The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [207]
Nonetheless, what happened next could not have been avoided whichever range-finders were used, whatever Norfolk and Suffolk had done, and however many guns Hood had managed to deploy. Only a thorough re-armouring of Hood’s upper deck in the inter-war years could have saved her. For a shell from Bismarck, in Kennedy’s phrase,
came plunging down like a rocket, hit the old ship fair and square between centre and stern, sliced its way through steel and wood, pierced the deck that should have been strengthened but never was, penetrated the ship’s vitals deep below the water-line, exploded, touched off the 4″ magazine which in turn touched off the after 15″ magazine. Before the eyes of the horrified British and incredulous Germans a huge column of flame leapt up from Hood’s centre.42
No one who witnessed that flame ever forgot it, as Hood exploded and then sank, with only three survivors out of a crew of over 1,400. Captain John Leach of the Prince of Wales continued firing at Bismarck, hitting her twice but only on the seventh salvo, yet once he was himself hit by German 5- and 8-inch shells, he was forced to escape under smoke cover. In an engagement lasting only twenty minutes, the Germans had sunk the maritime pride of the British Empire. Thereafter, their luck changed. One of the two 14-inch shells that the Prince of Wales landed on Bismarck had ruptured her fuel tanks, and she started leaking oil, which, because she had also sailed under-oiled and had not been resupplied when she might have been, meant that her skipper had to try to reach her supply ships and, he hoped, lead his antagonists into a wolf-pack.43 Meanwhile, Prinz Eugen broke off westwards, covered by an attack by Bismarck on Norfolk and Suffolk.
At sunset on 24 May, nine Fairey Swordfish torpedo-bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious braved Bismarck’s sixty-eight anti-aircraft guns and scored a hit with their 18-inch torpedoes. With the battleship still leaking oil steadily, it changed course for Brest. Then Enigma made its vital contribution, when a senior Luftwaffe officer in Athens using the Lufwaffe Enigma code enquired of his son serving in Bismarck where he was headed, and received the reply ‘Brest.’ Had it not been for Bismarck breaking radio silence in a code that Bletchley had cracked, she might have reached the port. She almost escaped anyway after her bearings were incorrectly plotted, but at 10.30 on 26 May she was spotted by a US Navy patrol pilot called Leonard Smith in a Consolidated Catalina flying-boat, part of RAF Coastal Command (and seven months before America entered the war).44
Force H, based in Gibraltar, and including the battle cruiser HMS Renown and the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, attacked that afternoon. Planes from Ark Royal landed two hits with contact-detonating torpedoes, one of them entering the starboard steering compartment, exploding, and thrusting the starboard rudder against the central propeller. This jammed Bismarck’s steering and wrecked her chances of getting to Brest. Nevertheless, German aircraft and submarines operating out of French Atlantic ports might still have saved her, had it not been for the attacks made at 08.47 the following day, Tuesday, 27 May, by the battleships King George V and Rodney, firing at 16,000 yards, with Norfolk taking part too, and the cruiser Dorsetshire finished Bismarck off with torpedoes. At 10.36 she sank, killing all but 110 of her crew. It seems that she was also scuttled, evidence for which was discovered when she was found on the seabed 300 miles off south-west Ireland in 1989.
Hitler learnt the lesson of the vulnerability of great surface raiders to air attack. On 19 June 1943 he told Martin Bormann that although he had once ‘planned to construct the most powerful squadron of battleships in the world’ – which he was going to name after the great sixteenth-century poet–adventurers Ulrich von Hutten and Götz von Berlichingen