Lütjens had absolutely no knowledge about Holland’s presence until the British squadron was so close that battle was imminent. The first indication of the enemy was received at 05.25 hours, only five minutes before the British lookouts sighted the German ships, when the hydrophones on the Prinz Eugen picked up propeller noise on the port side. Twelve minutes later a masthead was sighted, believed to be part of a British cruiser, and a few minutes later another masthead was seen, close to the first. The two ships seemed to travel at about the same speed as the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen and while Lütjens’ ships held a 220 degrees course, the enemy ships were estimated to travel at 240 degrees. Were these newcomers cruisers or perhaps heavier ships?
On board the Hood the lookouts strained their eyes to make out details of the German ships. More and more of their masts and superstructures became visible as the range gradually decreased. However, unlike Lütjens, the British commanders did not have any doubts about the identity of the ships they approached. Holland had originally intended to advance towards the German ships on their port bow, where he might remain unobserved until the last moment, but the confusion of the previous night meant that he closed on her port aft.
Furthermore, instead of being able to fire with all 18 of his heavy guns against only the four heavy guns on Bismarck’s bow, he could now only use the ten bow guns of the Hood and Prince of Wales, while the Bismarck would be able to fire with all her eight guns. He had to adjust to the altered situation and his first priority was to close the range as quickly as possible, to reduce the German advantages of better deck armour and accuracy at longer range.
As soon as the German squadron was sighted, Holland had ordered a change of course, from 240 degrees to 280 degrees and his ships now steamed directly towards the enemy ships. The British ships presented as small a silhouette as possible, so that they were a difficult target. When the range had been reduced sufficiently, Holland would turn his ships to allow all heavy guns to fire. At that point, the British ships would present larger targets, but on the other hand, the disadvantage of the Hood’s weak deck armour would be greatly reduced at the shorter range. Lütjens initially tried to avoid battle and changed course from 220 to 265 degrees.
At this stage, mistakes were made on both sides. As Bismarck and Prinz Eugen had changed positions, after the breakdown of the flagship’s radar, Holland believed that the first ship in the German squadron was the most dangerous enemy. On board the Prince of Wales, a correct identification of the German ships had been made, but Holland continued into the battle aiming at the Prinz Eugen.
For their part, the Germans were struggling to identify the enemy ships, whose steep angle of approach made their silhouettes difficult to recognise. In the fire control centre of the Prinz Eugen, Commander Jasper was of the opinion that the two enemy ships were cruisers. Lieutenant Commander Schmalenbach, the second artillery officer, was more pessimistic. He studied the huge surge from the bow of the ships and said that one of them was a modern battleship and the other a battlecruiser.
‘Nonsense!’ Jasper seemed certain. ‘It’s either a cruiser or a destroyer.’
‘I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne,’ Schmalenbach offered, ‘that it’s the Hood.’
‘Taken!’ replied Jasper, thinking he was sure to win this bet. ‘Load with high explosive shell and impact fuses!’272
The officers on board the Bismarck were also unsure about the identity of the ships. Schneider believed they were cruisers and issued orders accordingly. Commander Albrecht, who was in the fore fire direction turret, protested over the telephone and said they were battleships or battlecruisers.
The moment when the heavy guns would open fire approached quickly. Members of Holland’s staff watched the German ships in their binoculars. They felt neither enthusiasm nor despair, because they were not certain whether the advantage lay with the British squadron or the German. On paper, the British were superior in firepower, because the Prinz Eugen was a much lighter vessel, but the circumstances of the British approach reduced their advantages. As Holland’s ships were on a bearing towards the wind, spray from their bows spattered the lenses of the range finders at the fore turrets, just the situation Holland had probably intended to place Lütjens in. All fire had to be directed from the inferior range finder at the main director. It was an aggravating circumstance, especially worrisome as the enemy could be expected to fire very accurately. The known problems with the Prince of Wales’s guns were also cause for uncertainty. The civilian technicians from Vickers-Armstrong were nearby to attend to any technical problems that might occur during battle.
The course and formation of their approach was a further disadvantage for the British ships, since Holland’s push to gain on the enemy as quickly as possible meant they were bunched closer together when viewed through German target sights. Thus it would be easier for the Germans to shift target, without wasting much time on finding the range and direction. The battle promised to be uncomfortably even, much more so than Holland had initially believed.
Ted Briggs, who had remained on the bridge, was firmly focussed on his own tasks. He had been at Oran the year before. That time the battle had been more of a slaughter than anything else. Now the Hood faced the kind of task she had been designed for. Briggs was fully confident in the battlecruiser, even more so than the knowledgeable officers around him on the bridge. ‘My emotions were a mixture of expectation, wild excitement and fear,’ he recalled. ‘I don’t believe there was anybody on board who did not consider our mighty Hood to be too much for the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to handle.’
The time was 05.53 hours and the Hood made 28 knots.273 The seaman down at the admiral’s bridge reported that the range at which Holland had intended to initiate the battle had been reached. The admiral looked in his binoculars at the German ships one more time and then said: ‘Execute!’
‘Open fire,’ commanded Captain Kerr.
A second later the voice of the first artillery officer was heard: ‘Fire!’
The fore guns of the Hood woke with a tremendous thunder, the wind swept a huge cloud of black cordite smoke over the bridge and four shells, each weighing more than 800 kilograms, began the 23,000 metre-long journey towards the intended target.
All German doubts disappeared as the Hood’s guns fired, almost immediately followed by the main guns of the Prince of Wales. The huge muzzle flashes and the long firing range were signs clear enough. ‘Blast!’ exclaimed Jasper, on board the Prinz Eugen, realizing his mistake. ‘Those guns are not mounted on any cruiser. They are battleships.’
Schmalenbach, cursed silently. He had just won a bottle of champagne. Whether he would ever be able to drink it or not was a completely different question.
‘Request permission to open fire,’ crackled Schneider’s voice in the loudspeaker on the bridge of the Bismarck, but Lütjens hesitated and the Bismarck’s guns remained silent. The seconds ticked by in what seemed an eternity. All was silent, except for the rushing when the bow split the waves and the wind that whistled and whined in the masts and bracing-wires. ‘As the shells passed over our heads,’ remembered the engine-man Josef Statz, who was stationed in the damage-control centre and heard the howling shells through an air intake, ‘They literally whipped the noise through my body. A noise that can not be described.’
Pillars of water thrown up by the shells landing around the Prinz Eugen made it clear that the Hood’s fire was not far off the mark. Soon the shells from the Prince of Wales followed, also falling near the Bismarck. As the fountains of water fell, the crack of the explosions reached the ears of the German seamen. ‘The enemy has opened fire.’ Schneider’s voice was again heard from the loudspeaker, this time much more impatiently. ‘Their fire is accurate. Request permission to open fire.’
At this moment, the thunder from the firing British ships caught up with the shells and passed over the German ships. On the horizon, new muzzle flashes from the British guns could be seen. Lütjens still hesitated. His orders were to avoid all contact with major enemy ships. Now he suddenly found himself in a battle with two British battleships or battlecruisers. Should he fight or flee?
‘It is the Hood!’ Albrecht shouted through the loudspeaker. ‘It is the Hood!’
Holland had now turned 20 degrees to port, to allow the aft turrets to fire too, and the Germans could more easily make out the silhouettes of the British ships. Funnels and superstructures could be distinguished and any remaining uncertainty was dispelled. The Germans no longer hesitated; it was the Hood. Soon the other battleship had been studied well enough to determine her identity. The Germans believed her to be the King George V, the virtually identical sister ship of Prince of Wales. As the British shells fell around his ships, Lütjens struggled with his decision. His ships were faster than the Prince of Wales, but it would be more difficult to outpace the Hood. If he fled, only four heavy guns of the Bismarck would be able to fire, while the enemy would be able to use ten, at least until the Prince of Wales was out of range. Flight was not particularly tempting. But was the alternative better? Did Lütjens dare to fight against the two most powerful ships of the Royal Navy?
‘I will not let my ship be shot away beneath my butt,’ muttered Captain Lindemann, who wanted to engage the enemy immediately.
The fore guns of the Hood flashed out their sixth salvo and suddenly Lütjens made his decision. ‘Open fire,’ he said to Lindemann and subsequently ordered a change of course, from 265 degrees to 200.
On board the Hood, Corporal Tilburn watched as orange flashes left the Bismarck’s fore guns. His own gun was on the port side, but he could still see the dark silhouette of the German battleship, as a huge black cloud of smoke was swept away from it by the wind. The battle between the largest British and German warships was now being fought on both sides. Müllenheim-Rechberg, who had been ordered to watch the British cruisers while Schneider directed all the guns from the main fire control centre, monitored how the orders were issued over the headset. The first salvo was short. The second was fired as a 400-metre bracket and was classified as ‘over’ and ‘on target.’
‘Straddling!’ Schneider yelled. ‘Full salvos good rapid!’
There was no longer any need to wait for the fall of shot to adjust the fire.274 The turrets could fire as soon as the breechblocks had been closed behind the propelling charges. The flagship as well as the cruiser fired at the Hood and soon the battlecruiser was engulfed by white fountains from the shells striking the water unpleasantly close to her.
‘I remember watching with a mixture of dread and fascination how the guns of the Bismarck spitted out four glowing stars,’ Ted Briggs wrote, ‘and realized they were shells aimed at us.’
He heard how someone from the spotting-top shouted: ‘We’re shooting at the wrong ship. The Bismarck is to the right not to the left!’
Holland did not allow himself to be excited by this news. ‘Shift the fire to the target on the right,’ he said with a calm voice.275 But due to the long order chain between commander and gun crews, and the fact that the ship was soon hit, the order was not executed in time. On board the Prince of Wales, the misunderstanding had already been corrected and she was firing at the Bismarck. The sixth salvo covered her and it was judged that the enemy battleship received at least one hit. However, the first significant damage was incurred by the Hood.
‘The ship shuddered,’ Briggs recalled, ‘and Commander Gregson, the torpedo officer, ran out on the starboard wing to investigate. He returned and reported a fire at the base of the mainmast.’
On the shelter deck Corporal Tilburn and a few other gunners had just been ordered to extinguish the fire, when some of the ammunition began to explode and the gunners had to take shelter by throwing themselves to the deck. Almost immediately afterwards, the Hood was hit again, this time by a shell from the Prinz Eugen which struck the fore-top without exploding. The shockwaves from the hit threw many seamen off the mast and onto the deck below. Some of them were dead before they hit the surface. Tilburn, who was already lying down, felt a heavy blow on his leg and when he turned to see what had happened, he found to his horror that parts of a body had struck him.
Another body fell on the open deck outside the compass platform. Commander Kerr told midshipman Bill Dundas to check who it was. Dundas glanced through the window, grew pale and shook his head. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said. ‘It is a lieutenant, but I can’t see who it is. He has no hands and…he has no face.’
As the ships exchanged fire, a British Sunderland flying boat approached. It had started from Iceland and passed right over the Suffolk, when the commander of the aircraft, captain R. J. Vaughn, discovered the muzzle flashes from the battle below. ‘As we closed in,’ he later reported, ‘we saw two columns of two ships, each going on a parallel course separated by approximately 20 kilometres.’
Vaughn saw that the leading ship in the left column was on fire, but it still fought back with its fore as well as aft guns. He still did not know that the burning ship was the Hood; in fact, he did not know which column was German and which was British. He slowly turned his big sea plane to take a closer look at the column on the right.276