When the Dorsetshire and Maori sailed away from the scene where the Bismarck had fought her last battle, little remained as evidence of the drama that had taken place a few hours earlier. The manoeuvring warships had disappeared and the wind had swept away the cordite smoke from the guns. There was no noise of battle or alarms. Only the gently whistling wind and the splashing waves could be heard.
This was the sight that met Lieutenant Kentrat, commander of U-74, when his submarine approached to search for survivors from the Bismarck. After a while, he distantly saw a British cruiser and two destroyers, but aside from the enemy ships he did not see anything and soon the enemy warships had disappeared too. He searched all day long without any success and not until dusk was a raft with three German corporals found. It was Manthey, Herzog and Höntzsch. The three shipwrecked men were brought on board the U-74 where they received blankets and food.444 Kentrat continued to search for two more days, but he did not encounter any survivors.445
Another two men had survived on a raft of the same type as had saved Herzog and the other two. There had been more men on the raft, but one by one they lost consciousness after accidentally swallowing water polluted with oil, or were swept away by violent waves. Soon only five remained. They had seen the warships retire in the remote distance. Then they were alone. A German reconnaissance aircraft had flown over them at low altitude, made a turn and flown back in the opposite direction. The men on the raft did not know if they had been observed.
‘I drifted with five men for about 2 more hours,’ Corporal Otto Maus recalled. ‘The air and the water appeared warm to us. In my estimation the raft capsized about 17.00 hours. Two comrades and I – Lorenzen and one from the prize crew command – managed to reach the raft again, while the others, a machinist corporal and a staff headquarters’ corporal, both drowned.’446
As the darkness had arrived, Maus fell asleep briefly. When he woke up, he saw a man from one of the prize crews lying in a strange angle at the edge of the raft. He had drowned. Together with Lorenzen, Maus removed the life vest from the dead man and then let him disappear in the ocean. The raft was equipped with a signal pistol and they fired several flares, but it was all in vain. The dawn broke with slightly calmer weather, but no ship was to be seen. While the thirst and hunger grew, and the sunshine on their salt covered faces and hands made them sore, the day passed without any relief. When darkness again fell, they were convinced that no help would ever appear. But the end of their hardships was in fact near.
‘Look!’ Maus shouted and stirred up the dozing Lorenzen. ‘A steamer!’
‘My comrade woke me up with the scream,’ Lorenzen recalled. He, too, could make out the ship against the dark horizon. ‘The steamer instantly veered toward us.’447
When the German weather observation ship Sachsenwald arrived, she searched fruitlessly for more than a day, but all that was observed was a large patch of oil, wood debris, cloth and a few life belts, with dead bodies. At dusk on the second day, little hope of finding any survivors remained, but the flare fired by Maus and Lorenzen was seen from the bridge. The commander on board the Sachsenwald studied the light in his binoculars and found a raft with two men. He turned towards them and when the ship was close enough, a call was heard from the survivors: ‘Are you Germans?’
‘Yes,’ the commander replied and was rewarded with weak cheers from the raft. Maus and Lorenzen were hauled on board the Sachsenwald, where they received food and drink, whereupon they fell into deep sleep. The weather ship searched all night and well into the following day. Thereafter it had to set course for a port, as virtually all the food had been consumed.448 Maus and Lorenzen were the last survivors from the Bismarck to be found.
In London, Winston Churchill had just concluded a cabinet meeting and proceeded to the House of Commons with disappointing news. The battle at Crete developed in a very unsatisfactory way. A defeat and evacuation was only a matter of days away. When he addressed the assembly, he admitted that the intelligence from Crete spoke of a precarious situation. From Iraq and Libya too, discouraging reports had been received, although perhaps not fully as gloomy as the information from Crete. In order to alleviate the effect of this bad news, he reported optimistically on the signals from the Home Fleet. It was expected that the German battleship which had sunk the Hood might soon be destroyed. He had just finished his speech, when a secretary arrived with an urgent telegram. It was given to Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, who immediately handed it over to the Prime Minister. The telegram could not have arrived at a better moment, even if Churchill had scripted the event himself.
‘I crave your indulgence, Mr. Speaker,’ he said as he rose from the bench, ‘I have just received news that the Bismarck has been sunk’449
The House of Commons cheered and for a moment Crete, North Africa and the Middle East were forgotten. A day of defeat had been turned into a day of victory.
At King’s Cross railway station in London, Ted Briggs said farewell to Bill Dundas and Bob Tilburn and climbed on board the train to his home in St. Panras, Derby. After arriving at Scotland in the Royal Ulsterman, they had first made a report to the Admiralty, whereupon they were allowed to go home while waiting for the Admiralty’s investigation into the loss of the Hood. As long as the three comrades had been together, Briggs managed to maintain the façade of being a thickskinned veteran, deceiving both himself and the others. But now, alone on the train, his nerve-racking experience caught up with him. Why had he survived when so many had died?
His mother had been informed that he would arrive and she of course went to meet him at the station. When the sinking of the Hood was reported by the BBC on 24 May, she had become one of thousands of parents, wives and relative who waited in dread for the confirmation that their relative had died, but merely an hour later she was reached by a telegram, saying that her son was alive, one of only three survivors. When she saw him step down from the train, the lingering doubts disappeared. Without uttering a word, she embraced him and then took him to a cab, bringing them both home to Nuns Street.
As Briggs sat next to his mother in the taxi and mechanically answered questions regarding how he felt, if he was hungry, or if he knew how long he could stay at home, the mental barriers that had sustained him this far began to crumble. When they exited the cab outside their home he burst into tears and began to shake and ramble incoherently. His mother would need almost a week to get him back into his old habits again.450
But the threat from the Bismarck was gone. For the ordinary person in Britain, the news probably rarely provoked little more than a quiet sigh of relief. The loss of the Hood had raised some alarming questions: was the Royal Navy no longer capable of fulfilling its duty to protect the British Isles from enemies on the continent? Now the misgivings vanished. The Royal Navy had won.
However, the final victory did not relieve Tovey, Wake-Walker and the other top ranking officers. As they were well aware of what had taken place during the operation, they clearly knew how close it had been. The same insecurity was most likely felt within the Admiralty. A sober analysis of the past days’ events clearly showed that it was not only the actions, decisions and strength of the Royal Navy that resulted in the destruction of the Bismarck. Sheer luck also played a prominent part, as fortune favoured first the Germans, then the British.
However, susceptibility to chance was but one of the defects inherent in the idea of cruiser warfare. Since the beginning of the war, the results were meagre. Up until 31 December 1940, the Germans had sunk 4.5 million tons of merchant shipping. Submarines accounted for 57% of the sinkings, while the surface ships only contributed 12%. Air power was responsible for 13% and mines no less than 17%.451 Of these weapons, clearly the surface ships had contributed least. Results hardly improved significantly during the first half of 1941. Despite their two-month voyage, the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst only sank or captured 22 ships with a combined capacity of 115,600 tons. Altogether, the large warships only sank 188,000 tons during the first six months of 1941.452 As a comparison, German submarines and airpower sent 575,000 tons to the bottom of the ocean in a single month, April 1941. Even the German auxiliary cruisers, which were much cheaper vessels compared to the large warships, inflicted losses of 191,000 tons during the first half of 1941.453 A very dramatic improvement was needed if the German surface ships were to have a significant effect on the British war effort, but it appears wholly implausible that they could have achieved such a success. With hindsight, we know that the efforts of the German submarines, despite their much greater success, were far from sufficient to bring Britain to her knees.454 The surface ships were even less likely to achieve such a result.
Why were the cruisers so unsuccessful? Often, the German ships were more powerful than their British counterparts, in speed as well as endurance, which were crucial factors in the kind of warfare implicated by the cruiser warfare strategy. The presence of fuel supply ships in the Atlantic added to the German advantage.455 The principle of caution emphasized by Lütjens seems to have been wise, not least when considering the events during the second half of May 1941. It is difficult to see what else the Germans could have done to improve their chances. That being the case, it seems that the strategy itself was flawed.
During World War II, German submarines sank an impressive total of 14 million tons of merchant shipping. Such losses periodically limited the flow of British imports, but did not curtail them entirely. United States merchant ship more than offset the losses. Furthermore, the losses inflicted by German submarines were diluted in a very large merchant navy. At most, during a single month the Germans managed to sink 10% of the commodities imported to the British Isles.456 Even if the Germans had managed to sustain that rate for several months, it would have been insufficient to cause severe shortage. Again it must be emphasized that the submarines were responsible for the vast majority of the losses – German surface ships played a minor part in these results. Hence, it seems clear that the Germans would have benefited more from reducing the production of battleships and cruisers and using the production capacity to build submarines. In fairness, it must be admitted that the Germans had already began such a process well before the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen left Gdynia. But battleships carried more prestige than submarines and weapons that appear to have political value in peacetime may prove less useful in war. The German shift of priorities from surface ships to submarines was made after the war had began in 1939, but it would require some years before it had any significant impact.
The Germans seem to have nurtured hopes that a kind of ‘system collapse’ could be generated by their attacks on the British maritime trade but there is little evidence to support this belief.457 The notion of the enemy as beholden to a fragile system, which will fall apart if a small but well aimed disturbance n is induced, was not confined to the German Navy. One of the best known examples is the U.S. Army air force, which developed the ‘industrial web’ theory in the interwar period. The theory postulated that the enemy economy could be ruptured by well-aimed attacks on certain nodes in the system. The concept did not prove successful during World War II, but the idea of the enemy as a fragile system has not been abandoned since World War II ended.
Possibly, the notion of a brittle system, which will collapse if it receives small but well-aimed damage, is alluring as it promises great results for little cost and effort. Perhaps the military was particularly susceptible to such ideas in the interwar period, when the horrendous memories of the costly battles of attrition during World War I were still vivid. Unfortunately ‘system collapses’ have been easier to envisage than realize. The leading officers of the German Navy were certainly misled by the idea, but it also served their purpose of providing them with a role and a strategy that could justify the navy’s share of the defence budget and ensure their participation in a future war. Even though the British Navy had an overwhelming superiority in overall numbers, its many commitments would prevent it from using all its resources to engage German vessels, which according to Raeder’s hopes could use the opportunity to strike against merchant shipping. However, in a critical situation, the British would have given priority to the protection of imports, not to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean or the Far East.
The difficulty of finding convoys is one of the major reasons why the cruiser warfare strategy failed. Unless a large number of ships was available to cover vast areas of the Atlantic, it was inevitable that the convoys would escape detection. Unfortunately, the German Navy had limited shipbuilding capacity, part of which also had to be used to repair ships returning from operations. Furthermore, the numerical inferiority was the very reason the Germans settled for attacking convoys. Had the German Navy possessed considerably more ships, it could have challenged British maritime superiority directly. Operation Berlin clearly showed how difficult it could be to find convoys and without finding them frequently enough, the Germans could never sink merchant ships at a rate sufficiently high to jeopardize the British imports. In a sense, the German concept had an inherent dichotomy: if both sides’ search capabilities were low, the Germans would not sink enough merchant ships; but if both sides had good search capacity, the British would find the German raiders and eventually sink them. Thus, in order for the strategy to be effective the German ships had to radically improve their search capabilities, while the British made no progress at all. However, all trends pointed in the opposite direction.
Construction of the first German aircraft carrier, Graf Zeppelin, had been initiated in December 1936. Possession of such ships would have improved the German’s capacity to search at sea, but Grand Admiral Raeder discontinued the project in April 1940, as it was estimated that the carrier would not be operational until the end of 1941.458 The decision was probably correct. Several other German warship projects, which were also estimated to be completed too late, were discontinued. Simultaneously, the enemy improved his search capacity.
Possibly, one chance for the Germans to challenge British sea power may have existed. If the Kriegsmarine had waited until the Tirpitz was ready, and sent a combined force consisting of the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, it would have placed the Royal Navy in a very difficult position. As the Home Fleet did not possess an abundant number of battleships – the Royal Navy was committed to many parts of the world – a challenge like this would have been very troublesome for Tovey. During Operation Rheinübung he had been able to create two task forces, each with one battlecruiser and one battleship. However, considering the superior firepower and protection of the Bismarck and Tirpitz, it would have been very risky to send, for example, the Hood and Prince of Wales into battle against a German force of four capital ships. If Tovey had chosen to keep his four capital ships together, he would have narrowed the odds, but it is far from certain that such a force would have been equal to the four German ships. Considering the inferior protection of the British ships, the teething problems in the artillery of the King George V and Prince of Wales and the better fire control systems on the German ships, Tovey could very well have been at a disadvantage in such a battle. Furthermore, it would have been difficult for him to force the Germans to battle, if he kept all his capital ships together. Lütjens would have been allowed greater freedom to choose when and where to attack.
An operation comprising many German battleships was exactly what Lütjens advocated, but Admiral Raeder pushed for the curtailed Operation Rheinübung. Most likely, Raeder believed the risks were small. Consequently, according to his line of thinking, there was no need to wait for more battleships to be ready. The kind of operation preferred by Lütjens could have been conducted after Operation Rheinübung. There was some merit to Raeder’s judgment. After all, the Germans had conducted several raids in the Atlantic since the war broke out and the only loss was the Admiral Graf Spee. Considering the speed and combat power of the Bismarck, Raeder found little reason to think that the outcome would be worse this time.
Obviously the sinking of the Bismarck meant that a very valuable ship had been lost, thus reducing the resources available to conduct cruiser warfare. The loss in itself could however be attributed to bad luck and mistakes in the initial phase of the operation, rather than shortcomings inherent in the concept. But the fundamental flaws in the concept remained, although perhaps Raeder did not see them. As already emphasized, the difficulty of finding convoys was a fundamental weakness, which prevented the Germans from sinking merchant ships at a rate sufficiently high to undermine the British war effort. This problem was in itself of decisive importance, but during the spring and summer of 1941 further difficulties loomed large. One of them was the radar on the British ships. It clearly reduced the chances of German ships reaching the Atlantic undetected. Aided by the radar, the Home Fleet might well close the Denmark Strait and the waters between Iceland and the Faeroes to German warships. With the radar on board the Suffolk, the British had caught up with the German lead in radar development. Her radar was approximately as good as the German EM II, perhaps slightly better. Several notes on the effectiveness of radar can be found in the Gneisenau’s war diary for Operation Berlin. The Germans can hardly have been surprised by the British development of radar. The discussions during the planning of Operation Rheinübung clearly show that the Germans did suspect the British might soon equip their ships with radar.
Grave as this was to the German plans, another circumstance, the British capture of U-110, was equally compromising. Soon after Operation Rheinübung, the British cracked the Enigma code used by the German Navy. This enabled the Royal Navy to track down the tankers and supply ships stationed on the Atlantic by the Germans. In order to deceive the enemy into thinking that their code was still secure, the Royal Navy decided to sink or capture only six of the eight ships at sea. However, by an unfortunate coincidence, the remaining two ships were accidentally encountered on 4 June by British warships.459 Nevertheless, the Germans remained confident in the Enigma code. The Germans had been able to read British encrypted messages for years, but rarely had the weapons to take advantage of the information. The British, on the other hand, did not suffer from such limitations and the Royal Navy could use the Ultra intelligence to its advantage. With the loss of the tankers and supply ships, the Germans could not conduct operations in the Atlantic. It was a very severe blow to the German Navy, but, ironically, it was caused by perhaps the only problem they could have done something about had they known what had happened to their crypto systems.
To the German public the loss of the Bismarck was a national defeat, just as the loss of the Hood had been to the British. While the German people anxiously waited for the list of survivors to be revealed, letters and postcards from Adalbert Schneider and other men who had served on the Bismarck arrived, delayed greetings from men already dead. On 7 June the British Admiralty announced the names of those Germans who had been saved by the Dorsetshire and Maori. The Germans published the names of the five men saved by the Sachsenwald and U-74. The grim facts of the tragedy became evident. The Bismarck was gone, with almost her entire crew.
Early in June 1941, Raeder had a troublesome meeting with Hitler. The loss of the Bismarck had made the Führer dejected and irritatable. The loss of the battleship was a major blow to German prestige, according to him, and the overall operation had been unsuccessful. The Bismarck was gone and the Prinz Eugen had put in at Brest on 1 June for maintenance. Of course, Hitler wanted to investigate the reasons for the failure. Raeder began with a few remarks and reminded Hitler that the Kriegsmarine had been allotted insufficient means, forcing him to take on the Royal Navy crippled from the outset. This disadvantage had not been made good, rather it had been aggravated as further British carriers and battleships were commissioned.
Hitler already knew all this and needed no lesson in history. ‘Why did the Bismarck not return to Germany after sinking the Hood?’ he asked instead.
Raeder argued that it would have been much more dangerous to return through the Denmark Strait, under threat of air attack and lighter vessels, than continue towards the Atlantic and turn towards St. Nazaire. Evidently, this had been Lütjens’ intention and he had initially endeavoured to attract the enemy towards the planned submarine trap. He had to abandon the idea when it became evident that insufficient fuel oil was available to allow the wider route. ‘Neither was the proposal from Marinegruppe West,’ Raeder concluded, ‘that the Bismarck would remain hidden for a few days, feasible anymore.’
‘And the Prince of Wales,’ Hitler said. ‘Why did not Lütjens continue the action until this ship too had been sunk?’
To this question, the Grand Admiral replied that Lütjens’ instructions told him to avoid engagements with enemy capital ships and to focus on sinking merchant ships. Taking on the Prince of Wales would have resulted in the Bismarck suffering further damage, which could not be justified considering the main aim of the operation. The fact that it subsequently became clear that the Bismarck had been damaged did not alter the soundness of the decision.
Hitler does not seem to have pressed Raeder too hard on the issue. His understanding of naval strategy was, as he himself admitted, quite limited and his interest in such matters remained low. Within a few weeks, he was to embark on his greatest project and there was no role for battleships, submarines or torpedo aircraft in it.
The role of the German surface fleet would soon be revised, a fact that did not escape the captured Lieutenant Commander Müllenheim-Rechberg. From the third storey in the building housing the ‘Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre’ in northern London, he could see the lawns, groves and the pond in Trent Park. The impression was so restful that he could have forgotten the war raging – but when he turned his head and looked to the southeast, the barrage balloons betrayed that Europe was still at war. After leaving the Dorsetshire, whose crew had treated him well, Müllenheim-Rechberg, like the other POW’s from the Bismarck, had been transferred to the British Army. Finally he was moved to his present location, an interrogation centre known as Cockfosters.
As he spent long periods alone in his cell, Müllenheim-Rechberg had plenty of time to think about his time on board the Bismarck in port; the break-out; the battle in the Denmark Strait; and finally the terrible battle so few of his friends survived. Why had they failed? Had their voyage been of any service to the fatherland, and could the sacrifice of more than 2,000 German seamen during the operation ever be justified? Only one thing was abundantly clear to the young officer: he would have plenty of time to ruminate on these issues.
One of the British officers interrogating Müllenheim-Rechberg was Lieutenant Commander Ralph Izzard, previously correspondent for the Daily Mail in Berlin before the war broke out. Izzard first showed up in Müllenheim-Rechberg’s cell in June, at about the same time as Raeder met Hitler. Despite being enemies, Izzard and the captured German officer got on well. As Izzard did not glean much information from Müllenheim-Rechberg, their conversations became numerous and often quite long. Müllenheim-Rechberg appreciated the talks, which broke the monotony of prison life and Izzard visited Müllenheim-Rechberg on different occasions on various days, sometimes even during the nocturnal air raids conducted by the Luftwaffe. He wanted to see how the prisoner reacted to the bombing attacks by his own countrymen. Together the two men listened silently to the noise from the distant bombs and anti-aircraft weapons.
One morning when Izzard entered the cell, Müllenheim-Rechberg immediately noted that something special had happened. ‘Well, do you know,’ the Englishman asked, ‘that you’re at war with Russia now?’
Müllenheim-Rechberg felt absolutely stupefied and at first did not know how to respond. He did not for a second believe that any scruples would prevent Hitler from breaking a non-aggression pact, but the sheer magnitude of the news was horrifying. A two-front war with all its consequences? ‘No,’ he finally uttered, ‘How would I know?’
‘Yes,’ Izzard went on. ‘Today Goebbels had to get up very early again and tell the German people that the Russians are still utter swine!’