Battleship Bismarck (41 page)

*
Wondering why on 27 May the
U-556
, which had been at sea for almost four weeks and was therefore presumably in a precarious fuel situation, was assigned to pick up the War Diary, in 1978 I wrote to ask Wohlfarth. He replied: “The U-boat operational command had only a general idea of my fuel situation from a report I sent when I was off Greenland that I was returning because of a shortage of fuel and did not know that, after I had been en route home for a day, I spent half a day operating at high speed against a convoy in a northwesterly direction, which used up my last reserves.

“Admiral Dönitz selected me for the pick-up because I had given running contact reports throughout the night. The
U-74
, to which I gave the mission of maintaining contact around 0600 that morning, would have automatically assumed reponsibility for carrying out the order. But I don’t think the order was radioed until around 1000, so that Kentrat could not have performed the mission with the
U-74
, either.

“I was submerged from 0600 to 1200 and did not receive the radio signal until 1200, at which time radio signals were regularly repeated.”

*
Sponsorship, an informal, merely personal relationship between the two ships, based on the friendship between Lindemann and Wohlfarth

*
Certificate of Sponsorship

†
Wohlfarth was, in fact, awarded the Knight’s Cross, a decoration similar to the U.S. Medal of Honor, on 15 May 1941.

31    A Last Visit to the Bridge

The clock was crawling towards 0800. It had been bright daylight for a long time. I could not understand why there was still nothing to be seen of the enemy battleships. Hadn’t they had time to catch up with us during the night? Where were they?

At the moment there was no specific order from the ship’s command that I had to carry out and nothing important demanded my presence in the after fire-control station, so I decided to circulate a little and started with the wardroom. As I went in, for the first time I became strongly aware that we were listing to port. It was strange how much more pronounced the effect was in this closed room than elsewhere. A handful of officers, the senior of whom was Korvettenkapitän (Ing) Wilhelm Freytag, were sitting round a table. The names of the others escape me. On the opposite side of the room was a large tureen, its dippers hanging in a sweet gruel that sloshed back and forth with the rolling of the ship. The silence at the table was broken from time to time by a laconic, hopeless remark. How could it have been otherwise? After all, we were by ourselves—why continue to play games? We all knew what was to come. Finally, someone said, “Today my wife will become a widow, but she doesn’t know it.” It was depressing. Too depressing to stay there.

Next I went to the bridge, which struck me as pretty deserted. That was an illusion, because there were men stretched out in the corners. Lindemann was standing in the forward conning tower. He was wearing
an open life jacket. I had to look twice to believe it.
*
His steward, Arthur Meier, was just handing him his breakfast and, while he ate it, he seemed strangely detached from his surroundings. He saw me coming, but he did not return my salute, which I held as I looked at him intently in the hope that he would say something. He did not say a word. He did not even glance at me. I was greatly disturbed and puzzled. After all, I had been his personal adjutant and the situation we were in seemed to me unusual enough to merit some remark. I would have given a great deal for a word from him, one that would have told me how he felt about what had happened. But there was only silence, and I had to try to interpret it for myself.

That was not the Lindemann we all knew. I thought back. In private conversations in the past year he told me how much he had always wanted to have command of a great battleship, and how happy he was to be appointed commanding officer of the
Bismarck.
He did say, however, that command of a flagship was not exactly what he had hoped for. Having an admiral embarked could, at critical moments, lead to differences that did not arise in a “brown” ship.
†
Naturally, the personalities involved would have a lot to do with that. Early in 1941 a classmate asked him, “How goes it with Lütjens?” His terse reply was, “Not easy.” His only consolation, Lindemann also told me, was that if his ship, the flagship of the Fleet Commander, were ever to be put in unnecessary danger, the blame would be on the admiral and not on him. These words came back to me, loud and clear, as I watched him standing there: Was that the way he felt about what had happened? Was his demeanor intended to show that he accepted none of the responsibility for the situation into which his ship had been led? When command decisions were called for in the course of Exercise Rhine, wouldn’t at least some of those he made have been different from those made by Lütjens, and wouldn’t he have chosen differently from among the alternatives available? After the B-Dienst center’s report about the alerting of the enemy on 21 May, for example, or when the
Suffolk
and the
Norfolk
were first
sighted? And what decision would he have made on the question of continuing the action against the
Prince of Wales
on the morning of 24 May? Mustn’t my yearning to know his thoughts have been apparent to him, wouldn’t it unlock his lips, wouldn’t he say, “Müllenheim, if you live through this, tell them in Berlin how I would have conducted this operation”? Then his words would have come, terse and precise, would have engraved themselves in my brain until the day I reported in Berlin. So many “would’s.” . . . If just one question had been decided differently early in the game, the subsequent course of the operation could have been different in so many ways. There would have been no guarantee against defeats and losses, but the
Bismarck
might not have suffered such a lingering death.

The personalities of the two officers certainly played a role in what took place. Lütjens was deeply impressed with what he took to be the superiority of British radar and his mood varied between optimism and despondency. Lindemann judged matters more realistically and resisted the depression of the Fleet Commander until finally, in military submission, he capitulated.

Junack’s impression of Lindemann was much like mine. Towards morning, he later said, “full power” orders to the engines gradually stopped coming and the atmosphere in the ship became somewhat calmer. Lehmann called him to the engine-control station to take over the watch for a little while. Just then the order came from the bridge, “All engines stop.” When some time passed and no other order came, Junack began to fear that, after the strains of the past hours, the turbines might be warped by heat expansion. He therefore picked up the telephone and asked for the captain. Having reported his concern to Lindemann, he requested an order for “Ahead slow,” and was greeted with the reply, “Ach, do as you like.” That was not the Lindemann Junack knew.

Only four hours earlier Lindemann was a completely different person. Around 0400 he was standing silently beside Schneider in a corner of the bridge. Then he moved away, but a moment later returned, beaming with delight, and went over to Schneider. A radio signal announcing that Schneider had been awarded the Knight’s Cross had just arrived, and Lindemann offered congratulations to his first gunnery officer. Cool and collected as ever—nothing about him betrayed his awesome worries. But, when I saw him at about eight o’clock, he had been on the bridge of his helpless ship for eleven hours straight. The rudder hit, the destroyer attacks—it was all too much.

Was this really, as it was to all appearances, the way Lindemann felt? In these tragic moments was he inwardly preoccupied, too preoccupied to break his silence, with reviewing his life and the fate by which his boyhood dream of commanding a ship had been fulfilled for only nine action-packed days, nine short days which had been overshadowed by depressing differences with his superior? The answer to that question was lost when he died two hours later.

Before I left to continue my tour of the ship, I threw a last glance at Lindemann and at Meier, who was still standing in front of him. The good Arthur Meier, who managed a pub in Hanover. When I was serving as Lindemann’s adjutant, I saw him every day as he looked after the needs of his captain and brought him his Three Castles cigarettes. Arthur Meier was always ready for a little chat. He could imagine much nicer things than war and being in the navy, but, as he said resignedly, one had to serve somewhere, and being in the
Bismarck
was quite all right with him. Such a big ship and such heavy armor! It would be hard for anything to happen to him there. How often he said that. And now his last dawn had broken.

From the bridge I went down the small ladder to the charthouse. The atmosphere in there was ghostly. A lamp lit up the lonely chart on which no more courses would be plotted. The rest of the room was dark; apparently no one was there. Our position when we received the rudder hit the previous evening was marked on the chart. I could see where our course towards St. Nazaire ended. From there on, a serpentine line showed our swerving course to the northwest, into the wind. Where the line stopped must be where we were at the moment. Navigationally, everything was up to date. Was there really no one in there? Then, in a corner I saw two men stretched out on the deck. Well, they had nothing better to do. I quickly left the room.

As I passed the heavy flak guns on my way back to my station, I suddenly saw Lütjens. I had not seen him since Exercise Rhine began on 19 May. And now, in this situation! What would he say to me? For he would surely say something! Perhaps, in view of our long acquaintance, “Well, Müllenheim, now we’re going down together, too,” or something of the sort. Accompanied by his Second Staff Officer, Fregattenkapitän Paul Ascher, he came straight towards me, obviously on his way to the admiral’s bridge. There was not much room to pass, so I stood aside and saluted. Lütjens looked at me, briefly, attentively, and returned my salute. But not a word came from him, either. He gave no sign of acknowledgment that we were in an extraordinary predicament—although we almost brushed together as he passed.
Disappointment, indeed, astonishment, at so much speechlessness and the certainty that I would never see Lütjens and Ascher again made me turn around and look after them as long as I could.

Günther Lütjens, Fleet Commander and my commanding officer in the
Karlsruhe
during her cruise to North and South America from 1934 to 1935. What memories he brought back!

As a Leutnant zur See in the
Karlsruhe
I was the range-finding officer and a divisional section officer. Lütjens attended divisional instruction more often than any other commanding officer I ever served with and paid closer attention. Having been chief of the Office of Naval Personnel in the Defense Ministry from 1931 to 1934, he took special interest in how his junior officers performed in the training of their men and wanted to see for himself.

Other images came before me. The tall, slim figure and the dignified bearing of the
Karlsruhe’s
commanding officer when he was representing his country on ceremonial occasions in foreign ports. He was not the kind of superior whom we junior officers would seek out for ourselves. He was too reserved for that; he seemed almost melancholy. Yet we were conscious of the integrity and reliability that he exuded.

And now as Fleet Commander? I had no firsthand knowledge. I had never served directly under him. But we in the officer corps were aware that Raeder had a very high degree of confidence in him.

And Ascher—one of those affected by Hitler’s imbecilic Aryan Paragraph,
*
who in accordance with the exceptions it made was, as a veteran of the First World War, allowed to remain in the navy. In December 1939 he had been first gunnery officer in the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
and later told his friend Puttkamer of her battle with
the British cruisers
Ajax, Achilles
, and
Exeter
off the River Plate. “I never got to do any proper shooting,” was how he put it, “because every time I had just range and attained bearings on one cruiser, another showed up, and that meant, ‘Change target to the other!’ The rate of fire of my 28-centimeter guns really wasn’t that great, so it always took a while to get the new range and bearings. I wasted all my ammunition without real chances.”

Lütjens and Ascher had long since disappeared out of sight. I looked at the clock. It was past 0830. Where were the Britons? They should have been here at daybreak at the latest. I still could not understand their delay. Hardly had I formulated that thought than the alarm bells began to ring shrilly. It seemed as though they would never stop.