Bismarck

24 Hours to Doom

Iain Ballantyne

• Publisher: Agora Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781504059152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

With extensive eyewitness accounts, the author of Killing the Bismarck vividly reconstructs the day British soldiers sank the infamous Nazi battleship. May 26, 1941. After a desperate chase lasting three days and more than seventeen hundred miles, Britain's Home Fleet would finally close in on the world's most powerful battleship, the very ship that sank the Royal Navy's battlecruiser HMS Hood. The German battleship Bismarck was literally in a class by itself, being one of two newly-designed Bismarck-class ships in the German fleet. But it would soon face, and ultimately lose, a brutal fight to the finish involving more than five thousand men of the Royal Navy and twenty-six thousand men of Hitler's Kriegsmarine. Historian Iain Ballantyne spent years conducting interviews with surviving veterans who had been present on that fateful day. Published here for the first time, alongside a compelling narrative of the final twenty-four hours of the mission to sink the Bismarck, are transcripts of those interviews, offering the unique eyewitness accounts of Royal Navy sailors who participated in one of the most significant sea battles of World War II.

Bismarck: 24 Hours To Doom

The Final Act in the Mission to Sink Bismarck

Iain Ballantyne

This edition published in 2016 by Ipso Books

Agora Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd

55 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1BS

Copyright © Iain Ballantyne, 2016

All rights reserved

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Dedicated to Terry, George, Yves, Ken, Len, Alfred,

Tommy, Otto and all the other veterans

of the Bismarck Action 24 May — 27 May 1941

‘… the men are the stars of this story. The only heroines are the ships: and the only villain the cruel sea itself.’

---

— Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea

Prologue

A pall of gloom and anxiety is draped over Britain…

It is reeling in shock from the loss of the biggest and most beautiful warship in the Royal Navy — the 48,360-ton battlecruiser HMS Hood.

For two decades she has been an icon of the British Empire but The Mighty Hood was blown apart on 24 May 1941 after a mere eight minutes of combat with the new Nazi battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait.

A 50,000-ton steel monster, Bismarck’s attempt to break out into the Atlantic to ravage vital convoys carrying sustenance to Britain had been expected — and feared — for months.

Spotted from the shores of Scandinavia by British spies as she exited the Baltic on 20 May, Bismarck was in company with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Heading north to Bergen, after taking on supplies — photographed in the process by a Royal Air Force reconnaissance Spitfire aircraft — during the evening of 21 May the two ships headed out into the North Atlantic.

Spotted at shortly after 7.00pm on 23 May and shadowed by the British cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk, the German battleship and her raising partner made a high speed run through the narrow waters between Greenland and Iceland.

Sent north from the main Home Fleet anchorage at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands to intercept the Germans, only three men out of Hood’s ship’s company of 1,418 survived while the brand new battleship Prince of Wales retreated badly damaged.

In pubs, homes and on street corners — wherever people gather — the terrible news is discussed. The shock is real and painful, for with the Army beaten and ejected from Europe, the Royal Air Force victory over the Luftwaffe providing only a breathing space, a vital struggle for survival is unfolding in the Atlantic. The surface raiders and U-boats of the Kriegsmarine are trying to force Britain into a peace deal that will let Germany focus all its military power on invading and conquering the Soviet Union.

The Royal Navy, which for centuries has ruled the waves appears to be losing the war of the oceans. It is stretched too thin across the seven seas.

Nowhere is the news of Hood’s loss more keenly felt than in the British warships, learning of the catastrophe within minutes via wireless signals net. RN rarely send such signals, to avoid giving their positions away to the enemy, but they can read those made both by the Admiralty and other vessels without exposing themselves. In this way they get a minute-by-minute insight into what is happening. Early on the morning of 24 May warships decrypt a shocking signal from Norfolk, which along with Suffolk witnessed the cataclysmic event. Norfolk tells the Admiralty in London:

‘HOOD blown up…’

Rear Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker aboard Norfolk instructs nearby destroyers: ‘Proceed and search for survivors.’

The young men of the British fleet are veterans of combat from the moment hostilities began in September 1939. There never was a phoney war at sea but the loss of Hood is still a terrible blow. Now they reflect on the sudden destruction of a ship many have served in and also the deaths of men and boys whom many of them knew. Above all they realise the job of hunting down Bismarck now falls to other ships currently scattered far and wide across the Atlantic. All it needs is for the net to be drawn tight but Bismarck could, nonetheless, still escape and sew chaos on the high seas.

The disruption caused by German surface raiders is a serious threat to national survival. With just one or two high-speed, well-armed battleships or cruisers on the loose, the complex system that feeds the war effort may falter, at a time when only Britain is still in the fight against the Nazis.

Fear alone causes hundreds, if not thousands, of cancelled sailings, delays deliveries and forces the Admiralty to take warships away from directly fighting the enemy to protect otherwise defenceless vessels.

An industrial powerhouse, with a population of 48 million, island nation Britain depends on its large Merchant Navy and also the cargo ships of neutral nations. It needs them to deliver 50 per cent of its food, 100 per cent of its oil and most of the raw materials for industry.

Warplanes cannot fly, warships are unable to leave port and armoured vehicles rendered immobile without oil. Should the supply of raw material be reduced too much, the wheels of production will grind to a halt. People might find their rations reduced.

Rather than seeking to avoid starvation, it is a case of ensuring merchant ships carry cargos such as iron ore, munitions and finished weapons to Britain, in order to maintain the fight, rather than packing ship holds with bananas and oranges. Keeping war industries going relies on preventing the enemy from ravaging the crucial convoys above all from Canada and the USA, but also protecting the trade from South America and Australia.

In September 1939 Britain was importing close to 70 million tonnes of goods and raw materials per annum, yet by 1941 this has been more than halved. The British also need to maintain exports to keep their economy afloat, but these have dwindled dangerously with all that industry can produce needed at home.

Post-war, German submarines will be seen as the most dangerous threat to Britain’s transatlantic lifelines but in 1941 the surface raiders are equally feared, especially Bismarck as the biggest, most modern and best armed.

Already in the period late 1940 to spring 1941 less powerful German surface raiders have taken a heavy toll of British sea trade. Between January and March 1941, two of them — the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau — sank 115,000 tons of shipping, representing 22 valuable merchant vessel lost to the British cause; several were also captured.

That the toll was not higher could be attributed to the use of battleships on convoy escort work. German surface raiders have until now been ordered to avoid confrontation with enemy capital ships. Bismarck is supposed to do the same, but found the confrontation with Hood unavoidable and now — as a proven capital ship killer — may well claim another warship scalp or two in addition to sinking merch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Also By Iain Ballantyne
• Bismarck: 24 Hours To Doom – Iain Ballantyne
• Arnhem – Iain Ballantyne
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