Final Voyage (10 page)

As she went down by the bow, her propellers still slowly turning as her stern lifted out of the water, the order was given to abandon ship.

Repeated torpedo strikes caused the
Scharnhorst
to list to starboard. She also settled deeper and deeper into the water. As she went down by the bow, her propellers still slowly turning as her stern lifted out of the water, the order was given to abandon ship. She sank at 7.45pm. The more distant British ships only knew of their victory when the fires that had lit up the blazing
Scharnhorst
moments before vanished. An explosion in the magazine below her forward turrets caused the bow to separate as the
Scharnhorst
sank, and her wreck landed on the seabed upside down 950ft (290m) below the surface.

Only 36 men were saved out of a crew of nearly 2,000. They would only survive a few minutes in the Arctic seas, so a couple of ships quickly moved in, scramble nets cast over the side for men to climb up. Searchlights used to find
survivors in the pitch black found plenty of men floating face down in the water. Within minutes the rescue ships stopped all rescue efforts and departed, leaving those still crying for help to a quick and inevitable death. The Royal Navy may have claimed U-boats were operating in the area, but by the time the Nazi propaganda machine had digested the story the abandonment was a callous act of revenge or psychological warfare. Of course, after sinking the
Glorious, Acasta
and
Ardent
none of the 40-odd survivors had been rescued by the
Scharnhorst
or
Gneisenau
, who had left more than 1,500 to die.

Without the
Scharnhorst
, which had been the Kriegsmarine's most powerful warship in Norwegian waters, the supply route between Britain and the Soviet Union was now more secure than it had ever been. From the Nazis' perspective, this was a bitter blow. The war in western Europe may have been at effective stalemate for years, but the loss of the
Scharnhorst
was the kind of defeat that signalled the tide turning against Germany.

As it turned out, this was one of the last major sea battles where the outcome was decided by the firepower of the ships involved.

For those allied against Hitler, victory in the Battle of the North Cape was a brilliant propaganda coup, but it revealed significant shortcomings in the way the Royal Navy had waged war at sea for centuries, not least because it had taken so many ships to win the fight against just one. As it turned out, this was one of the last major sea battles where the outcome was decided by the firepower of the ships involved. Soon artillery shells would become almost as anachronistic as cannonballs, and in future
aircraft carriers would become the core unit for waging war at sea.

How aircraft carriers became essential to winning sea battles is no better proved than by the sinking of the Japanese battleship
Yamato
in April 1945. Despite being one of only two ships in the heaviest, most powerfully armed class of battleship ever constructed in the history of war at sea, without air support she proved an even easier target for the US Navy's aircraft carriers than the
Scharnhorst
had for the Royal Navy.

She would fight until destroyed, even running herself aground so that she couldn't be sunk, and keep on firing until she had not a single shell left.

The
Yamato
was laid down in 1937. Launched in 1940 she displaced an incredible 72,800 tons at full load. She was so big (to the extent that her corridors had directions for those who got lost) that crewmen reported that being on board the 840ft (256m) warship felt no different than being on land – she seemed impervious to the pitch and roll of the sea, which certainly contributed to this general impression that she was not just another big battleship. Vessels of her size and power had actually been banned by an international treaty in 1934, so the world did not discover just how powerful the
Yamato
had been until the true extent of Japan's military might was revealed after the war. The
Yamato
had nine 18-inch guns, each of them almost 70ft (21m) long, which could fire shells up to 26 miles (42km). These constituted the most powerful guns ever installed on a warship. As it turned out
she only ever hit other ships with them on one occasion, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. As with her sister ship, the
Musashi
, the
Yamato
was so big and had such a high fuel consumption that she spent much of the war in base.

On 1st April 1945, American forces invaded Okinawa, the first step in the invasion of the Japanese mainland. Japan sent kamikaze pilots to repel the invaders, and they sent the
Yamato
on a similar one-way mission too. She would fight until destroyed, even running herself aground so that she couldn't be sunk, and keep on firing until she had not a single shell left. She never reached Okinawa, nearly 280 bomber and torpedo-bomber planes from American aircraft carriers intercepting her and other Japanese ships on the suicide mission whilst they were still in waters north of the island.

After surviving torpedoes and bombings in December 1943 and October 1944 (both times taking on over 3,000 tons of water but not sinking), the Japanese navy were confident in her ability to stay afloat under heavy attack. She stayed afloat for about six hours, but even with 150 anti-aircraft guns the
Yamato
was no match for that number of American planes. As explosions set the ship on fire her commanders flooded compartment after compartment, even killing several hundred crewmen in the starboard engine room who were given no warning.

The water rushed in at such speed that it created a rise in air pressure within the ship, which felt almost like wind blowing through the corridors.

By the time alarms sounded on the bridge, warning the commanders of fire in the forward battery magazine, they
had already lost control of their ability to flood any more compartments. Soon it was simply a matter of whether fire and explosion or flooding would sink the
Yamato
first. The water rushed in at such speed that it created a rise in air pressure within the ship, which felt almost like wind blowing through the corridors. Men trying to escape found the water rising too quickly. Those already in the water were sucked back towards the ship as she capsized, her immense 16ft (5m) propellers creating massive whirlpools.

When the magazine in the bow exploded it created a mushroom cloud so big (towering nearly 4 miles, or 6km, into the sky) that people saw it on Kyushu, 100 miles (160km) away. Of the nearly 3,000 who had joined the
Yamato
's final mission, only 269 were pulled from the cold, oil-coated waters by the crew of destroyers, several hours later. That represents the single largest loss involving a warship in history. Though five ships in the
Yamato
class had been planned, the Japanese only built three, and even as the third was constructed they realised the shift taking place in marine warfare strategy, so converted her to an aircraft carrier instead.

Of all the countries that could have been considered a naval power at some stage in their history, Japan has suffered the greatest losses from waging war at sea. An island nation but an imperial power, Japanese primacy in the western Pacific rested on ruling the waves, in much the same way as it did for Britain on the other side of the world. But such dependence on maritime supremacy provided Japan's enemies with a vulnerability. During the Second World War the United States quickly learnt the lesson the Germans had learnt after losing the
Bismarck
,
and realised submarines were the key to defeating Japan, whose attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 meant the United States could not match Japan with warships alone.

The blast tore the hull open, blowing out the sides of the ship.

One of the most successful submarine attacks in the Pacific war was by the USS
Albacore
on the Japanese aircraft carrier
Taiho
in June 1944. Aircraft carriers may have held the advantage over warships, but stealthy submarines would win the war at sea, even if they could not then win it on land. A single torpedo from the
Albacore
struck the
Taiho
and fractured her aviation fuel tanks. As a dangerous cocktail of seawater, gasoline for the ship and fuel for the aircraft mixed below decks, the crew's efforts to pump it out failed. Flammable fumes filled every deck of the ship. When the fuel ignited, the explosion was so powerful that those on the bridge saw the flight deck lurch upwards. The blast tore the hull open, blowing out the sides of the ship. Settling fast in the water, listing to port, she eventually sank by the stern, killing 1,650 of the nearly 2,200 aboard. The best defence her aircraft had been able to provide was when one of the pilots spotted another torpedo's wake and crashed his plane into it before it hit the
Taiho
.

American submarines were lethally efficient weapons, but sometimes too efficient, with indiscriminate targeting of enemy vessels. In the last year of the Second World War, as Japanese forces retreated and regrouped, American submarines tried to prevent mass troop movements between Pacific islands and killed tens of thousands crammed on to troopships. The USS
Sturgeon
scored the deadliest single strike, her torpedo attack causing the
Toyama Maru
's fuel tanks to explode. As the ship turned into an inferno, 5,400 Japanese soldiers died. Only 600 survived. The deadliest single submarine was the USS
Rasher
, which in 1944 alone killed 2,665 aboard the
Teia Maru
and 4,998 aboard the
Ryusei Maru
. However, this indiscriminate targeting – compounded by an inability to know exactly what was aboard the enemy vessels – led the
Rasher
to sink another Japanese ship on the same day it sank the
Ryusei Maru
, the
Tango Maru
. But instead of troops, this ship carried hundreds of Allied prisoners of war and thousands of Indonesian slave labourers. This was not an isolated incident, but the submarine crews would not know the number and scale of these friendly fire disasters until after the war (see
chapter six
).

The loss of the
Lancastria
and why Churchill covered it up

As retreats go, Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers from Dunkirk between 27th May and 4th June 1940, has come to be seen as a brilliant success, a heroic nose-thumbing at Hitler, rather than a humiliating defeat of a once mighty imperial power now unmatched against a country that had had little military capability less than a decade before. Amongst other good news stories, contemporary spin focussed on the efforts of leisure boaters taking their own yachts across the Channel, the so-called Little Ships that each brought a handful of Tommies home. It was important for British
morale that the public see the fall of France only as a temporary setback in the fight against Hitler, so the version of the Dunkirk evacuation that Winston Churchill's government encouraged saw almost 340,000 Allied troops rescued from France, ensuring that Britain still had an army to repel a German invasion.

But that was only half the story. Surpassing the most pessimistic expectations of the more sober figures in the British government and military, Germany had stormed across western Europe, defeating (and in some parts simply occupying, having met little in the way of organised resistance) Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and later France in little over a month. The first German units came within sight of the Channel coast at the mouth of the River Somme on 20th May, and, as more followed, they left British, French and Belgian troops trapped in an ever shrinking pocket of northern France. They also ensured that Allied personnel throughout the rest of France had no way of getting to Dunkirk when the evacuation order came on 26th May.

Some 198,000 British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, but almost as many again were still stranded on the continent. This included a number of armoured and infantry divisions, as well as other units separated from their own divisions. There were also 150,000 operational support personnel, from clerks and cooks to engineers and RAF ground staff. Operation Dynamo ended on 4th June, after the French units providing rear-guard defence surrendered to the German forces advancing on Dunkirk. On 10th June, Operation Cycle began, evacuating over 11,000 more from Le Havre. That ended on 13th June, by
which time any British people still left in France were heading to St Nazaire, south of the Brittany salient, having been told ships were awaiting them there. Many of them did not know about what had happened at Dunkirk, in the same way many in Britain did not know so many of their countrymen remained in France.

In some ways the retreat to St Nazaire was even more urgent than the retreat to Dunkirk.

Operation Ariel constituted the last major British operation on French soil until D-Day almost exactly four years later. Between 14th and 25th June, another 215,000 were evacuated from St Nazaire (and other ports along the west coast), the vast majority of them British, but sizeable numbers of Polish and French troops were also rescued. Included in the number were also plenty of civilians, including diplomatic staff and their children. In some ways the retreat to St Nazaire was even more urgent than the retreat to Dunkirk. Come the end of Operation Ariel, any British people who remained in Europe would probably be there until the end of the war.

St Nazaire was not an ideal location from which to evacuate large numbers of people. Though a major port, it was located in the estuary of the River Loire, and its waters were too shallow for some of the larger vessels that came to St Nazaire. Some had to anchor several miles away and have people brought to them by smaller boats. One of these was the liner RMS
Lancastria
, which could have gone on to be remembered for bringing up to 9,000 evacuees back to Britain. Instead she went on to suffer the worst disaster in British maritime history, which would barely be remembered at all.