‘What do you mean with course 340 degrees?’ Tovey asked the signal officer. His forehead was wrinkled as he read the message.
The Sheffield’s report had been received not long after Coode’s disappointing signal and the Admiral was not in the mood for careless reporting. ‘I fear Larcom has joined the reciprocal club,’ he snubbed.
Tovey concluded that Larcom had misjudged the silhouette of the Bismarck in the poor weather. He thought such an experienced commander ought not to make such a mistake, but it was fairly common. Some of the other officers suggested that the estimate indeed was correct, as the Bismarck might have altered course due to the air attack. The opinions diverged, but no one could yet guess the true facts.
Soon another signal arrived, this time from one of the two Swordfish aircraft shadowing the enemy battleship, claiming that her course was northerly, which confirmed Larcom’s report. Might Coode’s report be erroneous? Or was the Bismarck about to resume her original course after the air attack, after being forced to make some extensive evasive manoeuvre? The latter alternative seemed more plausible.
Nevertheless, the two messages gave rise to new hopes and revived energy. When the humming noise was again heard from the radio room, the tension was so great that virtually everybody winced. ‘Enemy steering north-northwest,’ the report of the second Swordfish aircraft read. It was soon followed by another signal from the Sheffield, saying that the Bismarck was now on a course due north.395
Was Lütjens attempting to shake off the pursuers by a series of evasive manoeuvres before darkness fell, or was the ship indeed damaged? If the latter was true, the situation had changed dramatically.
When Coode’s Swordfish returned to the Ark Royal (all of them had survived and managed to land on the careening flight deck) the airmen delivered an optimistic but confused report on what had transpired. Maund was cautious and did not want to jump into conclusions. Everything happened very quickly during the kind of attack they had just carried out and the psychological stress was considerable. Thus, it was difficult to form a correct picture of what had actually taken place. The clouds and rainsqualls made it difficult for the airmen to observe their comrades attacking. Finally Maund felt convinced enough to report that at least one torpedo had hit. When Somerville later asked Maund whether he intended to stage another attack, in darkness, the reply was negative, but Maund added that the Bismarck had probably been hit by a second torpedo, abaft on starboard. If so, this raised the possibility that the British might catch up with the Bismarck before she reached harbour.
If Maund, Somerville and Tovey could have seen what occurred on the German side, their assurance would have been much greater. On the Bismarck, Lindemann struggled to make his ship regain the proper course. He tried all conceivable speed combinations on the three propeller shafts. On a few occasions he managed to get the ship on a proper course, but the damaged rudder caused her to turn northwards against the wind, bringing her straight towards the enemy ships.
All the men on the Bismarck, from Lütjens to the seamen in the damage-control parties, discussed what could be done to repair the damage. The rudder was controlled electrically, but there were reserve systems, manual as well as electrical. None of these systems worked and it was impossible to reach the compartments next to the rudders, as they were water-filled. Worst of all, the rough sea caused water to move violently back and forth in the compartments, making it impossible to enter them. The waves were very high, as in a full-blown storm.396
In the damage-control centre, Artificer Statz saw a team of divers return after attempting to repair the damage. One of them had almost drowned when some sharp object cut off his air hose. They all appeared downhearted.
‘It won’t be done,’ stated Commander Oels after receiving their report. ‘If we only had the type of diving equipment they use in the Uboat service.’397
Many proposals were made. One was to simply blow away the rudders with explosives. As they had jammed at an unfavourable angle, it was impossible to steer with the propellers. However, the propellers might be damaged as well if the rudders were blown off. Nevertheless, the suggestion was seriously discussed. Finally, the rough sea precluded the proposed solution, as it would be impossible for divers to attach the explosives in the harsh weather. In fact, some seamen volunteered for pure suicide missions: to fasten explosives on their bodies, swim to the rudders and blow themselves up together with the rudders. Their offer was turned down, since in even the most perfect of conditions it would have been extremely difficult to swim with the amount of explosives that would be needed. In the current weather, the most likely outcome of such an attempt would simply be that the swimmer drowned or damaged some other part of the ship.398
It was also suggested that something like an old fashioned steeringoar should be fastened to the starboard side, which would counteract the jammed rudders. This might have have succeeded, but again the rough sea prevented such work.399 Another idea was to secure a submarine at the stern and try to steer with its help. Such ideas betray a sense of desperation, which is hardly surprising considering the circumstances, and they were scarcely realistic. After the war, Captain Schulze-Hinrichs suggested that the Bismarck might have attempted to travel to France in reverse. It is unclear whether this idea would have worked, or what speed the battleship might have attained in the attempt.400
After considering the alternatives, it seems that it was not possible to save the Bismarck, at least not in the prevailing weather. Lütjens appears to have quickly accepted the fate awaiting him, the Bismarck and the crew. When Coode passed over the ship for the first time, he had already signalled Marinegruppe West: ‘Attack by carrier planes.’ This message was followed 11 minutes later by ‘Torpedo hit aft’ and then ‘Ship no longer steering’ and ‘Torpedo hit amidships’. Less than an hour after Coode’s Swordfish began the attack, Lütjens reported that it was no longer possible to control the ship, but that she would still fight to the end.
As the night rapidly approached, the Swordfish planes shadowing the Bismarck had to return to the carrier. This would not have been any complication to the Royal Navy while the Sheffield was still in a position to follow the German battleship with her radar, but unfortunately a shell splinter had knocked out the radar. If the crew on the German battleship had been able to repair the damaged rudder to such an extent that she could have continued towards France, this minor, improbable damage to the Sheffield would have been a significant setback. Again the British efforts were favoured by luck.
Hardly had the downheartedness settled within Larcom’s staff, before a lookout yelled: ‘Ships! Red one-five!’ In one moment visible at the wave crests, only to disappear beneath the waves with no more than the mastheads perceptible, Vian’s five destroyers of the 5th destroyer flotilla approached. He had arrived just as the Sheffield lost contact. A signal lamp flashed from the Cossack, requesting Larcom to provide the latest known position of the Bismarck. The destroyers then spread out, to increase the area they could search, and set course in the direction Larcom had indicated. Forty minutes later, the Polish destroyer Piorun reported that she had found the German battleship, at about the same time as the last shadowing Swordfish landed on the Ark Royal.
Vian now asked himself: would he be content to shadow the enemy, or should he attack it? He did not know the effects of the air attack and decided to try to damage the Bismarck sufficiently for her speed to be reduced so that Tovey could catch up with her at dawn. If he could accomplish this, without exposing his ships to unnecessary risks, it was worth making the attempt.
The Piorun had already engaged in an exchange of fire with the Bismarck, which could be seen against the approaching night in the east. Unfortunately the Polish destroyer and Maori, her closest sister, appeared as a clear silhouette against the setting sun in the west, allowing the Germans to open fire. Vian ordered them to fall back and manoeuvre to attack the Bismarck from the north, while the Cossack, Sikh and Zulu were to try to approach the battleship from the south. A coordinated attack would then be staged. The Piorun maintained her course and was soon so close to the battleship that her tiny guns could reach the enemy. Briefly the small Polish destroyer exchanged shots with the huge German battleship. The commander on board the Maori found the enemy salvos too close to the mark and sheered to port, in order to try to attack from the south.
While Vian struggled to get his ships into suitable positions, the true situation finally dawned upon Tovey and his staff. The crews of the Swordfish that had been following the Bismarck were able to fill in many of the gaps remaining in the accounts given by the attacking crews. This allowed Maund to present more accurate reports, confirming that several torpedoes had hit the battleship. Even more importantly, she had been observed making two complete circles, at low speed. From this information it seemed clear that the torpedoes had not only hit, but at a very vulnerable point. This information reached Tovey before midnight, and confirmed the reports he gradually received from Vian. The last air attack had rendered the Bismarck impossible to manoeuvre.
Now, Tovey faced a difficult decision. Should he attack the Bismarck in the night or wait until dawn? The Bismarck could regard every ship as hostile, allowing her to fire on them at will. However, the British risked firing upon their own ships, especially in the confusion of darkness. Also, the weather and light conditions were unfavourable. The horizon behind him was clear, while the Bismarck was more likely to be concealed by rainstorms and poor visibility.401 At dawn it would be much easier to coordinate the efforts.
On the other hand, there were risks associated with waiting. In particular, the crew on the German battleship might repair the damage. If she regained speed and manoeuvrability, while Tovey waited, the Admiralty could be expected to be very critical. Nevertheless, Tovey decided to wait. According to the plan he conceived, Force H would be positioned south of the Bismarck, to avoid getting harmed in the forthcoming battle. At the same time, he would set a north-northeasterly course with the King George V and Rodney, to ensure that the enemy would be cut off from France. At dawn, he intended to make a 180 degree turn, bringing him on a course directly towards the enemy ahead. At the same time, Wake-Walker closed in from the north; he had ordered full speed ahead when notified about the air attack. If all went according to plan, the Bismarck would be attacked from all sides simultaneously. Furthermore, from Tovey’s battleships she would appear against the gathering sunlight, making it easier for the British gunners to find the mark.
While Tovey worked to get his scattered forces into position for an attack at dawn, Vian strived to stage a coordinated attack with his five destroyers. This proved difficult in the increasing darkness. Waves 10 to 15 metres high splashed over the destroyers and tossed them violently in the heaving water. Speed had to be reduced, or else men on deck would be washed overboard. The poor visibility, which alternated between less than three hundred metres up to a few nautical miles, did not make the task any easier. The conditions did not facilitate a coordinated attack.
Another factor complicating Vian’s plans were the erratic, haphazard and unpredictable movements of the German battleship. It was difficult to interpret her manoeuvres. When first observed, she had been on a southeasterly course. During the initial battle with the Piorun, the battleship was seen sheering to port, apparently to enable all her heavy guns to be trained on the destroyer. The Piorun broke off the engagement and retired behind a curtain of smoke. The commander on board the Piorun did not know that the enemy ship was uncontrollable and her movement was an effect of the sea and Lindemann’s attempts to steer her with the propellers. When the Piorun had reached far away enough to be safe, her crew could catch a glimpse of the Bismarck, which again appeared to sail on a southeasterly course. When the Sikh sighted the Bismarck after midnight, aided by the muzzle flashes, the German ship was sailing northwest.
It was a very long night for the men on board the Bismarck as well as on the destroyers. The Piorun lost contact at midnight and did not see the battleship again, but the other destroyers had made an outflanking movement, allowing them to attack from the south. The German battleship could be made out as a faint silhouette against the last glow of the sunset in the northwest, but Vian hoped his destroyers would be invisible against the darkness to the south. He was quickly disabused of this hope when the Bismarck’s guns flashed and her shells landed so close to the Cossack that splinters tore off her radio mast. Vian quickly made a 180-degree turn. Soon the Zulu found herself the target. This time too, the first salvo straddled the destroyer, which had to turn away with three wounded seamen. The British concluded that the German guns must have been radar controlled, but this was not correct. The German optical instruments were of such quality that Schneider and Albrecht could accurately direct the fire with these, despite the poor visibility.
While the Cossack and Zulu regrouped, Commander Stokes in the Sikh assumed responsibility for shadowing the enemy and reporting on her whereabouts. He carried on for half an hour and reduced the range to less than four nautical miles, when the next salvo flashed from the Bismarck muzzles. Stokes had just been busy preparing for a torpedo salvo, when the enemy forestalled him. He had to retire and his torpedoes remained unused on his destroyer.
At this stage, Vian had been informed that the Bismarck had been damaged during the air attack. Indeed, his own observations clearly suggested that the battleship did not move in the way expected from a ship heading rapidly towards a French port. The primary reason for his attacks thus seemed to have been rendered irrelevant. He could have chosen to break off the attacks and be content with shadowing the enemy, while awaiting the arrival of Tovey’s heavy ships. But if the crew on board the Bismarck managed to repair the rudder she would be able to evade. Vian decided to continue attacking, although he abandoned the coordinated attack and instructed his destroyer commanders to attack individually, when a propitious situation occurred.
In his fire control tower, Müllenheim-Rechberg saw how the enemy destroyers appeared and disappeared in the darkness:
We did not know how many destroyers there were around us. The pitch-blackness of the night and frequent rain squalls made it impossible for us to make out silhouettes, so we couldn’t tell whether we were seeing a few destroyers over and over again or whether there was a great number of them. The only thing clear to us was that we could expect endless torpedo attacks. Everything was going to depend on extreme vigilance and the flawless functioning of our range finders.402
Although Vian’s attacks had so far not resulted in any damage to the Bismarck, they adversely affected the German activities. The damage control party still worked to repair the jammed rudder, but the muzzle flashes from turrets Cesar and Dora prevented the men from staying on the aft deck.403
Despite the abandoned ambition to launch a concerted attack, the first torpedo salvoes were fired within a short period of time. First out was the Zulu. Commander Graham had manoeuvred into a position northwest of the Bismarck, when he suddenly saw her sailing northnorthwest. He closed in on her port side and began the attack. Hardly had he set course on the battleship, before its medium artillery opened fire. Again the accuracy was disturbingly good. With a very slender margin, the destroyer avoided being hit and could fire four torpedoes at a range of about 3,000 metres. At this moment, the Bismarck made yet another of her erratic movements and all the torpedoes missed.
At the same time, Commander Armstrong on the Maori had attempted to attack from almost the same position as Graham. Armstrong fired light flares, but these only revealed an empty ocean. Then, muzzle flashes betrayed the Bismarck and Graham fired yet more flares, this time illuminating the German battleship. He promptly attacked. At 01.37 hours, about 15 minutes after Graham had conducted his attack, two torpedoes left the Maori and disappeared in the dark sea. Somewhat later, when the destroyer was already in full retreat from the shells of the battleship, the crew saw a sharp flash from the Bismarck, which they believed resulted from one of their torpedoes hitting her. In fact, it was one of the star shells fired from the Maori, which had landed on the battleship’s deck and caused a fire.
At the same time as the Maori plunged herself at the battleship’s port side, Vian attacked from starboard. He launched three of his four torpedoes and then turned back. The flash from the flare was also observed from the Cossack and again it was concluded that a hit had been scored. As the destroyer retired, Vian visited the radar operators in their cabin and made a very unpleasant discovery. As he watched the screen, a strange echo left the battleship and rapidly moved towards the Cossack.
‘What’s that?’ Vian asked.
‘Shells from the Bismarck, sir,’ one of the men told him. ‘On their way towards us.’
‘They induced some unpleasant moments,’ Vian wrote later, ‘until the shells plunged into the sea, exploding with a violent concussion and throwing up huge pillars of water which seemed to tower above us.’404
After these almost simultaneous attacks, a more tranquil period followed. Vian received an order from Tovey that star shells should be fired at regular intervals. The reason was not to enable the main British force to locate the Bismarck, but because Tovey suspected that the positions given by the destroyers might differ from his own, as it had not been possible to take any sun sightings and fix accurate positions. He wanted to avoid the risk of an unexpected encounter with the Bismarck, or of some of his ships being hit by straying torpedoes.
The Bismarck enjoyed an hour of respite before the destroyers resumed their attacks. The Sikh had reconnoitred for several hours, after losing contact with the battleships following the exchange of fire. Not until after 02.00 hours did her lookouts again observe the enemy ship between two rainsqualls. This time Stokes was more cautious and fired his torpedoes at longer range. This attack also failed. Vian made yet another attempt an hour later, which exhausted his supply of torpedoes. Except for the Piorun, which was already sailing towards Britain as her fuel oil was almost consumed, only the Maori still had any torpedoes but, she did not manage to put in any more attacks before dawn.405
Within Marinegruppe West the Bismarck had confidently been expected to reach a French port on 27 May. The news that an aeroplane with fixed undercarriage had been seen, as well as the observation that a British cruiser had assumed position astern of the Bismarck, lessened the optimistic mood. Lütjens’ report on the air attack, the torpedo hits and the inability to control the ship turned nervousness into despair. Admiral Saalwächter ordered all submarines in the Bay of Biscay to set course immediately towards the Bismarck’s latest known position. Soon after 22.00 hours he informed Lütjens, and an hour later he ordered air reconnaissance to begin at 04.30 hours, followed by bombers starting at 06.30 hours. He also ensured that the tanker Ermland could sail from La Pallice at dawn. There was little else he could do.
At about midnight, Lütjens sent another message, addressed to Hitler: ‘We will fight to the last in our faith in you, Mein Führer, and in our unshakable trust in Germany’s victory.’ Lütjens also reported to Marinegruppe West that the ship was not manoeuvrable, but he did not report any deficiencies in her armament.
The response from Marinegruppe West said that tugs had already put to sea, to assist the Bismarck, but also included messages suggesting that those on shore had little hope of the Bismarck’s survival. The first originated from Saalwächter: ‘Our wishes and thoughts are with you and your ship. We wish you success in your difficult fight.’ It was followed by a message of a similar kind from Raeder: ‘All our thoughts are with you and your ship. We wish you success in your difficult fight.’
Lütjens conveyed these messages to the crew to strengthen their morale, as well as information on the condition of the battleship. However, this information, just like his speech the day before, seems to have had the opposite effect. All the well-meant words gave the impression that it had already been accepted that the Bismarck and her crew belonged to the dead. Almost exactly coinciding with the beginning of the torpedo attack by Zulu, Maori and Cossack, two messages from Hitler reached the Bismarck. In the first message, Hitler thanked Lütjens in the name of Germany. The second message was addressed to the crew and was read over the loudspeakers as soon as the British destroyers had turned away and firing had ceased: ‘All of Germany is with you. What can be done will be done. Your devotion to duty will strengthen our nation in its struggle for its existence. Adolf Hitler.’
During the later part of the night, a number of signals were sent between the Bismarck and Marinegruppe West. They dealt with the weather and cooperation with the Luftwaffe. The final message said that Commander Adalbert Schneider had been awarded the Knights Cross for the destruction of the Hood. This message at least generated a wave of applause and cheerful cries in the ship.
Neither the crew of the Bismarck nor the men on board the British destroyers knew that the nightly cat and mouse game had been watched by an unknown observer. At the moment he emerged from the depths of the ocean to transmit a wireless message, Commander Wohlfarth on U-556 could see the flares in the clouds, while the horizon occasionally lit up with the gun flashes from the Bismarck. Wohlfarth was the submarine commander who had promised to protect the Bismarck. He had been on his way back to port when he received the general instruction to converge on the battleship’s last known position. This he did, even though he had already fired his last torpedo at the Darlington Court, and so had no means to attack enemy vessels. On the evening of 26 May, he dearly regretted that he had not followed the advice of his navigation officer to hold back that last torpedo. The Renown and Ark Royal approached at high speed from the sea spray. He quickly dived before the British lookouts saw his submarine, but well concealed beneath the surface, he had a perfect opportunity to fire. Such a shot could hardly have missed. ‘The enemy came straight towards me,’ he wrote in the war diary, ‘without escorting destroyers or zigzagging.’
What Wohlfarth saw was Somerville and Force H, soon after Coode had started for the decisive attack. When they had passed, he returned to the surface and tried to follow. He reported the position, hoping that some other submarine might take advantage of the opportunity. The British ships sailed at a speed too high for his submarine to follow and he soon lost contact. Nearly four hours later, U-556 was almost caught unawares when a destroyer came towards the submarine in the darkness. Again Wohlfarth had to submerge quickly and the destroyer – probably the Cossack, Zulu or Sikh on their way to attack the Bismarck from the south – thundered past ahead of the German submarine, without showing any sign of detecting it.
Soon Wohlfarth returned to the surface. The rough sea caused the submarine to careen violently and the rainsqualls made it difficult to see much except the revealing light from flares and gun flashes. Wohlfarth realized he would not be able to fulfil his commitment as guardian to the Bismarck. He sent repeated messages to direct other submarines to the area. ‘It felt horrible,’ he wrote in the war diary, ‘To be so close yet unable to assist.’ Finally he had to leave off, or else his fuel would not be sufficient to reach the base in France.