Battleship Bismarck (32 page)

*
The information came in a radio message from the Spanish intelligence service to the appropriate German headquarters. This message was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence.

*
It seems curious that Admiral Wake-Walker kept all three of his pursuing ships off the
Bismarck’s
port quarter, the
Suffolk
, with her superior radar, nearer to the
Bismarck
than the
Prince of Wales
and
Norfolk.
At first, he intended to have the
Prince of Wales
engage the
Bismarck
with gunfire from time to time, in the hope that the defensive maneuvers the latter would be forced to take would draw her to the east, the direction from which Tovey’s task force was approaching. But this plan did not work out and was soon abandoned. Keeping his three ships to port enabled Wake-Walker to command them as a unit, but how seriously he considered the risk that the German battleship might be able to slip away to starboard, I am unable to say.

*
Short-signal procedure

†
This message reached its destination at 0908.

*
Lütjens overestimated the range of the
Suffolk’s
radar by 11,000 meters.

†
This signal reached its destination at 0942.

*
Hans-Henning von Schultz told the author in 1984: “The
Prinz Eugen
also was equipped with radar detectors. These were passive radar sets, with which the beams of a radio-location set (radar impulses) could be detected in a then still-inexact direction only. And since radar detectors would register radar impulses at great distances while the range of shipboard radar was still short, the great distance that existed between the
Bismarck
and her shadowers after contact had been lost excludes any chance that she was still being located by enemy radar. That was not technically possible at the time.”

21    The British Compute the Bismarck’s Position

Around 1030, barely an hour and a half after Lütjens sent his second message, Tovey received an urgent signal from the Admiralty informing him that the radio bearing of a ship, supposedly the
Bismarck
, had been picked up at 0852. It gave him the relevant bearings but did not include a determination of our position. This information was omitted because, before he left Scapa Flow, Tovey said he wanted such computations to be done in his flagship.

The bearings transmitted to him from stations in Great Britain, Iceland, and Gibraltar could only be computed by his navigation officer, Captain Frank Lloyd, on an ordinary mercator projection, however, as the flagship had not been outfitted with the gnomonic charts needed for such purposes. The result was that the computations made on the
King George V
were far from unequivocal. Faced with a choice of positions in which the
Bismarck
might be found, Tovey decided that the most northerly was the most probable. That position was, in fact, so far north that Tovey concluded the
Bismarck
was going home through the Norwegian Sea. When he transmitted it to his ships, most of them, with the
King George V
in the lead, turned to the north or northeast on courses that led away from the
Bismarck’s
true position.

Were we to have two chances of escape in one day, 25 May?

The Admiralty soon began to have doubts about the
Bismarck
steering a northerly course and that afternoon recalculated the coordinates with the help of a fix on another signal sent by Lütjens. As a
result, it sent Tovey a more southerly position for the
Bismarck
, one that definitely showed her to be heading for the Bay of Biscay. Tovey meantime had had his computations reexamined and realized that a grave error had been made that morning. After another exchange of thoughts with the Admiralty, more hesitation, and briefly taking a compromise course to the east, he let himself be persuaded that the
Bismarck
was steering for the west coast of France. Accordingly, shortly after 1800 he turned to the southeast. For seven hours the
Bismarck
had been enjoying his gift of space and time, and now he was 150 nautical miles behind her on course for St. Nazaire. At 0400 that day, he was 100 nautical miles ahead of her in that direction.

22    A Fateful Sunday

Around the noon hour on 25 May, Lütjens spoke to the ship’s company. The summons to assemble near the loudspeakers came on short notice and reached me while I was watch officer in the forward control station. I dismissed the men on watch with me so that they could listen to the talk but, not wanting to leave the guns completely uncovered, I remained at my station.

According to the
Bismarck’s
reconstructed War Diary,
*
Lütjens said:

Seamen of the battleship
Bismarck!
You have covered yourselves with glory! The sinking of the battle cruiser
Hood
has not only military, but also psychological value, for she was the pride of England. Henceforth, the enemy will try to concentrate his forces and bring them into action against us. I therefore released the
Prinz Eugen
at noon yesterday so that she could conduct commerce warfare on her own. She has managed to evade the enemy. We, on the other hand, because of the hits we have received, have been ordered to proceed to a French port.
†
On our way there, the enemy will gather and give us battle. The German people are with you, and we will fight until our gun barrels glow red-hot
and the last shell has left the barrels. For us seamen, the question now is victory or death!

I can still see the leading petty officer who operated one of my directors returning dejectedly from the loudspeaker and still hear him remarking that it was really all over. He and the others who heard the address regarded our chances of getting through to France as practically nil. The enemy, they told me the admiral had said, is concentrating his entire high-seas fleet, not only the ships in home waters, but those in any part of the Atlantic. In the face of such a mass, the fate of the
Bismarck
could only be victory or defeat.

The undertone of the men’s remarks was clear. They had used both words, “victory” and “defeat.” Yet, before them they saw only defeat. It was not easy to reassure and calm them. I said something to the effect that perhaps things really wouldn’t be that bad and reminded them of our lightning victory over the
Hood.
Why shouldn’t we do something else like that? But a shadow hung over the men: after all, it was the Fleet Commander who had said those things.

Kapitänleutnant (Ingenieurwesen) Gerhard Junack later reported that after Lütjens’s address dejection spread throughout the ship, and it was obviously generated at the top. Staff officers began to wear unfastened life jackets. Senior ship’s officers declared in the presence of their juniors that they now saw no way out. Senior petty officers appeared at their duty stations with open life jackets, although to do so was against regulations. The division officers tried harder than anyone to counter the contagious depression and had some success in cheering up their men. But the high morale that permeated the ship in the preceding days was irretrievably lost.

Junack continued: “Whether the Fleet Commander simply made a bad choice of words or whether the crew sensed his innermost fears must remain an open question. Needless to say, all the later rumors about people refusing to obey orders and so forth were invented out of thin air. Morale was low, however, and who can judge what tactical effects that had?”

Stabsobermaschinist Wilhelm Schmidt said: “It is understandable that immediately after this address some of the crew were depressed. The men were so young, some of them had come directly from the training centers and had been on board only six weeks. We warrant and petty officers, trusting in what fighting power we had left and in timely intervention by our long-range bombers, did everything we could to revive and sustain the men’s morale.”

And a few other voices. A junior gunnery officer: “The Fleet Commander should not have described the situation so baldly.” A seaman gunner: “My comrades seemed downhearted and said that the Fleet Commander spoke well, but they interpreted his words to mean that we were already lost.” A machinist: “The address had a depressing effect on the crew. Since morale was very high before the speech, the general opinion was that it would have been better if we had not been told anything about the situation we were in.” A machinist petty officer: “The Fleet Commander’s words had a devastating effect on us. They were taken to mean that we were sentenced to death, whereas we had already reckoned when we would arrive in France. No one looked at anyone else, for fear of betraying any weakness in himself. Deep depression enveloped the whole crew.”

Quite obviously, Lindemann immediately perceived what the Fleet Commander’s words and tone were bound to do to the spirit of his crew. There were already whispers that the two had their differences. About an hour after Lütjens spoke, the captain made a brief address over the loudspeakers, in which he said exactly the opposite: we would put one over on the enemy and soon reach a French port. Also, in conversations with groups of men, he did his best to counteract the effect of Lütjens’s words. He succeeded in dispelling the gloom. The men went back to their duties cheerfully. “I remember,” a survivor wrote me, “how their faces brightened after the captain’s address, they showed that the men had got their courage back.”

Junack’s impression that, after Lütjens’s address, the dejection seeped down from the top, confirms that our crew, being very young on the average, was overwhelmingly optimistic by nature. At first, some of the younger men were not particularly depressed by the Fleet Commander’s warnings. Later they made such comments as, “We were all young and believed in victory,” or “The Fleet Commander’s address didn’t give us the slightest idea that anything could happen to this powerful ship.” Another youngster had to overhear a conversation between two older members of the ship’s company before he understood “that worse awaited us and that the near future was not nearly as rosy as it appeared to us young sailors.”

The
Bismarck’s
reconstructed War Diary concludes: “After this address by the Fleet Commander, which made the crew aware of the situation of the ship and the intentions of its command, the morale of the crew, outstanding until then, suffered a certain setback.”

Information regarding the latest dispositions of the British fleet, on which his address was based, was evidently given to Lütjens by the B-Dienst
at home and perhaps also by our own B-Dienst team. He continued to get this kind of information and periodically had the crew told about it. “Intercepted and decoded radio signals must have kept our leadership very well informed as to British positions and intentions,” remarked a survivor. Thus the crew learned, among other things, that Force H had left Gibraltar; that the British battleship damaged by us in the action of 24 May was not the
King George V
, but the
Prince of Wales
; and that the
Bismarck
was now being sought and pursued by the
King George V, Rodney, Ramillies
, and
Repulse
, plus cruisers and destroyers, eager to avenge the loss of the
Hood.