Battleship Bismarck (47 page)

Statz was now completely alone in the command center; the electric light was burning as though nothing had happened. Nervousness gripped him. Should he, would he, go aft, as Oels had indicated? He tried it and stepped through the bulkhead out of the center, but he didn’t get much farther. Pitch-black darkness and thick smoke made it impossible for him to see anything and soon he was standing in knee-deep water on the upper platform deck of the heavily listing ship. He stopped near the flood valves for the 15-centimeter munitions chambers. To think that barely thirty minutes earlier he and Sagner had opened them. The chambers had shown external temperatures of 80 degrees centigrade, and Sagner ordered for them all to be flooded. Statz objected, “But there are still people in there!” Yet after the chamber bulkheads could not be opened, Sagner stood firm: “For Führer, Folk, and Fatherland, it’s got to be, otherwise we’ll all go sky-high.” My God, flashed through his head, are we really going to go sky-high now? Better get away from here, anyway, back to the familiar control center.

Once again Statz was alone in his still well-lit, accustomed surroundings, which he should have left long ago hut in this almost
incredible fashion could not. While he was considering what to do, the damage control telephone shrilled in the silence. Who can still be calling now, heavens, still now, after such an inferno? thought Statz. He picked up the receiver and heard my question from the after fire-control station: “Who has and where is the command of the ship? Are there new orders in effect?”

With Oels’s last words spinning around in his head that barely ten minutes remained for the crew to save themselves—how many of them had already elapsed?—and thoroughly perplexed as he was, Statz pulled himself together and replied quickly and tersely: “First Officer and Damage Control Officer have left the control center together with the compartment personnel, I must follow.” And from my call he realized: someone’s still alive up there, there’s still hope, but now I’ve got to get out of here fast!

Hardly had he hung up the receiver than suddenly two men entered the compartment, Maschinenobergefreiter Heinz Moritz and Erich Seifert—his messmate “Fietje.” Two oldtimers from the building course who knew every nook and cranny in the ship, they had found their way from aft to the connecting shaft to the forward conning tower. But as Fietje—once so full of good advice—stood there barefoot, wearing only an undershirt, he had nothing at all to say and only stared at Statz without showing any sort of reaction. Turning to Moritz, Statz asked, “Should we try to go up seven decks through the cable shaft or communications tube and then four more below from there to the upper deck?” He had only a hazy recollection of that route. By way of answer, Fietje stepped smartly into the shaft, Moritz followed, and Statz—”I, the procrastinator”—came last.

Inside the narrow communications tube, the ascent was a true ordeal for the three men. The iron rungs were welded on the starboard side, but for some time the
Bismarck
had had a steadily increasing list to port, so that the men, hanging onto the rungs on the opposite side and repeatedly snagged by cable housings, had to expend three times the usual amount of energy to clamber up. This difficult climb, the hellish circumstances, and the worry constricting his throat as to how all of this would end completely confused Statz. Every time he glanced up past the men above him and saw light, he asked himself, “Is that the sky or is that water?” The higher he went—with the continuous battle noise becoming even more ear-splitting, the light ever brighter just where the forward conning tower should have cast everything in darkness—it became all the more clear to him that “something must have happened to the conning tower.” And, in fact,
on climbing out of the shaft, Statz found himself in the open, with apparently nothing left standing above the platform there.

Another direct hit struck the conning tower, demolishing its remains and spewing scraps of metal overboard. Now only the outline of the conning tower could very faintly be discerned in the short segments of upright armor plate on the deck, that was all. Its destruction had meant death for the many officers massed at their action stations there; they lay in their blue uniforms. Statz recognized Jahreis and Sagner, who had come from below shortly before, saw them not far from the mouth of the shaft, both dead, and thought, “Honor to their memories.”

The last direct hit had also wounded Moritz, Seifert, and Statz, the latter with a twenty-centimeter-long gash in his left shoulder. Luckily, he was wearing leather clothing; the other two were not. Amid the glowing shell splinters he could only roll out of the shaft, and as he did so heard the familiar, Rhenish voice of his friend Oberleutnant Cardinal: “Well, Slim, did they get you?” My God, he thought, someone is still alive up here, too.

Then they were standing beside one another, Statz and Cardinal, just the two of them, for no one else was on his feet anywhere within their field of vision. It would have been impossible for the situation to have corresponded more completely to the battle problem at sea off Gotenhafen a month earlier. “Half bad with my wound,” he told Cardinal, “but we must get below as quickly as we can.” Then he saw Moritz lying terribly wounded on the deck with his whole chest torn open, and Statz and Cardinal pulled him gently behind the armored bridge bulwark, the only part of the ship that was still intact here above. How he could help his comrade, Statz was too excited to have any idea, and simply stroked his face, as one would a baby’s. But Moritz smiled at him gratefully, gasped “Say hello to Cologne for me,” and died.

The destruction round about was frightful. Everything up to the bridge bulwarks had been erased. Stumps indicated the columns on which nautical apparatus had once rested; the big binoculars in the middle of the ship on the bridge, remarkably enough, undamaged; on both sides, close to the wings of the bridge, the remains of antiaircraft guns identifiable only by the seats for the men who had directed them.

Cardinal and Statz now sought shelter behind the bulwark, but had to leap constantly from side to side, for shells continued to hit,
mainly on the tower mast and below it. The heavy “trunks” could be seen clearly with the naked eye as they rushed through the air. After a leap to the starboard side Statz was surprised to glimpse another living being there. He was sitting on the bridge deck, immobilized by serious leg wounds, an officer with four stripes on his sleeve, a Fregattenkapitän. Bracing himself against the deck with his left hand, he sat completely upright—and around him only the dead! He was observing the bombardment with professional interest. What a fine, neatly styled haircut he had, thought Statz; what beautiful, lustrous white hair.

Then the hits had Cardinal and Statz on the run again, and Statz fervently hoped that the lieutenant would take the initiative and tell him the best way to get down from here. Yet he began to feel that it was he himself who had to lead now; Cardinal had changed. His previous question to Statz, “Well, Slim, did they get you?” were the last words he would ever speak; after them he kept silent—he, for Statz always “the officer,” “example, expert, soldier, a man with whom one could move mountains.” Statz no longer recognized him. From their position they had a completely unobstructed view of the flak control centers on both sides aft, standing like fingers in the sky, completely untouched, as though nothing had happened. Nearer, fires were swirling up to the more elevated admiral’s bridge, the smoke coiling itself into dense swaths; the bridge itself appeared undamaged, the windscreen glass intact, but no one could be seen there.

Statz said, “I’m not going below to the starboard.” Cardinal merely nodded. It really looked horribly high from up here; on the starboard side, the upper deck was already towering far above the sea. Several voices from below bawled “Gas!” and then a direct hit beneath the bridge silenced them. On with the gas mask, Statz told himself, and pulled it on, but immediately felt suffocated; in his excitement he had not unscrewed the microphone cover, so off with the mask, and by then the gas had blown away. Now he and Cardinal peered forward again, towards the main turrets, whose terrible condition brought tears to Cardinal’s eyes. Then they saw a British cruiser approaching with guns blazing and the bridge deck again reverberated with impacts. But the little cruiser shells weren’t so bad, not nearly so bad as the battleships’ 40.6 and 35.6ers, which shattered everything beyond recognition wherever they hit. The Fregattenkapitän must have fallen victim to a direct hit, for the place where he had been sitting was no more.

Looking to port, Statz saw a rope ladder made fast forward of the
flak control center and told Cardinal, “That’s our chance!” Then suddenly, the firing ceased—what a blessing—and it became possible to walk upright again, diagonally across the bridge deck, where the conning tower had once stood, up to the bulwark. Statz helped Cardinal over; the latter climbed on the rope ladder and immediately fell like a stone—blissfully unhurt—to the lower bridge deck, for the belaying knots of the ladder had burned through. The fire was most intense here and somehow Statz managed to get down to the lower bridge deck, too. There, an absolute wasteland, nothing recognizable. Now, down again to the
Aufbaudeck
(equivalent to USN 01 level), dangle part of the way, jump the rest. And another leap to the middle port 15-centimeter turret, whose roof was intact, if in other respects it no longer resembled a gun turret. From there they saw some comrades who had sought shelter behind turret Dora, the first living men in an apparently endless time! They heard the national anthem sung and a triple
“Sieg heil
” and saw men leaping into the sea. Not a soul came from anywhere else in the forepart of the ship. Besides Cardinal and Statz, no one escaped the hell there.

Some men were trapped below. The hatches leading to the main deck (particularly on the port side) were either jammed shut or there was heavy wreckage lying on top of them—again more so on the port side where wreckage from the forward command tower including louvers to the boilers had been ripped away by direct shell hits. In Compartment XV near the forward mess on the battery deck, two hundred men were imprisoned behind jammed hatches. They were all killed by shell fire. Flames cut off the whole forward part of the ship. One of the starboard 15-centimeter turrets had been hit and its access hatch was jammed. No amount of effort from inside or out could pry it open. The turret became a coffin for its crew. Farther aft, two men who had managed to reach the main deck were blinded by the dense smoke and fell through holes in this deck back into the fire below. There were young sailors, petty officers, even men of the prize crews, experienced seamen, who decided it would be pointless to try to climb out.

With the silencing of our guns, one after the other, the doctors’ and corpsmen’s hour had come—and in what dimensions! Hundreds of wounded lay where they had been hit, in the foretop, on the bridge, in the control stations, at the guns, on the upper deck, and on the battery and main decks. Stretcher-bearers, including civilians, carried them from the upper deck amid a hail of shells, but the only thing that could be done for such numbers was relieve their pain by
giving them morphine. None of those who really knew what feats were accomplished in the dressing stations and at the collection points lived to tell the story.

The task of the doctors and corpsmen became overwhelming as one action station after another was knocked out and the men who were no longer able to take part in the fight crowded the battle dressing stations. As the minutes passed and ever great numbers of wounded requiring ever more attention pressed into the stations, the possibility that our medical people would have a chance to save themselves became slimmer and slimmer. The armor of the battery and main decks within the citadel offered them no protection as they labored amid a stream of heavy hits, every casualty providing them with a preview of what lay in store for them. What they suffered was the epitome of what observers in two British ships preferred not to imagine: “What that ship was like inside did not bear thinking of; her guns smashed, the ship full of fire, her people hurt; and surely all men are much the same when hurt,” “Pray God I may never know what those shells did as they exploded inside the hull.”
*

Referring to the forty-five minutes of relentless cannonading that followed the silencing of our guns, Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton said, “I can’t say I enjoyed this part of the business much, but didn’t see what else I could do.”
†
Captain W. R. Patterson of the
King George V
would have stopped firing earlier had he been able to see what was happening on the
Bismarck
, but the wall of splashes from near misses obscured his view of her port side.
‡

The doctors and the corpsmen endured the horror and helped the wounded until they themselves fell victim to a hit. When and where they died, I do not know. Only the direct hit in the action dressing station aft has been recorded. Marineoberstabsarzt
§
Hans-Günther Busch, Marinestabsarzt Hans-Joachim Krüger, Marinestabsarzt Arvid Thiele, Marineassistenarzt der Reserve
**
Rolf Hinrichsen, and their corpsmen and assistants are here remembered with special respect.

This is as far as I can reconstruct the
Bismarck’s
last battle from my own experiences and from the testimony of others. The concentration
of hits on the forward section of the ship in the opening stage of the battle explains why the
Bismarck’s
command system was crippled so early. Only afterwards did I understand why once the battle had started, not one order or message from the bridge reached me in my after fire-control station. To us participants, each phase of the action seemed much, much longer than it actually was. By 0902, fifteen minutes after the first salvo was fired, the foretop, the forward fire-control station, and turrets Anton and Bruno had been disabled, which meant we had lost more than 50 percent of our firepower. No one who was in those forward action stations survived, and my report, from the perspective of a position aft, can only be a fragment.