For the Royal Navy, the showdown with the Bismarck could hardly have come at a worse time. The ‘Senior Service’ was stretched to its limit, fighting a bitter two-front naval war in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. The ‘phoney war’ ended in the early summer of 1940 when the whirlwind German invasion of France that May was followed in June by Italy entering the war as Germany’s ally. Britain’s resources were now committed, as the peacetime navy lacked the ships and men it needed to guarantee victory in both spheres of operation.
That summer the British Mediterranean Fleet was immediately pitched into a vicious naval campaign for supremacy, and by the spring of 1941 it appeared to have gained the upper hand. Victories at Taranto and Cape Matapan deprived the Italian Supermarina of some of its most powerful warships, and its commanders became increasingly reluctant to risk the rest of their fleet in a battle they felt they couldn’t win.
Then in April, less than a month before the Bismarck slipped out to sea, everything changed. Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, and within weeks the Royal Navy was called in to evacuate Commonwealth and Greek soldiers, first from Greece and then from Crete. The Germans had moved hundreds of aircraft to the region, and warships began to be bombed and sunk in ever-increasing numbers. When Churchill suggested withdrawing the fleet, Cunningham replied; ‘it takes three years to build a ship. It takes three centuries to build a tradition’. The evacuation continued. The losses ended after the final evacuation of Crete, but the incident taxed the resources of the Royal Navy even further, as replacements from the Home Fleet had to be sent to the Mediterranean to help make up for the losses. The Royal Navy was now stretched very thinly indeed.
The battleship Bismarck, photographed shortly after she was commissioned into service. Before undertaking Operation Rheinübung, she underwent a considerable crew training and ‘working-up’ programme in the relative safety of the Baltic Sea, before being declared ready for operational duty in April 1941.
The battleship Bismarck was launched in Hamburg on St Valentine’s Day – 14 February 1939. At the time of her launch she was regarded as one of the most powerful warships in the world, as well as the most technologically advanced.
The past 12 months had also seen a dramatic change in home waters. In April 1940 the Germans invaded Norway, which gave them control of Norway’s airfields and numerous secluded anchorages. The collapse of France in May and June 1940 meant that the Germans now controlled France’s Atlantic ports, the most important of which were Brest, Cherbourg and Saint-Nazaire. The first arm of the Kriegsmarine to use them was the U-boat fleet, but ports were also perfectly suited as bases for Germany’s major surface warships. The occupation of the Channel ports also raised the possibility of a German invasion of Britain. While the Luftwaffe vied for control of the skies, German troops prepared for a cross-channel invasion, and landing barges were gathered in the French Channel ports.
Since the war began the Kriegsmarine had been waging a U-boat campaign against Britain. As early as August 1939 the Kriegsmarine’s Seekriegsleitung (operations department) ordered its U-boat forces to engage in ‘commerce warfare’ – in other words to attack British shipping. Starved of fuel for her ships and aircraft, food for her population or steel for her ships, Britain would be brought to her knees. If her maritime links overseas were severed, Britain would be unable to wage war, or defend her global possessions, In World War I, German U-boats had almost succeeded in severing Britain’s maritime arteries. The Kriegsmarine’s Commander-in-Chief Großadmiral Raeder was determined that this time Germany would succeed.
This enterprise – an operation that evolved into the Battle of the Atlantic – would be spearheaded by the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat arm. However, Raeder also saw a role for his major surface warships. When the war broke out the Kriegsmarine sent the pocket battleship Graf Spee on a rampage through the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean – a spree that lasted for ten weeks before a squadron of British cruisers caught up with her off the River Plate, damaging her enough for the German warship to flee into a neutral port. She put to sea again only to scuttle herself off Montevideo, her captain preferring to save lives rather than make his crew face a battle against overwhelming odds.
Then in January 1941 the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau broke out into the North Atlantic, where they sank 22 merchant ships, totalling some 115,000 tons. This sortie – codenamed Operation Berlin – was a complete success. The two battlecruisers passed through the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, then spent two months disrupting Allied convoys in the mid-Atlantic before returning safely to Brest in late March. The force was commanded by Admiral Lütjens, the man chosen to lead the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen on a similar sortie less than two months after his triumphal return.
Apart from the loss of the Graf Spee, these sorties had been successful, and made the Seekriegsleitung believe that further operations of this kind were a useful way to increase the pressure on the British, whose transatlantic lifeline was already under pressure from the U-boats. If such impressive results could be achieved with battlecruisers, even greater success could be expected if the far more powerful Bismarck managed to break out into the North Atlantic. Therefore, within a fortnight of Lütjens’ safe arrival in Brest, plans were being drawn up for a new operation.
On 2 April, just 11 days after Lütjens’ homecoming, Generaladmiral Otto Schniewind, Chief of Staff of the Seekriegsleitung, issued a new directive, which had just been approved by Großadmiral Raeder. It emphasized the strategic importance of these surface ship sorties into the Atlantic, and outlined what their objectives were. In effect it laid out the reasons behind the German strategy and showed what Raeder hoped to achieve. From this, it was clear that the Bismarck, which was conducting her final sea trials in the Baltic Sea, would spearhead the next sortie.
This aggressive use of his major surface ships was typical of Raeder. During World War I the Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine had been Chief of Staff to Admiral Hipper, who commanded the German battlecruisers at the battle of Jutland (1916). After Jutland the German Hochseeflotte (High Seas Fleet) spent the rest of the war on the defensive and its ships rarely left port. Raeder was determined to use his capital ships more aggressively than his predecessors.
The elegant battlecruiser HMS Hood, photographed at anchor in Scapa Flow. She was built during World War I, but inter-war parsimony meant that she was never fully modernized, and she lacked the armoured protection of more modern major warships.
Adolf Hitler, posing for photographers during his inspection of the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in Gotenhafen on 1 May 1941. He never grasped the importance of seapower, and had reservations about the value of capital ships.
In April, Admiral Lütjens was called to Berlin to discuss the possibility of another sortie with Raeder and Schniewind. After Raeder gave his approval, Schniewind and Lütjens planned this new operation, which was given the code name of Operation Rheinübung (Rhine Exercise). When plans were first drafted Schniewind and Lütjens expected to have a powerful Seekampfgruppe at their disposal – the battleship Bismarck, the two battlecruisers, Scharnnhorst and Gneisenau, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. German destroyers lacked the fuel capacity and endurance to operate in the North Atlantic. German aircraft also lacked the range to provide cover. Only the U-boat fleet was in a position to provide the Seekampfgruppe with support – acting as scouts, and helping to track enemy convoys. Apart from them, these large and powerful German surface ships would be left to their own devices.
The trouble was, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau were still in Brest on the French Atlantic coast, while the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen were half a continent away, in the Baltic Sea. The original plan was for the two groups to rendezvous in mid-Atlantic, after the German ships had successfully evaded the waiting British warships. Obviously this operation was an extremely risky venture. Not only did it place all of Germany’s capital ships in danger, but they would venture into hostile waters, beyond the reach of any help if anything went wrong.
While the British Home Fleet was stretched thin, it still had enough battleships to crush either of the two Seekampfgruppen if they could bring them to battle. Of course, if the two German Seekampfgruppen managed to join forces, the whole situation would be very different. They would then have the firepower to take on the British Home Fleet, and they had the speed to dictate whether they would fight, or evade contact, only to fall on some unprotected convoy instead. While Schniewind and Lütjens realized that any attempt to wrest control of the Atlantic Ocean from the Royal Navy was pure fantasy, they knew they had a chance of inflicting a humiliating defeat on the British, and of disrupting or even halting Britain’s vital transatlantic convoys. This would be the biggest, most ambitious German naval operation of the war.
While Raeder encouraged the aggressive use of his major ships, he realized that if any of his warships were damaged in mid-Atlantic, then their chances of reaching a friendly port were extremely limited. Consequently, Lütjens – the man chosen to lead the operation – was ordered to preserve his ships as best he could, engaging enemy warships only when an encounter was unavoidable. His priority was to destroy enemy convoys, not to lock horns with Royal Naval battleships. When he approved the operation, Raeder added another cautionary note, ‘It would be a mistake to risk a heavy engagement for limited and perhaps uncertain results’.
It was a strategy of limited risk – one that left Lütjens in the difficult position of having to decide whether to avoid a fight, or to press home an advantage against the enemy if events presented him with an opportunity. In the end, this is exactly the situation he found himself in on 24 May. There his options were simply to fight the enemy, or to slink back to a home port having failed in his mission. For an aggressive commander like Lütjens there was simply no question what he should do.
Then, on 6 April 1941, the whole situation changed. While they lay docked in Brest the German battlecruisers were the target of a major bombing raid by the Royal Air Force. A Beaufort torpedo bomber managed to fly through the curtain of flak, and, although the aircraft was hit, her crew managed to drop their torpedo before the plane crashed. The torpedo struck the Gneisenau, causing moderate damage. Four nights later the RAF struck again, and this time five bombs struck the battlecruiser. The result of these two raids was that the Gneisenau was put out of action, and needed to be dry-docked and repaired, a process that could take several months.
The Scharnhorst was also undergoing a refit that was expected to last for up to two months. While this could be cut short, her chances of successfully breaking out into the Atlantic on her own were significantly less than if she could operate in consort with her sister ship. It was decided to continue with the refit, and hope that the Gneisenau could be repaired as quickly as possible.
That left the Baltic Seekampfgruppe – Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. The original plan called for the two ships to commence Operation Rheinübung on 28 April. However, the Prinz Eugen was slightly damaged by a magnetic mine, dropped by a British aircraft, and so the sortie was postponed for almost four weeks while repairs were carried out. Therefore, Admiral Lütjens set a new starting date in late May, to take advantage of a new moon and the consequent reduction in visibility this entailed. The dark nights made it easier to slip past through the cordon of British ships. Actually, Lütjens had wanted to delay the operation even further, which would allow him to add the Bismarck’s sister ship Tirpitz to his Seekampfgruppe. That May the Tirpitz was conducting sea trials and would be ready for active service by the end of June. That would have placed an extremely powerful force at his disposal. Unfortunately for Lütjens, Raeder refused to countenance any further delay. Lütjens would simply have to make the most of the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. The scene was now set for one of the deadliest and most tragic naval operations of World War II.