Читать книгу Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship - Patrick Bishop - Страница 16

Chapter 5 ‘A wonderful chance’

In the first two months of 1942, nine Allied convoys crossed the Arctic Ocean, going to and from Russia. The voyage tested the seamanship and character of the crews to the limit. In the freezing heart of winter, the sea lapping the polar ice cap was the grimmest place on earth. They travelled in darkness, relieved only by a few hours of wan twilight in the middle of the day, through fog-smothered and snow-swept waters seething with submerged growlers and jagged floes that could rip through the hull of a merchantman like a tin opener. Sudden storms whipped placid seas into cliffs of angry water, seventy feet high, tearing the formation apart and scattering ships far and wide. Strange effects compounded the literal truth that they were sailing to the end of the world. Cold air settling on warmer water created wraiths of mist that made it seem that the sea was boiling. On a clear night the Northern Lights flickered mystically in the black, star-dusted canopy above, filling those who looked up at it with awe and apprehension.¹

The narrowness of the waters east of Bear Island meant that ships could not turn into the waves and meet heavy seas bow-on as they did in the Atlantic. Instead, they were rocked from side to side, rolling as much as 30 degrees to port and starboard. Temperatures could plunge to sixty below, sheathing the upper deck with ice which the crew attacked with axes and steam hoses to prevent the added weight tipping the ship over. Able Seaman Bill Smith, who made the voyage aboard the anti-submarine sloop HMS Magpie, recalled how eyebrows, eyelashes and nasal hair froze solid, ‘like needles’. Men came off watch with their faces covered in blood from rubbing their noses without thinking.²

These were not waters into which sailors ventured happily and the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, and the Home Fleet commander, Sir John Tovey, had opposed the Arctic convoys. They argued instead that supplies to the Soviet Union should be sent via the Persian Gulf which, though longer and slower, would cost fewer ships and lives.

Churchill overruled them. His motives were political as well as practical. As the summer of 1941 faded, German armies prepared to close on Moscow, and Stalin needed swift and solid proof that Britain and America were genuine allies. The first convoy sailed on 21 August 1941, opening a pipeline which, with some significant interruptions, gushed tanks, aircraft and stores to the – largely ungrateful – Soviets until the last days of the war

There were frequent differences between Churchill and some of the admirals. On the whole his relations with Pound were good – a result, said critics, of the First Sea Lord’s emollient and accommodating attitude – and his opposition to the convoys was soon forgotten. The clash with Tovey, though, merely deepened Churchill’s irritation with the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet. Even as an adolescent at Dartmouth, ‘Jack’ Tovey had been marked for the top and he had a stubborn faith in himself and his judgement. He was also deeply religious and if he had to choose between the will of his Maker and the dictates of the Prime Minister, God was always going to trump Churchill.

Tovey’s robust integrity had caused problems with Pound in the aftermath of the Bismarck episode. With the Prime Minister’s encouragement, the First Sea Lord had proposed disciplining senior officers for their alleged timidity during the battle of the Denmark Strait. He started moves to bring court-martial proceedings against the commander of the Prince of Wales, Captain John Leach, and Rear Admiral William Wake-Walker, who took command of the force after Admiral Holland went down in the Hood. It was Wake-Walker who ordered Prince of Wales to break off the action against Bismarck on the grounds that she was bound to come off worse. Tovey agreed with the decision. He let it be known that if proceedings were brought he would resign and appoint himself ‘prisoner’s friend’ at the service of the accused and Pound was forced to drop proceedings.

Churchill interpreted this behaviour as evidence of cautiousness rather than moral fortitude. Even though he had – after some initial dithering – put Tovey in charge of the Home Fleet, he came to regard him as lacking in offensive spirit, the military quality that he prized above all others. By the beginning of 1942 he was complaining to Pound about Tovey’s ‘negative, unenterprising and narrow-minded’ attitude.³ Tovey, for his part, had a professional’s contempt for Churchill’s continuous interventions, which often seemed wildly at odds with reality. After an early meeting he wrote to his friend Vice Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham expressing surprise at the Prime Minister’s ‘astonishing statements about naval warfare both at home and abroad’.⁴ Cunningham shared his view, confiding in a letter to an aunt that Churchill was ‘a bad strategist but doesn’t know it and nobody has the courage to stand up to him’.⁵

Churchill had served two stints as First Lord of the Admiralty, first in 1914–15 and then from September 1939 until arriving at Downing Street in May 1940. Like Hitler, he had an extraordinary capacity for absorbing facts and few matters, great or small, escaped his attention. There was no phony war at sea and the first weeks of the naval conflict were fraught with drama and incident. Churchill nonetheless found time on 21 November 1939, a day when the new cruiser HMS Belfast had had her back broken by a German mine in the home waters of the Firth of Forth, to dictate a memo on the question of whether having a cockney accent should be an impediment to rising up the service (it should not). His experience, and his image of himself as a born warrior, persuaded him that his judgement was at least equal to that of the admirals. There were enough occasions when he was demonstrably right and they were wrong to confirm him in this view.

Churchill’s intention to keep the Arctic convoys sailing at regular intervals throughout the year presented Tovey with a continuing logistical migraine. He did not have the ships to provide a strong escorting force as well as mounting an effective guard on the northern passages to the Atlantic. The lengthening hours of daylight made the voyage increasingly hazardous. In the first few months of 1942, the convoys had got off lightly. Only one destroyer and one merchantman had been sunk and several convoys had passed undetected. The concealing robe of darkness, though, was slipping away. The same was not true of the polar ice cap, which would take several more months to retreat, forcing the convoys to pass through narrow waters patrolled by U-boats and within easy reach of the newly arrived Luftwaffe reinforcements on land. Tovey voiced his fears but Churchill was adamant that the risks were acceptable and the convoys would sail.

Tovey could take some comfort in the thought that a great opportunity had arisen from the new situation. Tirpitz was now in Norway, with the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer to support her. Another convoy was due to set to sail at the beginning of March. Surely they would venture out to attack it, providing him with the chance to bring off an extraordinary coup? He had already sent Bismarck to the bottom. Now he was well placed to sink her sister. It was a thrilling prospect, and he was eager to seize it. So, too, was Churchill. The Prime Minister’s fascination with Tirpitz was unabated. On 27 January he had taken the trouble to complain to Alexander about the waste of time involved in signalmen, cipher staff and typists referring to the ship as ‘Admiral von Tirpitz’ in every signal when ‘surely TIRPITZ is good enough for the beast’.⁶ Now there was a chance that the beast might come out to fight. On 3 March he once again emphasized Tirpitz’s great significance in the strategic picture, telling the War Cabinet Defence Committee that she was ‘the most important vessel in the naval situation today’, and that ‘her elimination would profoundly affect the course of the war’.⁷

By then, a new convoy, PQ.12, was already at sea. It had set sail on 1 March, with seventeen vessels from Iceland, bound for Murmansk. At the same time, Convoy QP.8, made up of fifteen ships which had made the journey earlier, set off from Murmansk for home. The lurking presence of the Trondheim squadron meant that, for the first time, the movement in both directions would be covered by the main body of the Home Fleet. PQ.12 would have a close escort comprising a cruiser, Kenya, two destroyers, Oribi and Offa, and several Norwegian whaling vessels converted to hunt submarines. A larger force consisting of the battleship Duke of York, the battle cruiser Renown and six destroyers, commanded by Vice Admiral Alban Curteis, had put to sea from Iceland on 3 March to cover from a distance. Tovey, on board King George V, followed two days later from Scapa Flow, together with the cruiser Berwick and six destroyers. To provide air cover and to attack any German shipping, the 29,500-ton carrier HMS Victorious sailed with them. She was fast, modern and could accommodate thirty-six aircraft. It was a lavish use of the Home Fleet’s stretched resources. Altogether, the thirty-two merchantmen in the outward and inward convoys would be protected by forty-two escorts.

Around noon on 5 March 1942 one of the Luftwaffe long-range Focke-Wulf Condors that scoured the northern sea routes for enemy convoys saw ships sailing eastwards near Jan Mayen Island, a barren lump of rock in the middle of the Norwegian Sea about 350 nautical miles north-east of Iceland. The news was passed on to the headquarters of Naval Group North, at Kiel. Its commander, Generaladmiral Rolf Carls, eagerly signalled the naval staff in Berlin for permission to attack.

Räder, with Hitler’s blessing, gave permission. Here, at last, was a chance for Tirpitz to do something to justify its existence. The Kriegsmarine’s big ships soaked up enormous amounts of materiel and manpower that were much needed elsewhere yet had made little difference so far to the war at sea. It was becoming clear from the battle in the Atlantic that submarines and aeroplanes were far more effective than surface vessels at the business of ravaging allied seaborne commerce. By now U-boats had destroyed more than five and a half million tons of Allied merchant shipping. Enemy aircraft had accounted for nearly two million tons. Warship raiders, however, had managed only to sink seventy-three ships totalling a paltry 363,146 tons. Submarines and aircraft had also proved a deadlier enemy to the Royal Navy’s big ships than their opposite numbers in the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet. Of the eight battleships, battle cruisers and aircraft carriers lost to enemy action in the war to date, only two had been sunk by gunfire.

Räder, though, was cautious. The prize of destroying the convoy was not worth the risk of the loss of his battleship. Vizeadmiral Ciliax, in command of the operation, was told that he was to avoid confronting enemy forces unless it was absolutely necessary to complete the destruction of PQ.12. Even then, he was to engage only if he was confident that he was facing an equal or inferior force.

There was plenty of time for an interception and nothing to be gained by an early appearance that would give the enemy time to react. It was not until the following morning that Tirpitz slipped her moorings at Faettenfjord and set off westwards into Trondheimsfjord. Darting ahead were the slim shapes of the destroyers Hermann Schoemann, Friedrich Ihn and Z-25. Snapping in the wind, high on the mast, flew the flag of Otto Ciliax, flushed with success from the Channel Dash and as anxious as Tovey for another triumph.

That afternoon Tirpitz passed the Agdenes fortress and steered round the Brekstad headland and out into the open sea. Norwegian agents onshore seem either to have missed her passing or their reports did not reach London in time, for the first sighting was made by one of the British submarines, now on regular picket duty off the entrance to Trondheimsfjord. Lieutenant Dick Raikes was patrolling in Seawolf, trying to stay hidden on a ‘horribly flat sea’ from the German aircraft that appeared frequently overhead, when, just before 6 p.m., the submarine’s hydrophones picked up the ominous churning of big propellers. He stayed on the surface long enough to glimpse the foretop and funnel of a large warship which he immediately took to be Tirpitz. He dived and set off towards her but ‘never got within ten miles of her’. It was, as he reflected later, as well that he did not for the destroyers and the escorting aircraft circling the squadron would have made short work of Seawolf.⁸

He broke off the chase to report the news to London. Nerves everywhere, in the Admiralty, in Downing Street and on all the ships at sea, were already strained in expectation. The Condor’s signal had been picked up and decoded. Just after midnight, Raikes’ confirmation that Tirpitz had been unable to resist the temptation presented by PQ.12 was in Tovey’s hands aboard King George V and he paused to consider his options.

Tirpitz was at sea but what about her companions? Prinz Eugen was still out of the picture, thanks to the damage done by a torpedo from HMS Trident on the journey to Trondheimsfjord, but where was the Admiral Scheer? The answer was that she was still at anchor, immobilised by the caution of Räder who was worried that she was too slow to take part in the operation. Tovey continued to worry about a big ship breakout into the Atlantic. There was a danger that one enemy ship might engage the convoy, diverting the attention away from the other while it raced for the North Atlantic. He considered dividing his force to cover both possibilities but an intervention from the Admiralty stopped this line of thought. They were sharply aware of the threat posed by the Luftwaffe squadrons now based in the area. The navy’s losses from air attack in Norway, Dunkirk and Crete had taught them a painful lesson. Tovey was told to keep his fleet concentrated under the protective air umbrella provided by the Fulmar fighters aboard Victorious.

Fleet Air Squadrons 817 and 832 made up the striking force that would be thrown at German shipping. They were equipped with Fairey Albacore torpedo planes, the replacement for the Swordfish. The RAF’s interwar control of naval aviation had meant that the navy had inherited a service that was dismally lacking in aircraft and weapons capable of taking on ships. For the first years of the war the men of the Fleet Air Arm were stuck with inadequate and ill-equipped aeroplanes which they flew with extraordinary élan and determination despite being profoundly aware of their shortcomings.

Sub-Lieutenant Charles Friend had just arrived on 832 Squadron, his latest posting in an incident-packed war that included having taken part in the air attacks on Bismarck. He was a reservist, a ‘hostilities only’ volunteer. Like many young men of the time he was fascinated by flying and in 1939 had given up his job as a lab assistant at the Paint Research Station in Teddington, Middlesex, to join the Fleet Air Arm. Friend was a grammar school boy, intelligent and lively. He brought a healthy dose of civilian scepticism with him into the enclosed world of the professional navy. On the whole, though, he found his new life congenial. ‘I had been made aware of the military virtues of obedience and loyalty in my family and school life as most of us had at the time,’ he wrote later. ‘The loss of complete independence in service life at all levels was compensated for by an abiding sense of belonging to an organization with a purpose.’⁹ In the early spring of 1942 he was just twenty-one but had already seen enough action to furnish several military careers. As well as the Bismarck operation, he had watched the sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, hunted submarines in the Atlantic and been aboard the carrier Ark Royal when she was sunk by a U-boat in the Mediterranean in November 1941.

Friend was an observer and most of his flying had been done in Swordfishes. He found the Albacore ‘like a first class version of the Swordfish. It was an improvement on the dear old Stringbag because it had a more powerful engine and it was more aerodynamically efficient.’ Unlike the ‘Stringbag’ it had an enclosed and heated cockpit which represented an enormous improvement to the lives of the crew, particularly in the savage conditions of the Arctic. It also had an automatic life raft ejection system which triggered in the event of the aircraft ditching. One innovation was particularly welcome. The installation of a ‘P Tube’ meant they could relieve themselves in comfort. In the Swordfish, the crew had to make do by filling the empty containers of aluminium dust markers or flame floats, used to determine wind direction and tide speed, before flinging them overboard. It was important to choose the right side, ‘because over the wrong one, the slipstream opened them and showered the contents back into the cockpit’.

The Albacore already bore an air of obsolescence. It was a biplane and its fixed undercarriage hung below, dragging through the air and slowing it down. Even with the extra horsepower offered by its new 1,065-horsepower Bristol Taurus II fourteen-cylinder radial engine it could still only manage a top speed of 150 knots (172mph) in straight and level flight. Its usual speed was a mere 90 knots (103mph), which made the observer’s job of navigating easier but severely limited its searching capabilities especially when the wind was against it. Some pilots felt the controls were heavier than those of the Swordfish and it was harder to take evasive action after dropping a torpedo.¹⁰

There were other antiquated touches. The pilot’s seat was just ahead of the upper mainplane and a long fuel tank separated him from the observer. Communication was via a Gosport speaking tube – a simple length of flexible pipe. Pilots often forgot to connect them. According to Friend, to gain the attention of the man at the controls of a Swordfish ‘one simply reached over and banged his head’. In Albacores, though, ‘we all carried a long garden cane to reach forward past the tank to tap him on the shoulder.’ Detailed messages were written down and passed forward in an empty Very signal cartridge stuck on the end of the stick.

Contact between aircraft and back to the ship was by radio and conducted in Morse code and was only used to report a sighting of the enemy or in extreme emergency. The Aldis lamp was still a useful tool to signal from air to deck or to other aircraft. When flying in formation they ‘resorted to making Morse with a swung forearm – “zogging” it was called’. As protection the Albacore had one fixed forward firing .303 machine gun in the starboard wing operated by the pilot. The rear cockpit was fitted with twin Vickers K guns operated by a third member of the crew, which delivered more firepower than the Swordfish’s single Lewis gun.

Compared with the Luftwaffe’s sleek Condors and Heinkels, compared with the Japanese Mitsubishi torpedo and bomber aircraft, the ‘Applecore’ was slow and feebly armed. Thus equipped, the Fleet Air Arm could hope to achieve little. Given the quality of its aircraft, it had performed remarkably well. So far, the FAA actions had sunk three Italian battleships and six destroyers, as well as a German light cruiser, largely thanks to the skill and boldness of the crews. These qualities were about to be tested again as the British fleet and the Tirpitz squadron headed towards what all involved believed would be an epic encounter.

By the evening of 6 March, Tirpitz was steaming north-eastwards up the Norwegian coast at a steady twenty-three knots through heavy seas before turning due north at midnight. At ten the next morning an attempt was made to send two of the battleship’s four Arado seaplanes off to try and locate the convoy. The Arado 196 was a robust, fast and well-armed monoplane designed for reconnaissance. It carried a pilot and an observer who also operated the guns. It was equipped with two floats and got airborne by being fired off the deck by a thirty-four-yard-long catapult that could be extended telescopically over the side. Its main shortcoming was that on returning it had to land on the water as near as it could to the ship’s side, to be lifted back aboard by a crane. In anything other than calm conditions, this was a difficult and dangerous manoeuvre.

Arados had folding wings and were usually housed below decks. The Tirpitz aircraft, though, were parked on deck. It was appallingly cold and snow gusted over the heaving, iron-grey seas. When the crews inspected their aeroplanes they found the wings were coated in ice. Flying was impossible. There would be no aerial reconnaissance that day. Ciliax did the next best thing and detached the three destroyers to head off north-north-west, while he took Tirpitz on a north-westerly heading, judging that one or other force would sail across the route the convoy would take.

Tovey had been moving steadily in the opposite direction, with the intention of putting a defensive shield of warships between the expected German line of approach and the convoy. Like Ciliax, he was operating blind. The weather brought no advantages to either side. The Albacores aboard Victorious had iced up, just like the Tirpitz’s Arados. There was no way of tracking the enemy from the air, and no other technological aids to decision-making to fill the information gap. Radar only stretched to the horizon. The great boon of Ultra had its limitations. The Kriegsmarine used an Enigma encrypting machine which had a different key system to that used by the army and air force. The code breakers at Bletchley Park found naval intercepts more difficult to decipher. It was sometimes twelve hours between a message being picked up and the decrypted content arriving at the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC), and so far there was nothing to reveal Ciliax’s intentions.

As the forenoon of 7 March wore on, both admirals were sifting their options in a manner that would have been familiar to a fighting captain of Nelson’s era. Into their calculations went the state of the sea and the weather, the speed and capabilities of the enemy force and, not least, their own assessment of the character and propensities of their opponent. Tovey’s intention was not only to protect PQ.12 but to lure Tirpitz and her companions into a battle which he hoped would end in her destruction. Ciliax was content with doing the maximum damage to the convoy.

It was likened later to a gigantic game of blind man’s buff, as both commanders groped through the great wastes of empty water, swept by frequent squalls and blizzards. Through the middle hours of the day both forces held their headings, waiting for a development that would propel them on a more promising course. While they did so, the returning Convoy QP.8, travelling westwards, and the outgoing ships of PQ.12, crossed through each other’s lines in a snowstorm.

Though they did not know it, the hunters and the hunted were close to brushing each other. Z-25, the destroyer Ciliax had sent off earlier in the day to find PQ.12, had passed only ten miles from the home-bound QP.8 but in the snow and gloom had failed to see its smoke. As the afternoon wore on visibility improved and the weather quietened. Another destroyer, the Friedrich Ihn, saw a smudge of smoke on the horizon and hurried off to investigate. The smoke was trailing from the funnel of the slow-moving Russian cargo ship Izhora, a straggler from QP.8. She was pathetically easy meat. At about 4.30 p.m. a torpedo from the destroyer hit her square on the port side. A photograph taken from the decks of the attacker shows a fierce fire burning amidships and black and grey smoke swirling above and behind. In the next one the bow has already disappeared beneath the surface of the sea which is now flat calm. Tirpitz hurried to join the destroyers as the Izhora went down, but the job was done and there was no need for her to fire her guns. Before the stricken merchantman disappeared, her radio operator managed to get off a distress signal which was picked up by the Home Fleet.

Tovey now had a rough idea of the enemy’s position. It was supplemented by wireless bearings of an unidentified ship, which might have been the Tirpitz, which led him to take the main body of the fleet off eastwards towards Bear Island in pursuit. In case this proved to be a false scent, and the battleship had turned for home, he detached six destroyers to hunt along a line stretching from the last position of the Izhora to Trondheim. Tovey kept up his search to the east until midnight, then turned south so that he could stay in touch with his destroyers and place Victorious in a position where her aircraft could set off on an aerial reconnaissance in the morning.

The end of the Izhora

Ciliax was still intent on attacking PQ.12. By the evening of 7 March, his destroyers were running low on oil. There was no accompanying tanker to allow them to refuel at sea. Ciliax ordered Friedrich Ihn back to Narvik to replenish and rejoin him as soon as possible. The other two destroyers tried twice to refuel from Tirpitz’s bunkers but it was impossible to hook up the hoses in the heavy swell. They were sent back to Tromsø to fill up.

The following morning, 8 March, he carried on the hunt with Tirpitz alone. He ordered Topp to turn due north towards Bear Island, calculating this would put him ahead of the advancing convoy. Once there, they turned again, heading south-west on a zigzag course which Ciliax believed would bring him onto a collision course with his prey. He was sure his instinct was right and the crew were called to action stations. But as the tension mounted and Topp and his men steeled themselves for their first battle, the convoy was steaming safely eighty miles to the north.

PQ.12 had been warned of the ambush. An Enigma intercept had reached the OIC which gave notice of Ciliax’s move towards Bear Island and the news was passed on in enough time for the convoy to steer away from danger, moving north along the edge of the Arctic pack ice.¹¹ It was yet another example of the blessings of Ultra. Had the intercept not been made, the merchantmen might well have sailed into Tirpitz’s guns while Tovey’s fleet was still two hundred miles away. By now Tovey had concluded that Tirpitz had eluded him and was on her way back to port. He intended to take the fleet back westwards to Iceland to replenish his destroyers. The new intelligence reached him in the late afternoon and at 5.30 p.m. he turned his ships round and headed north-east again in the direction of Bear Island.

Ciliax had spent a frustrating time steaming along his chosen line of interception. At 8 p.m. he finally decided to give up the hunt and return south to Norway. He signalled his intentions back to Kiel. The message was duly intercepted and passed to the Bletchley Park decrypters who worked frantically to crack it in time for it to be put to maximum use. By the early hours of 9 March, the information that the German fleet was on its way reached Tovey. At 2.40 a.m. he ordered the fleet around and steered south-east as fast as his ships were able in an attempt to cut off Ciliax and his force before they reached safety.

It was too late to catch them and bring them to battle. The aircraft aboard Victorious provided a strike force that could land a significant blow, however. By skill or luck, some of the Albacores’ torpedoes might find their target, slowing Tirpitz enough for the Home Fleet to catch her, presenting Tovey with the chance to crown his earlier triumph against Bismarck.

As the minutes passed the prospects of success seemed to grow. An Ultra signal reached Tovey from London giving further, invaluable details. An intercepted message from Naval Group North in Kiel gave the position, off the Lofoten Islands, where Tirpitz was to rendezvous with its replenished destroyers at 7 a.m. At 3.16 a.m. the information was passed to Captain Henry Bovell, the commander of Victorious, with the order ‘report proposals’.¹² Charles Friend was in the Operations Room when the new information arrived. ‘[It] said in effect that Tirpitz would be in a stated position just off Vestfjord which leads up to Narvik,’ he wrote. He remembered that it also gave the battleship’s speed and course. The precision prompted him to think ‘that to have such prior knowledge Admiral Tovey must have had a spy on board Tirpitz’.¹³ It was only some time after the war was over that those who had fought in it finally learned of the existence of Ultra.

It was still too dark to fly but Bovell assured Tovey that operations would begin at first light. He signalled back: ‘Propose fly off searching force of six aircraft at 0630 … fly off striking force of 12 as soon as ranged about 0730.’ The Albacore crews were woken at 5.30 a.m. Seventy minutes later, three aircraft each from 817 and 832 Squadrons left the carrier to comb the waters to the south-east. By now Tirpitz had been reunited with one of its destroyers, the Friedrich Ihn, returned from refuelling at Narvik, and was west of the Lofotens, steaming hard for home. Over the horizon, only 115 miles to the west-north-west, sailed the Home Fleet.

The Albacores climbed through patchy cloud and gusting snow into a lightening sky. At 8.03 a.m. Sub-Lieutenant Tommy Miller piloting the lead Albacore spotted Tirpitz ploughing through the leaden seas. The trim hull of the Friedrich Ihn, tiny in comparison, skimmed along beside it, a mile or so to the west.

He radioed back the news. The twelve Albacores of the strike force were waiting for the signal to go. Before they flew off Tovey left them in no doubt of the hopes that they carried with them. ‘A wonderful chance which may achieve most valuable results,’ he signalled. ‘God be with you.’

For a few minutes after Miller’s aircraft had made contact, the battleship sailed blindly on. The mood on board Tirpitz was subdued. After years of preparations and months of anticipation the ship’s first foray had been desperately disappointing. For all the expenditure of energy and adrenalin, for all the massive consumption of scarce fuel oil, the expedition had resulted only in the sinking of a single merchant ship. At the moment the Albacores arrived, Ciliax was having breakfast in his quarters and Topp was resting in the lookout room. The ship was in the temporary charge of the navigating officer, Korvettenkapitän Gerhard Bidlingmaier, who was writing up his log when he heard a shout of ‘aircraft astern!’ and ran to the bridge.

He ordered the ship to full speed and the Arados into the air. All over Tirpitz, alarm bells clanged and men ran to their action stations. Ciliax abandoned his breakfast and Topp his rest and they rushed to the bridge. It was clear that a torpedo attack was imminent. Ciliax took the decision to stay on the same heading until the Arados were airborne then change course and run for the shelter of Vestfjord which lay behind the Lofotens and led into the haven of Narvik.

Only one Arado managed to take off. It turned towards the pursuers, dodging in and out of the drifting cloud cover, apparently directed towards the shadowers by Tirpitz’s radar. One of the Albacore’s gunners opened fire but without serious effect. The Arado was more successful. One Albacore was hit and the observer, Sub-Lieutenant A. G. Dunworth, wounded in the thighs. Despite the attentions of the Arado, the shadowers stuck with the battleship, and at 8.30 a.m. radioed back her change of course towards the narrow entrance of the Moskenes Strait which opened into Vestfjord.

The strike force, formed up into four sub-flights of three aircraft, was now heading straight for Tirpitz. It was led by Lieutenant Commander Bill Lucas of 832 Squadron. Lucas was the most senior pilot in the force. He was not, though, the most experienced. He had arrived on the squadron only a few weeks before to replace Lieutenant Commander Peter Plugge who had disappeared with his crew in atrocious weather off the Norwegian coast on a futile search for the Prinz Eugen as it sailed for Trondheim. According to Charles Friend, Lucas was an ‘unknown quantity’. In contrast, his subordinate in the operation, Lieutenant Commander Peter Sugden of 817 Squadron, had been flying operationally for two years and had won the DFC.

At 8.40 a.m. Lucas sighted the target in the distance, creaming strongly through the corrugated seas, and the Albacores fell in behind. It seemed to Friend that it was taking an eternity to reach it. They were ‘flying upwind against a thirty-five knot wind and ninety knots air speed, to a target which was steaming directly downwind at twenty-five knots. Our closing speed was therefore thirty knots – about the speed at which one carelessly drives in a built up area.’

On spotting the target Lucas had taken them up to 3,500 feet, hoping the scattered cloud would mask their approach. Friend found that, as they climbed, ice began to form on the wings. ‘The huge ship seemed to be there for hours as we crawled towards her,’ he recalled, ‘although it was only ten minutes from sighting to attack.’

The subflight led by Lucas was approaching Tirpitz on the port side. The other three were to starboard. The recommended drill for a squadron-strength, twelve-aircraft torpedo attack on a ship was for the force to overhaul the target then turn back onto it. Two subflights were to attack on the port quarter and two on the starboard, dropping their torpedoes in a fan-shaped pattern from a height of fifty to a hundred feet across her bows. This would cover a ninety-degree arc, making it difficult for a big ship to take evasive action and greatly increasing the chances of a hit. The method had its dangers. The quarter attack exposed the aircraft to the ship’s guns which were presented with an ideal opportunity as the pilots approached, flying straight and level, low and slow, to drop their torpedoes at an optimum range of between 800 and 1,000 yards.

Lucas, however, decided against the textbook approach. They were only catching up at a rate of a mile every two minutes and the danger of icing up was increasing. He gave the order for each sub-flight to attack in its own time, choosing its own trajectory. The concentration of force mustered by a coordinated attack was now lost. If a torpedo did hit Tirpitz it would be more by luck than design.

Lucas led his sub-flight in first. As he got closer there was a break in the cloud which he thought would expose their position. He decided on an immediate attack from the side rather than a head-on approach. At 9.18 a.m. the three Albacores dropped almost to sea level and released their torpedoes. According to Friend the others watched the attack with ‘astonishment … the subflight was led down immediately on Tirpitz’s port beam leaving the other three [subflights] badly placed should she turn to port which she forthwith did’.¹⁴ Lucas claimed, no doubt sincerely, that he had released his torpedoes from 1,000 yards, the outer limit if there was to be any chance of success. Friend’s account says it was closer to a mile.

From the bridge, Topp could see the torpedoes hit the water and head towards his ship at forty knots. Without hesitation he shouted to the helmsman to wrench the ship hard to port. His instruction was countermanded immediately by Ciliax, standing alongside him, who ordered the helmsman to steer to starboard. There was a moment of silence. The Topp spoke quietly but firmly. ‘I am in command of this ship, sir, not you,’ he told his chief, and repeated his order. The helmsman obeyed. A photograph, crisscrossed by the rigging of the wings of the Albacore from which it was taken, shows the ship turning with a tightness that seems extraordinary given its size, making a near semi-circle in the water.¹⁵ The torpedoes from Lucas’s flight cruised harmlessly astern, with the nearest one passing 150 yards away. The second 817 subflight now crossed over to the port side and launched another broadside attack.

All the Tirpitz’s many guns were blazing in unison, supported by those of the Friedrich Ihn, but the pilots stuck to their course, releasing their torpedoes at 1,000 yards. Once again, they missed. The two remaining 817 Squadron flights under Sugden had anticipated the first evasive action and cut the corner of the turn to port to place themselves ahead. But Tirpitz now changed course again and swung sharply to starboard, taking her back on an easterly tack. Instead of a frontal attack they were forced to come at her from behind.

The 817 Squadron crews were heading into a blizzard of shells and bullets. Film taken from deck level shows two low-flying Albacores desperately clawing for height as gunfire whips up ramparts of spray in the sea right behind them. A close-quarters attack was suicidal. ‘With shots from her coming all around us I dropped my torpedo at almost extreme range,’ admitted an 817 pilot, Lieutenant Commander John Stenning, later.¹⁶ One Albacore of 832 Squadron and another of 817 Squadron were hit just as they released their torpedoes and tumbled into the sea. There was no chance of rescue by the fleeing battleship and all six on board were killed or drowned.

Despite the furious defence they encountered, the attackers came remarkably close to scoring a hit. According to the Tirpitz log, three of the torpedoes went wide, but a fourth passed ten yards from the stern. A near miss, though, counted for nothing. The determination and sacrifice was in vain. No damage had been done to the target. The only German casualties of the attack were three men wounded by machine-gun fire from the Albacores.

As the torpedo planes dwindled into the distance, relief swept the ship. The decks jingled with shell cases. In the brief action, Tirpitz’s sixteen large-calibre 105mm flak guns, the size of field artillery, had fired off 345 rounds. The 37mm light flak guns had got through 897 rounds and the 20mm guns 3,372. The ship’s eight gigantic guns had also been fired in anger for the first time, loosing off two broadsides against their flimsy attackers. Ciliax made amends to Topp for his intervention. ‘Well done, captain,’ he said in front of the rest of the officers on the bridge. ‘You fought your ship magnificently.’ Exercising his prerogative as fleet commander he made an immediate award to Topp of the Iron Cross, taking off his own and pinning it on the captain.¹⁷

The surviving aircraft arrived back on the carrier at 11.00 a.m. to a cold reception. ‘The processes of debriefing and dissection of the fiasco ended in the surviving crews being mustered on the quarterdeck of Victorious to be addressed by senior officers in a very recriminatory way,’ Charles Friend remembered. ‘We received for our efforts and the loss of six men what can only be described in the naval slang of the time as a “severe bottle”.’ Friend considered his superiors’ disappointment as ‘natural’. But he judged that ‘their humanity seemed to have left them at that time’.¹⁸

Lucas was criticized by Bovell for launching his attack prematurely. He went on to conclude that ‘all aircraft were deceived by Tirpitz’s large size and dropped their torpedoes at too great a range’.¹⁹ A fairer criticism would have been of the system which placed Lucas in charge, even though he had received no training for such an operation and had never flown in action with his men before that day. In the judgement of the official historian of the war at sea, ‘to be called on to carry out so critical an operation in such circumstances was a very severe, even unfair test’.²⁰

It was, as Tovey had said, a wonderful chance. But God was not on his side that day and the opportunity had been lost. For a few hours Tirpitz had been uniquely vulnerable, in open sea, with only her own guns and those of a single destroyer to defend her. There was some consolation in the safe arrival of PQ.12 at Murmansk on 12 March. But weighed in the scales of war, Tovey regarded the sinking of Tirpitz as ‘of incomparably greater importance … than the safety of any convoy’. To him the battleship remained a mortal menace, whose removal was worth gamble and risk.²¹ The moment had passed and there was no knowing when it would come again. As Tirpitz slipped into the safety of the sheltered anchorage at Bogen, near Narvik, the Home Fleet, with Victorious, headed disconsolately back to Scapa Flow.

The game was not quite over. The Bogen Bay anchorage provided only a temporary haven. If she lingered, Tirpitz could find herself bottled up by a blockading force stationed at the exit where the narrow Vestfjord met the sea, and vulnerable to air attack. Group Headquarters in Kiel ordered her back to Trondheim. She left at eleven o’clock on the night of 12 March, accompanied by five destroyers. They had been due to sail early on the 13th, but Topp, chastened perhaps by the near miss of the torpedo, superstitiously brought the departure forward.

They picked their way through the inner leads and raced south, through foggy seas, keeping a watch for mines. Though those on board did not know it, there were other dangers lurking. Once again Ultra had given warning of the movement. A flotilla of eight destroyers from Scapa Flow arrived off the coast between Bodø and Trondheim at 1.30 a.m. and steered north into the path of the oncoming Tirpitz. By 3.30 a.m., they had to turn away, so as to be clear of the coast when dawn came up, exposing them to Luftwaffe attack.²²

Tirpitz steamed southwards, hugging the coast through fog and snow, passing close to four waiting submarines deployed tactically at points along the way where she had to leave the shelter of the leads for the open sea. By nine o’clock on the evening of 13 March, she was back in her anchorage in Faettenfjord. The thick weather persisted. It was not until six days later that a reconnaissance flight confirmed that Tirpitz had returned home.

The failure to nail Tirpitz was badly received in Downing Street. On 13 March, Churchill sent Pound a message asking him to ‘kindly let me have a report on the air attack on TIRPITZ, explaining how it was that 12 of our machines managed to get no hits as compared with the extraordinary efficiency of the Japanese attack on PRINCE OF WALES and REPULSE’.²³ The underlying explanation, as he knew well, was that the Japanese had the aeroplanes and weapons to wage successful war at sea. The FAA was paying the price of its neglect. Its aircraft were outmoded and outclassed and, in the rapid expansion now going on, training had been rushed and units diluted with untested new arrivals. The debacle hastened efforts to repair these weaknesses, so that the next time the FAA met the Tirpitz the results would be different. In the meantime, Churchill could take satisfaction from an operation that was very much to his taste.