I Sank The Bismarck (27 page)

I cannot imagine what it must have been like on
Bismarck
that night, and I thank God that I never had a similar experience.
A torpedo had hit the ship in the after section on the
port side. Some floor plates in the engine room buckled
upwards and water started pouring in through the port shaft
tunnel. Damage-control parties rushed to the port side to discover
that the hole in the side was so big that all the steering
rooms had been flooded and the crews had abandoned them.
The water in them was rhythmically splashing up and down
with the movement of the ship. Seawater was leaking through
to the main deck and watertight seals on cable tubes had been
damaged, causing water to flood into the upper and lower
passageways on the port side of the hull just aft of the rear
main gun turret. But these leaks were of minor importance
compared to the damage that had been caused to the steering
control rooms. The rudders had been jammed at 12 degrees to
port, so the ship could not be steered. The room that contained
the electric rudder motors and gearing was open to the
sea, under the waterline, and when an emergency access hatch
was opened, water shot out of it as the stern rose and sank in
the rough seas. It was clearly impossible to send men into the
room to decouple the motors or carry out any sort of repairs.

Ratings from one of the port gun turrets were ordered to try
to seal the hole with a collision mat, but the sea was too
rough. The captain tried to overcome the influence of the
jammed rudders by varying the speed and direction of
the propellers, but
Bismarck
was too long and unwieldy for
this to be effective: the strong wind always turned the ship's
head back. As the impossibility of repairing the damage
dawned on her crew, they also started to absorb the fact that
they could no longer hope to avoid another battle with the
Royal Navy, this time with the odds very much against them.

They were heading inexorably back over the course that
they had just covered, straight towards Admiral Tovey and his
flagship,
King George V,
with her eight 14in guns, and
Rodney,
a battleship that, when she was launched in the
1920s, was considered, along with her sister ship
Nelson,
to
be the most powerful on the high seas.
Rodney
was armed
with nine 16in guns, all mounted on the huge foredeck that
stretched out from her armoured bridge. In addition, other
warships were steaming to join Tovey's forces. There was little
point in
Bismarck
rushing to her fate, so now her speed was
reduced to 6 or 7 knots. After midnight, work on repairing
the rudder was abandoned and the ship sailed towards the
superior forces that were intent on destroying her.

During the night the four
destroyers that had been directed
to
Bismarck
by
Sheffield
– the three Tribal class,
Cossack,
Zulu
and
Sikh,
and the Polish
Piorun
– attempted to attack
Bismarck
with torpedoes. They were frustrated by the heavy
seas and the still accurate fire of
Bismarck
's guns. Yet time
after time they steamed closer, only to be forced to retreat. At
around 0200 they launched star shells to illuminate the target,
to indicate the position of the enemy to Admiral Tovey. These
and the continual attacks, however, kept
Bismarck
's crew
awake throughout the night, increasing their fatigue and no
doubt their despair. They were on board one of the most
powerful and modern
battleships in the world, yet despite all
the technology, the highly advanced gun control, the massive
armour plating and the powerful turbines, all had come to
nothing. They had set out just a few days ago, the pride of the
German navy, with Hitler's blessing. Now, because of a slow,
single-engined biplane launched from an aircraft carrier, they
were almost impotent.

At 0600 on 27 May, as dawn broke, the destroyers realized
that they were dangerously close to
Bismarck
and retreated
into the cover of a rain squall. The men in
Bismarck
now
waited for our battleships to arrive, but it was not until 0843
that the alarm claxons went off.
King George V
and
Rodney
had arrived, and at 0847
Rodney
fired a salvo of her massive
guns, to be followed a minute later by
King George V.
Within
a few minutes,
Rodney
had scored a hit on the forward part
of
Bismarck.
Captain Lindemann could neither choose his
course nor evade the fire from the British ships, while Tovey
could manoeuvre both his battleships and the cruiser
Dorsetshire,
which had joined him, and close the range until
even shells from
Rodney
's secondary armament were exploding
on the superstructure of the helpless German warship. The
casualties and deaths started to mount. Soon
Norfolk,
whose
captain had trailed
Bismarck
from the Greenland Strait
only to lose her again the next day, arrived on the scene and
started to add her 8in guns to the fusillade that was ripping
into the stricken ship.

At 0931
Bismarck
's main guns fired their last shells. She
started to list to port and fires had broken out along her
length, but still the salvoes from
Rodney
and the other ships
continued.

I had a disturbed night on the
Ark,
still vividly alert after
the fears of the day and anticipating another run into
Bismarck
's concentrated anti-aircraft fire. I did not get much
sleep and was not particularly hungry at breakfast. The
weather was obviously still bad and I did not know what was
worse – attempting another hazardous take-off and landing
or the prospect of another flight into a storm of tracer. We had
been extremely lucky the day before, but surely we could not
make another attack and expect to escape without any
casualties.

I was scheduled for take-off at 0700 but was up much
earlier. Two reconnaissance Swordfish had taken off at 0430,
apparently with a great deal of difficulty. The wind had
increased again, the night was as black as the inside of a
flying boot and spray was washing over the length of
the flying deck. The wind was almost a constant 50 knots and
when the Swordfish took off into it they rose into the air as if
they were on a lift. They were brought forward abreast of the
island. If they had taken off from their normal position at
the end of the flight deck they would have been airborne so
quickly that there was the chance that in the dark they would
collide with the bridge or the funnel as the carrier pitched and
rolled.

Admiral Tovey's battleships, the destroyers and the cruiser
were now known to be in the vicinity, but visibility was so
poor that identification was difficult. I hoped that it would be
sufficiently improved by the time we arrived over the target.
We were told at our briefing about the attacks on
Bismarck
during the night, but that our big warships had not yet made
contact with her. Clearly thanks to the damage that we had
inflicted yesterday, the battleship would be in no condition to
carry out any fast evasive manoeuvres when we attacked, but
this might allow her gunnery directors more time to range
their fire. That was a very worrying prospect. Lt Commander
Coode's plan was that we would attack in groups of three,
from whatever direction seemed the most propitious. There
were only twelve Swordfish available this morning to mount
the attack and they were brought up on deck, but the wind
was so strong it was impossible to open the wings and start
up the engines. The captain decided that the attack would
have to be delayed, so the aircraft were taken down again in
the lifts, their wings still folded.

Now it was a question of waiting, and I dozed in a chair
until daylight had fully arrived. But the wind and the seas did
not abate, so we were told that the Swordfish would be
ranged and their engines started while the
Ark
was stern on to
the wind, then she would turn her flight deck into the wind
for take-off. The Swordfish were lined up and I sat in the
cockpit, the engine thundering away in front of me, while I
waited for the ship to make its manoeuvre. The Swordfish
were temporarily lashed to the deck and more men were
brought up from the other squadrons to hold the aircraft.
After a particularly steep wave, the captain ordered the helm
down. I watched as the flight deck turned to starboard across
the fetch of the waves and felt three or four heavy rolls. I saw
one Swordfish skitter sideways like a spooked horse, but fortunately
it didn't collide with anything, or anyone. I have
never seen or heard of a similar manoeuvre carried out by a
carrier, before or since. Looking back, the prospects of a
disaster were quite high, but the captain pulled it off, and I
think it took some marvellous seamanship.

Then the
Ark
slowed, it was my turn to advance the
throttle and I was airborne in next to no time. We formed up
over
Ark Royal
and, flying at 300 feet, set off. We could see
that the battle was now taking place; flashes, and plumes of
water and thick black smoke were becoming visible. It was
our understanding that Admiral Tovey knew about our
planned attack, but with shells flying through the air and the
gouts of water from exploding near misses reaching 150 feet
into the air, we could not make a sensible torpedo run on to
the target. As it was,
Bismarck
was a shocking sight – black
and smoking, with crewmen lying or milling around on her
decks. We could see pieces of twisted wreckage, a huge gun
turret, now all silent, the guns awry, one barrel of a 15in gun
pointed almost vertically. There were great holes in her superstructure
and a fire blazing amidships where a seaplane crane
hung over the rails, blasted from its mounting. She had almost
come to a stop, and was rising and falling in the sea like a
giant blackened dead thing.

We flew close to
King George V
and the squadron CO
signalled by an Aldis lamp to ask for orders. I wanted the
shelling to be stopped so that we could go in and launch our
torpedoes, to finish the job that we had started the day before –
I believe that that is what we all wanted.
Bismarck
was ours if
she was anybody's. We circled, waiting for a reply, then Dusty
shouted at me, 'Bugger me, Jock, they're shooting at us!'

The flashes of the guns from the 4.5in turrets on the side of
King George V,
which we had all observed, resulted in some
shellbursts not on
Bismarck
but in the air around us. God
knows what those halfwits were thinking. Dusty said,
'They're flashing a signal telling us to keep away.'

There was no more fire against us and we circled over
Bismarck,
smouldering and smoking, listing to port, pitching
in the heavy seas, oil covering the surface of the water around
her. I saw that both our battleships had finally stopped firing
and were now steaming on a course north, away from
Bismarck.
Tovey's flagship,
King George V,
had finally
reached the limit of her available fuel and had to make
urgently for port.
Rodney
went with her. In retrospect, I
believe it was a strange thing to do while
Bismarck
was still
afloat. A heavy cruiser – I now know it was
Dorsetshire
–
manoeuvred close to
Bismarck
and fired a couple of
torpedoes at her starboard side, then circled and fired another
at her port beam.

Our CO led us down to see, I suspect, if we could finally
sink this giant beast. We got to a range of about 1,000 yards,
flying low with what was now the hulk of
Bismarck
in front
of us, and then I saw a sight that has remained etched in my
mind ever since. This enormous vessel, over 800 feet long, her
gun turrets smashed, her bridge and upper works like a jagged
ruin, slowly, frighteningly toppled over, smashing down into
the sea, and her great hull was revealed, the plates and bilge
keels glistening dark red as the oily sea covered her. Still leaping
from her were men, sailors, and there were hundreds more
in the sea, some desperately struggling for their lives, some
already inert, tossed by the waves as they floated face down.
I saw these hundreds of desperate human beings in the water
and I was immediately pierced by the knowledge that they
had no hope, and that as I flew just 100 feet above them there
was nothing that I could do to save even a single one.

We flew back to the
Ark,
and no word was exchanged
between me or Dusty or Hayman.

We went into the circuit and waited for the signal to land
on. The flight deck was heaving and pitching even more than
the previous day, but we all got in without any more aircraft
being damaged. As I had just completed my landing and was
unbuckling my harness the air-raid rattler went off. A Heinkel
bomber appeared out of the clouds and a stick of bombs
crashed into the sea about 500 yards from us. We got the
Swordfish down in very quick order, because several Heinkel
and long-range four-engined Focke Wulf 'Condor' bombers
had been seen in the area. We were pretty defenceless.
Sheffield
's radar had been damaged by the near miss from
Bismarck
and it would have taken some time to get the
Fulmar fighters ranged, if it had been possible at all in
such weather. It was a real demonstration, if one were needed,
of how close
Bismarck
was to the protection of the Luftwaffe
and how critical our attack had been. We quickly got the
Swordfish lashed down in the hangar, once more the carrier
turned beam on to the sea and we headed south-east back to
Gibraltar.

By the afternoon we had found better weather and sunshine
broke through on to the flight deck for the first time in days.
The next day, the 28th, I was once again flying my Swordfish
over the Atlantic, this time on a routine anti-submarine
patrol. It was back to normal for me, if that was possible.