they went down to the floor of the Atlantic locked in the iron coffin of the turret they had served so well.
Hatches, too, jammed shut all over the BISMARCK. Two hundred men, imprisoned thus in the canteen, were fighting madly to force their way out, when a shell crashed through the deck and exploded inside, all the concussive blast and murderous storm of flying shrapnel confined to that one narrow space. There were no survivors.
But they were the lucky ones in the manner of their dying — lucky, that is, compared to the ghastly fate of the sailors trapped in magazines. Raging fires surrounded these magazines on nearly every side, and as the metal bulkheads grew steadily hotter until they began to glow dull red, the magazine temperatures soared. That this could have only one end the few damage control men still clinging to their posts knew all too well — and they could never forget the HOOD blown out of existence when her magazines went up. They had no option but to do what they had to do — flood the magazines and drown their comrades in the swiftly rising waters.
And just as nightmarish as the scenes aboard was the appalling spectacle of the BISMARCK herself. Weighed down by the thousands of tons of water rushing in through the great gaps torn in her sides, she rolled heavily, sluggishly, in the troughs between the waves, a battered, devastated wreck.
Her mast was gone, her director tower was gone, the funnel had just disappeared. All her boats had been
