The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories

PART ONE

Far south of the Arctic Circle, along the great trade routes of the Atlantic, westerly gales die away to a whisper and then the warm sun shines on the long gentle swells. Far to the north, in the numbing cold of the Barents Sea, stretch away the immense reaches of an almost miraculous calm, the sea milk-white from horizon to unbroken horizon for day after endless day. But between these two vast areas, along the belt of the Arctic Circle itself, lie the most bitter seas in the world: and no part of it more bitter, more hostile to man and the puny ships that carry him across the savagery of its gale-torn waters than that narrow stretch of ocean between Iceland and Greenland that men call the Denmark Strait.

From the far-ranging Vikings of a thousand years ago to the time of the modern Icelandic fishermen, ships have sailed through this narrow passage, but they sailed always at their peril, only when necessity dictated, and they never lingered long, never a moment more than they had to. No man, no ship, has ever waited there from choice, but, at rare intervals, some few men and ships have had to do it from necessity; just seventeen years ago this month, two ships, with the hundreds of men aboard them, were just coming to the end of the longest vigil man has ever kept on these dark and dangerous waters.

The ships' companies of His Majesty's Cruisers SUFFOLK and NORFOLK were tired, tired to the point of exhaustion. They had kept their vigil far too long. Even one winter's day in the Denmark Strait, with twenty hours of impenetrable darkness, driving snow, a sub-zero wind knifing off Greenland's barren ice-cap and the ship rolling and plunging steeply, sickeningly, incessantly, is a lifetime in itself, a nightmare that has no ending. And the NORFOLK and the SUFFOLK had been there for months on end, had been there all through the grim winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941, suffering incredible hardships of cold and discomfort, always watching, always waiting. The strain of watching never ceased, the tension of waiting never ended.

But now summer, or what passes there for summer, had come to the Denmark Strait, and the struggle merely to exist was no longer an all-exclusive preoccupation. True, the cold still struck deep through the layered Arctic clothing, the pack-ice stretching out from the shores of Greenland was only a mile or two away and the rolling fog banks to the east, off the Icelandic coast, no further distant, but at least the sea was calm, the snow held off and the darkness of the long winter night was gone. Halcyon conditions, almost, compared to those they had so recently known: even so, the strain was now infinitely greater than anything that had ever gone before, the tension bow-tautened almost to breaking point.

At that moment, just after 7 o'clock on the evening of 23 May, 1941, the strain, the tension bore most heavily on one man and one man alone — Captain R. M. Ellis, on the bridge of his cruiser SUFFOLK. He had been there, on his bridge, for two days now without a break, he might be there as long again, even longer, but it was impossible that he relax his unceasing vigilance, even for a moment. Too much depended on him. He was not the senior officer in the area: Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker was in his flagship, the NORFOLK, but the NORFOLK, though not far away, was safely hidden in the swirling fog. The ultimate responsibility was that of Captain Ellis, and it was a crushing responsibility. He could fail in what he had to do, he could all too easily fail through no fault of his own, but the disastrous consequences of any such failure were not for contemplation. Britain had already suffered and lost too much: one more defeat, one more blunder and the war could well be lost.

The war was in its twentieth month then, and Britain was alone and fighting for its life. Twenty dark, gloomy and tragic months, a gloom only momentarily lifted by the shining courage of the young pilots who had destroyed the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, but now the road ahead was more dark, more hopeless than ever before, and no light at the end of it.

The Wehrmacht's panzer divisions were waiting, the threat of invasion still a Damoclean sword. We had just been driven ignominiously out of Greece. In that very week, Goering's Eleventh Air Corps, whom Churchill called the flame of the German Army, had launched a ruthless and overwhelming attack on our forces in Crete, and the end was only a matter of brief time. Six million tons of shipping had been lost at sea, 650,000 tons in that April alone, the blackest month of the war, and May might prove even more terrible still, for at the moment when Captain Ellis was patrolling north-east and southwest through that narrow lane of clear water between the Greenland ice and the Icelandic fogs, there were no fewer than ten major freight convoys and one large and vital troop convoy, far scattered and for the most part only thinly protected, sailing over the face of the broad Atlantic.

And what part, people were asking bitterly, was Britain's mighty Home Fleet playing in all this. Our first line of defence, our last hope in the darkest hour, why wasn't it throwing all its great weight into these life and death battles? Why wasn't it patrolling the North Sea and the English Channel (where the Stukas and the Heinkels could have destroyed it between dawn and sunset on any given day) ready to smash any cross-Channel invasion? Why hadn't it helped in the evacuation of Greece? Why wasn't it north of Crete, breaking up the seaborne reinforcements without whom Goering's paratroopers could not hope to complete their conquests? Why wasn't it at sea, bringing its great guns to bear for the protection of these threatened convoys in the submarine infested waters to the west? Why was it lying idle, powerless and useless, in its retreat in Scapa Flow? Why, why, why?

The BISMARCK was the reason why: an overpowering reason why.

Laid down in 1936, launched from the Blohm and Voss shipyards in Hamburg on 14 February, 1939, in the presence of no less a person than the Chancellor of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler himself, the BISMARCK was something to haunt the dreams — or nightmares — of foreign navies the world over. Hitler had a genius for exaggeration, but there was no hint of exaggeration in what he said to its crew when he visited the battleship again in early May, 1941, only the simple truth. The BISMARCK,' he told them, 'is the pride of the German Navy.'

She was indeed. She would have been the pride of any navy in the world. Built in cynical disregard of the 35,000 tons treaty limitations, with an actual tonnage somewhere in the region of 50,000, she was unquestionably the most powerful battleship afloat. She was fast, her speed of over 30 knots a match for any British capital ship: she had an immense beam

— far greater than that of any British ship — which provided a magnificently stable firing platform for her eight 15-inch and twelve 6-inch guns — and the German gunnery, far superior to ours, was legendarily accurate under any conditions: and with her heavy armour-plating, double and triple hulls and the infinitely complex sub-compartmentation of the hull itself achieving a hitherto impossible degree of watertight integrity, she was widely believed to be virtually unsinkable. She was the trump card in Admiral Raeder's hand — and now the time had come to play that trump.

The BISMARCK was out. There could no longer be any question about it. First reported by reconnaissance as moving up the Kattegat on 20 May, she had been photographed in the company of a 'Hipper' class cruiser, by a Spitfire pilot, in Grimstad fjord, just south of Bergen, on the early afternoon of the 21st; at 6.00 p.m. the following 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 the HOOD'S mainmast within the first minute. The BISMARCK, too, was hitting now, the huge 15-inch projectiles, each one a screaming ton of armour-piercing steel and high explosive, smashing into the reeling HOOD and exploding deep in her heart. How often the HOOD was hit, and where she was hit we will never know, nor does it matter.

All that matters, all that we do know, is what was seen by the survivors of that battle at exactly six o'clock that morning, as the fifth salvo from the BISMARCK straddled the HOOD. A stabbing column of flame, white and orange and blindingly incandescent, lanced a thousand feet vertically upwards into the grey morning sky as the tremendous detonation of her exploding magazines almost literally blew the HOOD out of existence. When the last echoes of the great explosion had rolled away to lose themselves beyond the horizon and the smoke drifted slowly over the sea, the shattered remnants of the HOOD had vanished as completely as if the great ship herself had never existed.

So, in the twenty-first year of her life, the HOOD died. This, the first naval engagement of her long life, had lasted exactly eight minutes, and when she went down she took 1,500 officers and men with her. There were three survivors.

PART TWO

The destruction of the HOOD, the invincible, impregnable HOOD, came as a tremendous shock both to the Navy and the country at large. It was incredible, it was impossible that this had happened — and the impossible had to be explained away, both verbally and in print, with all speed.

As details of the action were at that time lacking, no mention was made of the HOOD'S suicidal angle of approach to the enemy, the fatal mistake in identification that led to her firing on the PRINZ EUGEN instead of the BISMARCK, or of the fact that the standard of her gunnery was so poor that she failed to register even one hit throughout the entire engagement. Perhaps it was as well that these things were not known at the time.

The reasons that WERE advanced at the time — and the source of inspiration of these reasons is not far to seek — were that the HOOD, of course, had been no battleship but only a lightly-protected battle cruiser, and, even so, that the 15-inch shell that had found her magazine had been one chance in a million. These explanations were utter nonsense.

True, the HOOD was technically classed as a battle cruiser, but it was just that, a technicality and no more: the fact is that with her 12-inch iron and steel sheathing extending over 560 feet on either side and with her total weight of protective metal reaching a fantastic 14,000 tons, she was one of the most heavily armoured ships in the world. As for the one chance in a million shell, senior naval architects had been pointing out for twenty years that the HOOD'S magazines were wide open to shells approaching from a certain angle, a danger that could easily have been obviated by extra armour plating. The HOOD'S design was defective, badly defective, and the Admiralty was well aware of this.

No such thoughts as these, it is safe to assume, was in the mind of Captain Leach of the PRINCE OF WALES as the smoke and the dust of the awesome explosion cleared away and the HOOD was seen to be gone. The PRINCE OF WALES was fighting for her life now, and her captain knew it. Both the BISMARCK and the PRINZ EUGEN had swung their guns on him as soon as the HOOD had blown up and already the deadly accuracy of their heavy and concentrated fire was beginning to have its effect. Captain Leach summed up the situation, made his assessments and didn't hesitate. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over, broke off the engagement and retired under a heavy smokescreen.

'The ship that ran away'. That was what the PRINCE OF WALES was called then, the coward battleship that turned and fled: it is an open secret that ship, officers and men, during the remainder of the PRINCE OF WALES's short life, were henceforward treated with aversion and cold contempt by the rest of the Navy and this opprobrium ended only with the death of the ship and the gallant Captain Leach a bare seven months later under a savage Japanese aerial attack off the coast of Malaya. The opprobrium was more than unjust — it was grotesquely and bitterly unfair. Once again, the Admiralty must shoulder much of the blame.

In fairness, it was completely unintentional on their part. The trouble arose from their official communique on the action, which was no better and no worse than the typical wartime communique, in that it tended to exaggerate the damage sustained by the enemy while minimizing our own.

Two statements in the communique caused the grievous misunderstanding: 'The BISMARCK was at one time seen to be on fire' and 'The PRINCE OF WALES sustained slight damage'. Why in all the world then, people asked, hadn't the ship which had received only slight damage closed with the one on fire and destroyed it. What possible excuse for running away?

Excuse enough. The fire on the BISMARCK, while demonstrable testimony to the occasional liveliness of official imaginations, had, in actual fact, consisted of no more than soot shaken loose from her funnel. As for the PRINCE OF WALES's 'slight damage', she had been struck by no fewer than three 8-inch shells and four of the BISMARCK'S great 15-inch shells, one of which had completely wrecked the bridge, killing everyone there except Leach and his chief yeoman of signals. Furthermore, one of the PRINCE OF WALES's big guns was completely out of action, repeated breakdowns in the others led to their firing intermittently or not at all and the jamming of 'Y' turret shell ring had put the four big guns of that turret — half of Captain Leach's effective armament — out of commission. The PRINCE OF WALES, far from being slightly damaged, was badly crippled: to close with her powerful enemy, to expose herself any longer to the murderous accuracy of these broadsides would have been no mere act of folly but quick and certain suicide.

The BISMARCK made no attempt to pursue and engage her enemy. With the HOOD destroyed and the PRINCE OF WALES badly hurt and driven off in ignominious defeat, she had already achieved success beyond her wildest dreams. A magnificent victory, a tremendous boost to the prestige of the German Navy and, in Goebbels' hands, a new-forged propaganda weapon of incalculable power — why risk throwing it all away by exposing herself to a lucky salvo that might destroy her turrets or bridge or fire control directors — or might even sink her? Besides, her primary purpose in breaking into the Atlantic was not to engage the Home Fleet — that was the last thing Admiral Lutjens wanted — but to annihilate our convoys.

The rejoicing aboard the BISMARCK was intense, but no more so than the jubilation in the chancellory of Berlin, where news of this resounding triumph had been flashed as soon as the BISMARCK had broken off the action.

Within an hour the news would be in the hands of every newspaper and radio station in the country. By the afternoon every person in Germany — and by the evening every country in Europe — would know of the crushing defeat suffered by the Royal Navy. An overjoyed Hitler sent his own and the nation's congratulations and admiration to the officers and men of the BISMARCK, and personally announced, amongst numerous other decorations, the immediate award of the Knight's Insignia of the Iron Cross to the BISMARCK'S first gunnery officer.

Only one man held aloof, only one man remained untouched by the exultation, the exhilaration of the victory — the man, one would have thought, who had the greatest cause of all to rejoice, Captain Lindemann, commanding officer of the BISMARCK. Lindemann was unhappy and more than a little afraid — and no man had ever called Lindemann's courage into question. A gallant and very experienced sailor, reckoned about the best and the most skilful in the German Navy — and he had to be, to have command of the finest ship in the German Navy — he was filled with foreboding, a dark certainty of ultimate defeat.

Although his ship had suffered no damage either to her guns or engines and was still the complete fighting machine, a shell, crashing through the heavy armour, and exploding in her fuel tanks had perceptibly reduced her speed and he feared he might not have sufficient fuel left for sustained high-speed steaming and manoeuvring — and Lindemann realized only too clearly that he would require all the speed and every pound of thrust the BISMARCK'S big turbines were capable of developing. He knew the British, he knew the tremendous regard and affection in which they had held the HOOD, and he knew too that, far from being intimidated by the appalling manner of her death, they would have been goaded into a savage fury for revenge and would not rest until they had hunted them down and destroyed them.

These fears he tried to communicate to his senior officer, Admiral Lutjens, and suggested that they return immediately to Bergen, for repairs. Admiral Lutjens, for reasons which we will never know — possibly the elation of their great success had temporarily blurred his judgment and dreams of glory are notoriously treacherous 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 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 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 die.

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 destroyed, the smashed and broken turrets lay over at crazy angles, the barrels pointing down into the sea or up towards an empty sky, and the broken, twisted steel girders and plates of what had once been her superstructure glowed first red, then whitely incandescent as the great fires deep within blazed higher and higher. But still the BISMARCK did not die.

Beyond all question, she was the toughest and most nearly indestructible ship ever built. She had been hit by the PRINCE OF WALES, she had been hit by hundreds of heavy, armour piercing shells from the KING GEORGE V, RODNEY, NORFOLK and DORSETSHIRE. She had been torpedoed by aircraft from the ARK ROYAL and from the VICTORIOUS, and now, in this, her last battle, torpedoed also by the RODNEY and the NORFOLK. But still, incredibly, she lived. No ship in naval history had ever taken half the punishment the BISMARCK had, and survived. It was almost uncanny.

In the end, she was not to die under the guns of the two British battleships that had reduced her to this empty blazing hulk. Perhaps, in their wonder at her incredible toughness, they had come to believe that she could never be sunk by shell-fire. Perhaps it was their dangerous shortage of fuel, or the certainty that U-boats would soon be on the scene, in force: or perhaps they were just sickened by the slaughter. In any event, the KING GEORGE V and the RODNEY, their mission accomplished, turned for home.

The BISMARCK never surrendered. Her colours still flew high, were still flying when the DORSETSHIRE closed in on the silent, lifeless ship and torpedoed three times from close range. Almost at once she heeled far over to port, her colours dipping into the water, then turned bottom up and slid beneath the waves, silent except for the furious hissing and bubbling as the waters closed over the red hot steel of the superstructure.

The long chase was over: the HOOD was avenged.