Battleship Bismarck (13 page)

The
Bismarck
returns up the Elbe in December 1940 to complete her yardwork at Blohm & Voss. Her range-finder cupola and radar antenna have been installed above the foretop, but the cupola has not yet been mounted on top of her forward fire-control station. (Photograph courtesy of Blohm & Voss.)

On 24 January 1941, the finishing touches to our ship were completed, but we could not immediately return to the Baltic to continue our trials and battle practice, as we had intended to do. A sunken ore ship was blocking the Kiel Canal, and the thick ice that had formed during this exceptionally severe winter was delaying salvage work. The idea of our making the long detour around Jutland was rejected by Berlin. I used the prolonged stay in Hamburg to take a special course in the English language in the fields of law and economics, in which I had a long-standing interest. I had the great luck to find a
teacher who could look back on many years’ residence in the British Commonwealth and possessed a truly sovereign knowledge of English. Moreover, we understood one another politically from the start. When I asked him how the newly fashionable Nazi “buzzword”
gleichschalten
could best be translated, he scornfully offered, “to boil down to the same level,” and the “down” in this formulation had at once indicated that we saw things the same way. In the Hamburg branch of the Reich Federation of Interpreting Organizations—through which, on his advice, I took a translator and interpreter’s examination—he had long been on the blacklist on account of his political opinions, and one day one of the federation’s functionaries warned me against being around him too much. “If you only knew,” I thought, “against whom unfortunately Germany was not warned in time.”

I also had great luck during these months through a social connection with an outstanding Hamburg hostess, who maintained an international circle even in wartime. When one was with her—let her be remembered with gratitude here—it was balm to be able once more to talk reasonably and easily about God and the world, secure against eavesdropping, and so wonderfully far from all the cramping of conversations in so-called national circles. It happened that I had received an invitation to one of her gatherings scheduled for the time Hitler was to give his speech of 30 January 1941, and I fully resolved to accept it and for once to escape Hitler’s tirade, his “baying into the ether,” as I always called it. But unfortunately a strict order came from the First Officer for us to assemble around the loudspeaker in the officers’ mess for Hitler’s speech, and it seemed to me better to avoid the complications in the offing for an unexcused absence. The speech was broadcast from the Berlin Sports Palace and on account of its length I took in only those points for which over the years I had developed a special sensitivity.

After the usual retrospective of the “desperate situation of the Reich” eight years earlier, Hitler launched his first attack on the nature of the English as unsocial, born capitalists and reactionaries, to whose account the outbreak of the First World War also should be debited. Yet for Germany the year 1918 had been exclusively the result of an exceptional accumulation of personal incompetents in the leadership of our people, which would “never” be repeated. He himself had drawn up his foreign policy program at an early date: “The destruction of Versailles!” He had not been able to make it clear to a certain Jewish-internationalist capitalist clique that 85 million
Germans were indeed a world power. National Socialism would determine the next millenium of German history; the last part of 1939 and 1940 had already practically decided the war. If our enemies were pinning their hopes on America, well, he had also taken that possibility into his calculations. And if they should have other hopes, let’s say that Italy would desert the Axis, well, these gentlemen should not invent a revolution in Milan but should rather take care that none break out among themselves. The Duce and he were neither Jews nor businessmen and when they gave each other their hands it was the handshake of men of honor. And if the enemy was hoping that the German people would be weakened by hunger, the Four Year Plan had taken care of that, too. These German people would go through thick and thin with him. The Germans’ spirit of fanatical readiness would enable them to pay back every blow they received with interest and compound interest. Thus we were going into the new year with the best-equipped Wehrmacht in German history. At sea the U-boat war would begin this spring and there, too, the enemy would see that we had not been sleeping—”the year 1941 will be, of this I am convinced, the historical year of a great New Order in Europe . . . and will contribute . . . to securing a reconciliation among peoples. . . . And I may not forget my earlier indication that if the world were to be plunged into a general war by Jewry, all Jewry will have played out its role in Europe! . . . The coming months and years will show that here, too, I have seen rightly.”

The promise of a New Order in Europe was becoming increasingly common in speech and print; there were no longer any bounds on the phantasy and the megalomania. The threat of the obliteration of the entire Jewish population hung more darkly than ever over Europe.
*

Because of the blocking of the North Sea Canal our sailing date was set for 5 February and until then we conducted training and battle drills in Hamburg Harbor. When that day came the canal had still not been cleared, but we could not have left, anyway, because some of our pressure gauges and electrical lines to the boiler-room ventilators had been damaged by the extreme cold, and we were not ready for sea. Although this situation was remedied by 16 February, the canal remained blocked and our departure had to be postponed again, this time to 5 March. At the end of February, Lindemann complained in the War Diary: “The ship has been ‘detained’ in Hamburg since 24 January. Five weeks of training time at sea have been lost!”

Korvettenkapitän (V) Rudolf Hartkopf, chief administrative officer of the
Bismarck, and
his assistant, Oberleutnant (V) Günther Tischendorf, supervise the loading of provisions at Scheerhafen in March 1941. “V” (Verwaltungs) designated an administrative officer. (Photograph from Ferdinand Urbahns, j

On 6 March, we cast off from the wharf at the Blohm & Voss yard, steamed out into the Elbe, and once again headed downstream. As the familiar silhouette of Hamburg slowly sank astern, I had the feeling that this time our absence from the beautiful Hanseatic City would be longer. For part of the way, the admiral commanding the Hamburg Naval Headquarters did us the honor of escorting us in his flagship. Scattered passers-by waved from the banks of the river. At midday we dropped anchor in Brunsbüttel Roads. Three fighters flew air cover for us and an icebreaker and two Sperrbrechers anchored nearby to protect us against possible aerial torpedo attacks. We entered the canal the next day and, on the eighth, reached Kiel, where we spent a few days in Scheerhafen again aligning our batteries. Also, we had to take aboard ammunition, two of our four assigned aircraft, provisions, fuel, and water. Leaving Kiel, we continued our voyage east. Because of the thick ice in the western Baltic, the predreadnought
Schlesien
, a veteran of the Imperial Navy, went ahead of us to act as an icebreaker. Behind her came
Sperrbrecher 36
, then the
Bismarck.
On the afternoon of 17 March we once again dropped anchor at Gotenhafen, which was to be our principal base until we sailed on our first operational cruise.

The
Bismarck’s
camouflage is touched up at Scheerhafen in March 1941. (Photograph by Ferdinand Urbahns.)

The following days saw a great deal of activity. We conducted more high-speed trials and endurance runs and tried out our hydrophone gear. This apparatus emitted a sound impulse, by whose echo the range, bearing, nature, and conduct of its contact could be determined. A well-trained listener could even identify the type of vessel the echo came from. I still remember the report from the
Prinz Eugen
, our companion on our Atlantic sortie, on 24 May 1941 before the battle off Iceland. It was made by Leutnant zur See Karlotto Flindt, a technically proficient and talented listening officer, who was sitting at the hydrophones when around 0440 he picked up turbine
noise and reported to the ship’s bridge: “Noise of two fast-moving turbine ships at 280° relative bearing.” The ships proved to be the
Hood
and the
Prince of Wales.

The most important thing now was intensive testing of our batteries. Practice firing for the instruction of the fire-control officers and gun crews alternated with carrying out projects for the Gunnery Research Command for Ships, an organization that ran its own trials on new ships with a view to improving the ordnance of various ship types. For me, as a gunnery officer, these tests were exciting but for the crew they just meant drill and still more drill. Battle practice in the daytime, battle practice at night! The men did not complain, however; they were in the swing of things and were becoming more and more anxious for our first operation at sea to get under way.

On 19 March, Lindemann learned from the captain of our younger sister ship, the
Tirpitz
, that, according to a directive issued by the Seekriegsleitung,
*
the
Bismarck
was to be ready for her first mission from three to four weeks earlier than originally intended—now she was to be ready at the end of April. This meant that Lindemann had to cut short the program of the Gunnery Research Command for Ships. He arranged for it to end on 2 April, after which time we conducted our own surface and antiaircraft firing practices. We also spent more time than before in “clear for action” drills and in training our air crews. Since the
Prinz Eugen
, which was commissioned three weeks earlier than the
Bismarck
, was to be our escort on the upcoming operation in the Atlantic, we conducted tactical exercises with her. We also exercised with the 25th U-Boat Flotilla and, with the help of the tanker
Bromberg
, we practiced refueling at sea. It was at this time that we started doing searchlight drills. We carried seven searchlights: one was on the forward edge of the tower mast, two were atop the main hangar, and the other four were high up on either side of the stack. They were directed to their target through the use of large high-powered binoculars mounted in posts on the sides of the forward battle command station. The purpose of these drills was to provide practice at picking up an indicated object at first try and keeping the light on it.

Besides the frozen lines to the boiler-room ventilators mentioned earlier, we were having a few other problems with the propulsion plant: some hairline cracks in superheaters; a broken ball-bearing ring on the middle main coupling; a loose sleeve in one of the main steam lines; salt in one of the turbines. All these insignificant defects in the plant were repaired in short order, but in the War Diary Lindemann complained that they tended “to tarnish the good impression previously gained of its reliability.” When Naval Group Command North, to which the ship was subordinate, read his comment in the middle of April, it added: “Considering that this is new construction, the engine malfunctions were very minor. In fact, the propulsion plant has been running more smoothly than expected.” Lindemann must have felt increasingly impatient to be able to report to the Seekriegsleitung that his ship was ready for operational deployment.