The Lonely Sea (8 page)

The situation was desperate. Time was running out, and the engineers, haggard, exhausted men who had almost forgotten what sleep was, were now all but incapable of any effort at all, mental or physical: with the interminable plunging of the wildly rolling ship and the fumes of diesel oil seeping back from ruptured fuel tanks even the most experienced sailors among them were almost continually sick, many of them violently so.

It was announced that the man who succeeded in freeing the rudders would be awarded the Knight's Insignia of the Iron Cross—the highest award Germany can bestow. But there is no place for dreams of glory in the utter wretchedness of a seasick man, and even had a diver gone over the side into that black and gale-wracked sea he could have achieved nothing except his own death, and that in a matter of moments as the great ship, wallowing wickedly in the troughs, crushed the life out of him.

The engineer commander approached Captain Lindemann with a counsel of desperation—they should try to blow the rudder off with high explosive. Lindemann, who had had no sleep for six days and six nights replied with the massive indifference of one who has taken far too much and for whom nothing now remains, ‘You may do
what you like. I have finished with the
Bismarck.
' These, surely, are the most tragic words that have ever been uttered by the commander of a naval vessel, but it is impossible to blame Captain Lindemann: in his hopelessness, in his black despair and utter exhaustion, he was no longer in contact with reality.

The order was given—it may have been by Admiral Lutjens himself—to get under way, and slowly the
Bismarck
gathered speed until she was doing almost ten knots. With no steering control left, she yawed wildly from side to side, but her general course was north—towards the coast of England. This was the last thing Lutjens wanted, but there was no help for it: with the constant lifeless rolling in the great troughs, the turret crews had become so seasick that they were unable to fight their guns, and the ship itself had become a most unstable firing platform. More important still, a ship lying stopped in the water was a sitting target for any torpedo attacks that might be delivered in the darkness of the night.

And, inevitably, the torpedo attacks came. All night long the
Bismarck
was harassed by a group of British destroyers, who, with their vastly superior speed and manoeuvrability, circled it like a pack of hounds waiting to bring down and finish off a wounded stag. But the
Bismarck,
as the destroyers found, was not to be finished off so easily. Time and again, as a hound darts in to nip the stag, a
destroyer raced in and loosed off its torpedoes, but soon discovered that this was an unprofitable and highly dangerous proceeding. Somehow, somewhere, the
Bismarck'
s gun crews—and they were, after all, the pick of the German Navy—had found their last reserves of spirit and energy and drove off the British destroyers with heavy and extremely accurate radar-controlled fire from their 15-inch turrets.

During the running and intermittent battle, in the intervals between the crash of the gunfire and the momentary glaring illumination of the ship and sea around as the white and orange flames streaked from the mouths of the big barrels, a German naval officer, intent on boosting the morale of his men, kept up a commentary of the fight over the Tannoy system. ‘One British destroyer hit…One hit and on fire…Ship blowing up and sinking…'

(In point of fact, none of Captain Vian's destroyers were hit, far less sunk, during the night. It is as well to remember, however, that all the inventiveness was not on the German side. The British destroyers claimed, a claim that was backed by the official Admiralty communiqué, that the
Bismarck
had been torpedoed several times during the night: the truth is that the
Bismarck
wasn't hit even once by a torpedo.)

Early on in the night, the Fuehrer himself sent a personal message to the
Bismarck
: ‘Our thoughts are with our victorious comrades' to which he
received a reply, ‘Ship completely unmanoeuvrable. Will fight to the last shell.'

It is difficult to imagine which of the two messages had the more dismaying effect. Probably the latter. For doomed men to be addressed as ‘victorious comrades' is irony enough, but for Hitler to learn that all hope had been abandoned for the magnificent ship he had visited only a week or two previously and called the pride of the German Navy must have been a shattering blow.

As Lutjens said, the ship was completely un-manoeuvrable. The long dark night wore on, and in spite of every effort it proved impossible to bring the
Bismarck
round on a course for Brest. For her own safety she had to keep moving, and with the set of the wind and the sea, there was only one way she could move—north.

Dawn was coming up now, a bleak, cheerless dawn with driving rain clouds and a grey and stormy sea. There was no longer any hiding from the crew the course they were steering, and the despair and the fear lay heavy over the
Bismarck.
It was almost certainly to counteract this that an official message was passed round to the men at their stations—those who still fought off exhaustion and remained awake at their stations—that squadrons of Stukas had already taken off from Northern France, and that a tanker, tugs and escorting destroyers were steaming out to their aid. There was no word of truth in this. The
Luftwaffe was grounded by the same high wind and low, gale-torn rain clouds as were sweeping across the
Bismarck,
the tugs and tanker were still in Brest harbour and the destroyers never came.

There came instead the two most powerful battleships of the British Home Fleet, the
Rodney
and the
King George V,
beating up out of the west so as to have the
Bismarck
between them and the lightening sky to the east. The men of the
Bismarck
knew that there would be no escape this time, that the promised Stukas and destroyers and U-boats would never come, and that when the British battleships, bent on revenge for the sunken
Hood,
finally turned for home again they would leave an empty sea behind them. The
Bismarck
made ready to die.

Over the guns, by the great engines, in the magazines and fire-control rooms, exhausted men lay or sat by their posts, sunk in drugged uncaring sleep. On the bridge, according to the testimony of one of the few surviving officers, senior officers lay at their stations like dead men, the helmsman was stretched out by the useless wheel, of the Admiral or any member of his staff there was no sign. They had to be shaken and beaten out of the depths of their so desperately needed sleep, awakened to the cruellest, the most bitter dawn they had ever known: and, for all but a handful, it was their last awakening.

Even before they were all roused, closed up at their battle stations and ready to defend themselves, the
Rodney,
no more than four minutes after she had first been sighted, opened up with her great 16-inch guns. For the waiting men on the
Bismarck,
the spectacle of a full-scale broadside from the
Rodney,
with her three massive triple turrets all ranged together on her tremendously long fore-deck and firing simultaneously as they did later in the battle, was an impressive and terrifying sight: but no more terrifying than the express train shriek of the approaching salvo, the flat thunderclaps of sound as the shells exploded on nearby contact with the water, the waterspouts erupting two hundred feet up into the leaden sky.

But this first salvo missed. So, almost immediately afterwards, did the first from the
King George V.
And now the
Bismarck
retaliated and concluding, probably rightly, that the
Rodney
was the more dangerous opponent, directed the first salvo at her. It fell a long way short, but the
Bismarck'
s reputation for gunnery of a quite extraordinary accuracy, a reputation achieved in only four brief days, was solidly founded in fact: almost immediately she started straddling the
Rodney,
which took swift avoiding action.

But still the
Rodney
was firing from every gun that could be brought to bear, and the
King George V,
temporarily ignored by the
Bismarck,
was arrowing in head-on, her six big for'ard 15-inch guns
firing time and again, as quickly as they could be reloaded. The
Norfolk,
too, the cruiser that had doggedly followed the
Bismarck
all the way from the far-distant waters of the Denmark Strait, now joined in the fight and shortly afterwards the
Dorsetshire,
who had taken a severe hammering all night long as she had raced north through galewinds and heavy seas, appeared on the scene. Within fifteen minutes from the beginning of the action, the
Bismarck
was being subjected to heavy and sustained fire from two battleships and two cruisers.

The odds were hopeless. Even for a ship capable of high speed and rapid manoeuvre, and with a fresh and confident crew, the sheer weight of enemy shells would have proved far too much: and the
Bismarck
could now move only at a relative crawl, manoeuvre of any kind was impossible for her and her crew were exhausted, hopeless and utterly demoralized. In retrospect, over the gap of seventeen years, our sympathies tend to lie with the
Bismarck,
a sitting target lying increasingly helpless in the water, being mercilessly battered into extinction. But there was no thought of mercy at the time, only of revenge and destruction, and understandably so: only four days had elapsed since the
Hood
and fifteen hundred men had gone to their deaths—and the Stukas and U-boats might appear on the scene at any moment.

Already, within fifteen minutes of the first shots being fired, there was a marked deterioration in the
Bismarck'
s rate and accuracy of fire. Heavy shells from the two British capital ships were beginning to smash into her, and the concussive impact of the exploding missiles, the clouds of acrid smoke and the bedlam of sound mingling with the crash of their own guns had a devastating and utterly demoralizing effect on the already dazed and exhausted gun crews crouched within their turrets.

Those few officers who still clung stubbornly to the bridge of the
Bismarck
could see that the gunfire from the
King George V
was falling off and becoming increasingly spasmodic (suffering from the same turret troubles as her sister ship the
Prince of Wales,
the
King George V
had, at one time, only two guns out of her ten capable of firing) and ordered every available gun to concentrate on the
Rodney.
But it was too late.

The
Rodney,
close in now, had the range and had it accurately. The big 16-inch shells, each one 2,700 pounds of armour-piercing high explosive, were crashing into the vitals of the shuddering
Bismarck
with steadily increasing frequency. One 16-inch shell struck the fire control tower, blasting it completely over the side, and after that all semblance of concerted firing and defence ceased. Another 16-inch shell silenced both for'ard turrets at once, wrecking ‘A' turret
and blowing part of ‘B' turret back over the bridge, killing most of the officers and men left there. Shells from both battleships were exploding deep in the heart of the
Bismarck,
wrecking the engine rooms, destroying the fuel tanks and adding hundreds of tons of fuel to feed the great fires now raging in the entire mid-section of the ship, the roaring flames clearly visible through the great jagged gaps torn in the ship's side and armour-plating.

‘Nightmarish' is the only word to describe the dreadful scenes now taking place aboard that battered, holed and flaming shambles of twisted steel and broken bodies that was all that was left of the
Bismarck
and its crew.

Sixteen-inch shells from the
Rodney,
by this time at a point-blank range of only two miles, were now hitting the
Bismarck
two, four, even six at a time, and groups of fear-maddened men on the upper deck were running blindly backward and forward like crazed animals seeking escape from the twin terrors of these lethal broadsides and the red-hot deck-plates beginning to twist and buckle under their very feet: most of them chose the easy way out, a leap into the shell-torn sea and death by drowning.

In the turrets, sailors abandoned their now useless guns, mutinied and rushed for the turret doors. Some of the commanding officers of the turrets committed suicide, and others turned pistols
on their own men, only to be overwhelmed: and then, the men found that the doors were warped and jammed fast, and they went down to the floor of the Atlantic locked in the iron coffin of the turret they had served so well.

Hatches, too, jammed shut all over the
Bismarck.
Two hundred men, imprisoned thus in the canteen, were fighting madly to force their way out, when a shell crashed through the deck and exploded inside, all the concussive blast and murderous storm of flying shrapnel confined to that one narrow space. There were no survivors.

But they were the lucky ones in the manner of their dying—lucky, that is, compared to the ghastly fate of the sailors trapped in magazines. Raging fires surrounded these magazines on nearly every side, and as the metal bulkheads grew steadily hotter until they began to glow dull red, the magazine temperatures soared. That this could have only one end the few damage control men still clinging to their posts knew all too well—and they could never forget the
Hood
blown out of existence when her magazines went up. They had no option but to do what they had to do—flood the magazines and drown their comrades in the swiftly rising waters.

And just as nightmarish as the scenes aboard was the appalling spectacle of the
Bismarck
herself. Weighed down by the thousands of tons of
water rushing in through the great gaps torn in her sides, she rolled heavily, sluggishly, in the troughs between the waves, a battered, devastated wreck.