Cook
Banned
Chapter 1.
20 May, 1941.
The Swedish cruiser Gotland was conducting gunnery practice in the Kattegat, the waterway separating Norway and Sweden from Danish Jutland, when lookouts reported a warship approaching from the south. The war in Europe had been raging for nearly two years, and although it had passed the Swedes by so far, their position was a precarious one; all of the neighbouring neutral countries had been conquered in lightning fast German attacks. Captain Agren, commander of the Gotland, immediately ordered his crew to action stations; the time was 13:00hrs.
In the clear conditions prevailing on the Kattegat that day, the warship was rapidly identified as a heavy cruiser or battleship, the first of a pair steaming in echelon, with three destroyers escorting them and aircraft providing overhead cover. All were without doubt German. Tension on the bridge mounted as the German squadron approached; if the German force attacked, Gotland would be severely out-gunned. The Swedish ship’s main guns consisted of six 152 mm guns, the German ships, which Agren concluded were the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz, each had eight 380 mm guns; they would tear through Gotland’s armour before the Swedish ship got close enough to return fire. Only when it became clear that the Germans were going to pass to the north-west did the men on the bridge begin to relax. Agren, maintaining a professional calm throughout, ordered Gotland to follow the German squadron at a distance. The Swedish warship continued to shadow the Germans, finally breaking off pursuit at 15:45hrs, when they were well clear of the Swedish coast and heading out across the Skagerrak towards Norway. Gotland turned east, the silhouettes of the two most powerful warships in the world rapidly disappeared below the horizon astern. Captain Agren anchored the Gotland in the port of Göteborg that evening and, following up the brief wireless messages sent while at sea, dispatched a detailed report to the Swedish admiralty headquarters in Stockholm.
Sweden was neutral, but in many respects leaned Germany’s way; iron ore from mines in northern Sweden fed the steelworks of the Reich and, following the invasion of neighbouring Norway in April 1940, German service personnel were permitted to travel across Sweden provided they were not in uniform. The Swedes were being pragmatic by accommodating the Germans; their armed forces were dwarfed by the Germans who now completely surrounded them. But being a helpful neutral hadn’t prevented Norway from being invaded, so the Swedes (cautiously) hedged their bets by maintaining good relations with the Norwegian government-in-exile, based in London, permitting them to keep control the Norwegian legation in Stockholm, despite protests from the Quisling regime in Oslo. Colonel Ragnvald Roscher Lund was the Norwegian military attaché at the legation, he was also head of Norwegian military intelligence and had good contacts in the Swedish military intelligence service: the MUST (Militära underrättelse- och säkerhetstjänsten). One of these MUST contacts passed the details of the German ship movements to Roscher the same evening. Roscher immediately sought out the British naval attaché, Captain Henry Denham, and found him just sitting down to dinner in a Stockholm restaurant. Denham abandoned his dinner uneaten and returned to the British embassy to begin the task of encoding and transmitting a message to London. Before midnight, the Admiralty had been alerted. A new phase in the Battle of the Atlantic was about to begin. [1]
Preparations.
The Battle of the Atlantic commenced with Britain’s entry into the war on 3 September, 1939. The civilian passenger liner SS Athenia, departed Glasgow on 1 September, when the world was still at peace. At 19:40hrs on the 3rd it became the first victim of the battle; torpedoed and sunk by U-boat U-30. Following that, the progress of the war at sea for Britain reflected the war on land; with considerable losses and precious few successes. The Royal Navy had gone to war extremely confident; after all, they outnumbered their German opponents by ten to one. Geography also gave them a natural advantage, German access to the Atlantic was via a limited number of narrow sea lanes patrolled by Royal Navy ships and aircraft from Coastal Command; the Germans were boxed in and (so the British thought) blockaded.
With the fall of Norway and then France, the tables had turned completely; now it was the British who found themselves blockaded. For Großadmiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, the Battle of the Atlantic was the war; prior to the outbreak of war, Raeder had concluded that the only way Britain could ever be defeated was by interrupting its maritime supply lines; for him preparations for Operation Seelöwe, the cross-channel invasion of England, was a pointless distraction and costly diversion of limited resources; the real Battle of Britain was being fought out on the grey expanse of the Atlantic.
The British economy was absolutely dependent on the maritime supply lines in the Atlantic Ocean; if they were interrupted, not only would Britain’s war industries grind to a halt, but Britain would also starve; 385,000 tons of food needed to reach the ports of Britain every week. [2] It wasn’t just that 70% of Britain’s food was imported; the food that was produced locally required nutrients imported from overseas. Raeder calculated that if Germany could sink 750,000 tons of merchant shipping per month, Britain would be forced to capitulate within a year. His calculations were actually pessimistic; the British government’s Ministry of Economic Warfare believed that if 600,000 tons per month were sunk, Britain would be forced to seek an armistice within a year. In addition to the obvious reduction in available shipping that sinking’s represented, there were also the delays caused by the organisation of convoys, the routing of shipping away from potential German attacks, and the congestion caused in ports once the convoys arrived. From an initial slow start for the first nine months of war, Kriegsmarine successes had grown enormously following the fall of France. Raeder employed sea mines, U-boats, merchant raiders, heavy warship raiders as well as long range aircraft to attack the convoys with growing intensity: in the second half of 1940, 2.5 million tons of British and neutral shipping was sunk, an average of 417,000 tons per month. In the first months of 1941, Raeder’s successes grew further: in April 645,000 tons of shipping was sunk; if that rate could be maintained or increased, Britain would be forced out of the war. German action significantly reduced the effective capacity of Britain’s remaining shipping; in late 1940 Churchill wrote to President Roosevelt that “the convoy system, the detours, the zigzags, the great distances from which we now have to bring our imports, and the congestion in our western harbours, have reduced by about one-third the fruitfulness of our existing tonnage.” Britain’s capacity to transport across the Atlantic was now “the crunch of the whole war.” [3]
During the first nine months of the war, the rate of British shipping had exceeded 45 million tons per year, but with the steadily intensifying battle in the Atlantic, that rate had dropped to a rate of less than 30 million tons per year in the closing weeks of 1940. In the first three months of 1941, the attacks on shipping by the Kreigsmarine, in conjunction with intensive attacks on British ports by the Luftwaffe, dropped that rate further, to below 28 million tons per year. This was below the volume of shipping needed to supply British industries and feed the population; if it continued, British factories would fall idle and the population would begin to starve. Raeder was winning the war; he just needed to keep winning. [4]
Although the most effective weapon in the German arsenal was indisputably the U-boat, German surface raiders had accounted for 450,000 tons of shipping sunk in 1940. [5] This was despite the fact that between June and late September almost no German warships put to sea; most remained in port, either awaiting the order to proceed with Seelöwe or still repairing damage sustained during the invasion of Norway. During the summer and autumn of 1940, only the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked shipping in the Atlantic. Raeder believed that, employed correctly, his surface ships had the potential to cause far more damage to British shipping; he was an advocate of long-range sorties by German warships, attacking British merchant shipping beyond the heavily defended area around the British Isles. This was Cruiser Warfare: Kreuzerkrieg.
Almost all of the sinkings in 1940 had been done by warships operating independently. Because they were operating at extreme distances from home ports, they had to avoid coming into battle with Royal Navy ships that had the potential to inflict damage that would limit their ability to continue the mission; consequently these solo raiders steered clear of escorted convoys. Obviously if Germany’s battleships and battle cruisers were able to operate at sea together, they could inflict far more damage than a solo raider; not only would they be able to attack defended convoys, but the British would have to concentrate more warships in their efforts to track down and attack the them, thereby weakening themselves in other locations that could then be attacked by U-boats.
The first major Kreuzerkrieg mission of 1941, Operation Berlin, began on 22 January when the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau departed Kiel harbour, bound for the North Atlantic. After successfully entering the North Atlantic via the Denmark Strait, north of Iceland on 4 February, the German ships prowled the North Atlantic, hunting for British merchant ships for the next forty-six days. Staying beyond the range of British land based reconnaissance aircraft, in an expanse known as the Mid-Atlantic Gap, the German squadron successfully located five convoys. Two of these the German commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens, chose not to attack because of the presence of a Royal Navy battleship escorting them, but the other convoys were successfully attacked, as were several other ships found sailing alone. In total 22 merchant ships were sunk or captured, resulting in the loss of 122,000 tons of British and neutral shipping. [6] Meanwhile the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, also operating in the Atlantic, intercepted another convoy; sinking seven ships and damaging three more. [7] In addition to the ships successfully attacked, Operation Berlin also provided Admiral Lütjens with a number of valuable lessons concerning how best to locate British convoys.
Planning for the next major fleet action, Operation Rheinübung, had commenced before the ships had returned to base from Operation Berlin. Ideally Rheinübung would see the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau put out to sea again in April in conjunction with the new battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz. Bismarck and Tirpitz were the newest and most powerful battleships in the world; with them the Germans would not have to pass up attacking convoys that had a battleship escort, they would attack and the sink the battleship and then go after the merchant ships. But Tirpitz had only been commissioned in February and was still undergoing sea trials in the Baltic, so Raeder decided to substitute the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen to accompany Bismarck instead of Tirpitz. This would necessitate a change in tactics; Prinz Eugen lacked the firepower to take on a battleship. Instead the German naval staff directed that Bismarck would engage and tie down the escort, while the lighter German ships concentrated on the convoy. It was less than ideal but still feasible. [8]
Another planning complication arose when Scharnhorst and Gneisenau reached Brest on the 22nd of March; during the two month operation Scharnhorst had sustained considerable engine and other mechanical damage as a result of heavy seas, the repair of which was expected to take ten weeks. Raeder had lost another battleship from Rheinübung. Gneisenau also had mechanical damage expected to take four weeks to repair; Rheinübung would have to be postponed until the last week of April. [9]
Worse was to come; on 4 April, RAF bombers attacked Brest. A bomb landed in the dock holding the Gneisenau but didn’t explode. To allow the dud to be disarmed and removed without endangering the Gneisenau, the battleship was moved out of the dock and anchored in the harbour. Anchored where it was, the ship was exposed to torpedo attack, but before nets could be put in place to protect it the RAF attacked again and Gneisenau was hit by a torpedo dropped from a Beaufort bomber. The damage inflicted was not critical, but was expected to take ten weeks to repair; either Gneisenau had to be left out of Rheinübung, or the operation delayed, at least until the end of June. Such a long delay was unacceptable, the intensity of attacks on British shipping had to be maintained, otherwise the British would be able to recover and all of the German blockade effort would be wasted; Gneisenau was dropped from the planning of Rheinübung. [10]
Rather than an expanded operation, Rheinübung now looked like a re-run of Operation Berlin; Bismarck and Prinz Eugen would leave their home port in the Baltic, have to evade the Royal Navy patrols around Iceland and slip into the North Atlantic. Once there they would disrupt British convoy operations as much as possible before either putting into one of the French ports in the Bay of Biscay, or slipping past the British blockade around Iceland again and returning to harbour in the Baltic. It was far from ideal; Raeder knew he needed to increase the pressure on the British if they were to be forced to capitulate, but at least it wouldn’t allow them a chance to recover. This operation would maintain the intensity of attacks, and a later operation could be planned for when he had all four of his battleships available; then the British would feel the squeeze!
The operation was scheduled to commence on 28 April, but more bad luck struck the Kriegsmarine on the 23rd of April. On its way from Kiel into the Baltic Sea, Prinz Eugen set off a British magnetic mine in the Fermer Belt, south of the Danish island of Lolland; repairs looked like taking two weeks. No German surface raider had been in operations in the Atlantic now for a full month, and Raeder’s tally of British shipping sunk showed the decline in intensity; Germany had sunk well over 300,000 tons of shipping in both February and March, but the figures for April were well down. Raeder was now growing desperate; the beginning of Operation Barbarossa was approaching; resources for the Kriegsmarine would be curtailed unless Raeder had a demonstrable success before the invasion of Russia began. If not, he would be unable to persuade the Fuhrer of the value of maintaining the pace of naval operations; Raeder’s work would be postponed until Russia was defeated, and then he would have to start all over again, by which time Britain may have grown stronger and the Americans may have entered the war. Time was critical.
On 5 May, Hitler visited Gdynia for an inspection of his two newest and most powerful warships, Bismarck and Tirpitz. While on board the Tirpitz, her commander, Captain Karl Topp, took the opportunity to ask the Fuhrer for his ship to be included in the upcoming operation. Originally it had been expected that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen would have put to sea in late April, while Tirpitz’s crew were still completing gunnery practice in the Baltic, but with the ongoing mechanical repairs to Prinz Eugen, the mission had been delayed. Meanwhile, Tirptiz had completed trials and was now available for operations; surely it should be included in the mission? Hitler lacked any great understanding of naval warfare and left the decision to his admirals. Raeder felt that Tirpitz’s crew could benefit with more training before embarking on a major operation, Lütjens didn’t disagree with Raeder’s assessment, but said that he would prefer to wait until all three ships were available; since further delays were now completely unacceptable to Raeder, Tirpitz, despite being fully operational, remained off the list for Rheinübung. [11]
Circumstances changed three days after the Fuhrer’s visit. Repairs to Prinz Eugen, which had already taken longer than the initially expected two weeks, were set back even further when a fuel line ruptured causing a fire in an engine room. If Prinz Eugen was to still be included in Rheinübung, the operation could not commence until at least early June. [12] For Raeder this was an unacceptable delay; it would mean that no German surface raider would have attacked British shipping for ten weeks; more than half a million tons of shipping reaching Britain every week for ten weeks! It would also mean that the Kriegsmarine wouldn’t have a major victory before Barbarossa commenced; thereafter the Fuhrer’s attention would be completely focused on Russia. Prinz Eugen was dropped from Rheinübung.
The question then had to be made: would Bismarck sail alone or would Tirpitz be included on the mission? Alone Bismarck would be unable to attack any convoy that had a battleship escort; the risk was too great of sustaining damage that would shorten or even terminate the mission, even if the Bismarck did defeat the Royal Navy vessel. Granted, the cruisers Admiral Sheer and Admiral Hipper had repeatedly found and attacked unescorted convoys, but the fact that Lütjens squadron had encountered two convoys with escorts in March suggested that the British were increasingly sending convoys with heavy escorts. The other problem that Bismarck faced if it sailed alone was simply finding the British convoys in the first place. This was actually the biggest problem the Germans faced; in the sheer size of the Atlantic Ocean, a convoy could simply disappear. Even if you knew, as the Germans did on a regular basis, where and when the convoy would be putting to sea, the potential routes that they could then sail made it difficult to track them down. This was the real reason for the success of the convoys, as Winston Churchill explained:
"The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance. There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one." [13]
If Bismarck sailed alone, it would have with it four reconnaissance aircraft, Ar 196 floatplanes, to help with the search. That was only the same number that Lütjens had had available to him for Operation Berlin, and he’d been keen for more; both to increase the area that could be searched and to provide a measure of redundancy if any were lost.[14] If Tirpitz were included in the squadron then the number of aircraft available would be doubled. Even if the gunnery on Tirpitz wasn’t up to the same standard as Bismarck, it would still provide a significant increase in firepower and add to mission flexibility. In fact including Tirpitz instead of Prinz Eugen added considerably to operational flexibility; Prinz Eugen was a heavy cruiser with a very limited fuel capacity, the squadron would have to either cruise at a slower rate of knots, or bunker fuel more often, and in all likelihood do both. Tirpitz however, was the twin of Bismarck, another battleship built with an enormous fuel capacity; consequently the squadron would be able to cruise faster and farther. This was critical, because for Kreuzerkrieg to be successful, the Germans needed to be able to out run and out range their Royal Navy opponents and this Bismarck and Tirpitz could do: cruising at 24 knots, they could both make 6,640 nautical miles; HMS King George V, the Royal Navy’s newest and most powerful battleship, could only make 6,300 nm at a cruising speed of 20 knots. Bismarck and Tirpitz really would be able to outrun anything they couldn’t outfight and outfight anything they couldn’t outrun. [15] In the end the decision was rather simple; Rheinübung had to go ahead without further delay, that ruled out Prinz Eugen, but for Rheinübung to still go ahead with any reasonable confidence of success, Bismarck could not be sent solo, therefore Tirpitz had to be included. A message was sent to a jubilant captain Topp instructing him to make his ship ready for extended sea operations by no later than 16 May.
Notes for Chapter 1:
[1] Historically, the message that was sent to London was: “Kattegat, today 20 May. At 1500, two large warships, escorted by three destroyers, five ships and ten or twelve planes, passed Marstrand to the northeast. 2058/20.” http://www.kbismarck.com/
[2] British Ministry of Food records. Thanks to the ‘Dig for victory’ campaign, rationing and other measures, the percentage of food manufactured in Britain rose to 75% by 1945.
[3] Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940 – 1943, by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6]http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignsUboats2.htm
[7] Bismarck: The Final Days of Germany’s Greatest Battleship, by Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Historically the repairs to Prinz Eugen were completed without incident and the ship fuelled and stocked with stores by 16 May, 1941.
[13] The World Crisis, by Sir Winston Spencer Churchill.
[14] Bismarck: The Final Days of Germany’s Greatest Battleship, by Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander.
[15] Specifications for Bismarck and Tirpitz: http://www.kbismarck.com/
Specifications for King George V: http://everything2.com/title/HMS+King+George+V
20 May, 1941.
The Swedish cruiser Gotland was conducting gunnery practice in the Kattegat, the waterway separating Norway and Sweden from Danish Jutland, when lookouts reported a warship approaching from the south. The war in Europe had been raging for nearly two years, and although it had passed the Swedes by so far, their position was a precarious one; all of the neighbouring neutral countries had been conquered in lightning fast German attacks. Captain Agren, commander of the Gotland, immediately ordered his crew to action stations; the time was 13:00hrs.
In the clear conditions prevailing on the Kattegat that day, the warship was rapidly identified as a heavy cruiser or battleship, the first of a pair steaming in echelon, with three destroyers escorting them and aircraft providing overhead cover. All were without doubt German. Tension on the bridge mounted as the German squadron approached; if the German force attacked, Gotland would be severely out-gunned. The Swedish ship’s main guns consisted of six 152 mm guns, the German ships, which Agren concluded were the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz, each had eight 380 mm guns; they would tear through Gotland’s armour before the Swedish ship got close enough to return fire. Only when it became clear that the Germans were going to pass to the north-west did the men on the bridge begin to relax. Agren, maintaining a professional calm throughout, ordered Gotland to follow the German squadron at a distance. The Swedish warship continued to shadow the Germans, finally breaking off pursuit at 15:45hrs, when they were well clear of the Swedish coast and heading out across the Skagerrak towards Norway. Gotland turned east, the silhouettes of the two most powerful warships in the world rapidly disappeared below the horizon astern. Captain Agren anchored the Gotland in the port of Göteborg that evening and, following up the brief wireless messages sent while at sea, dispatched a detailed report to the Swedish admiralty headquarters in Stockholm.
Sweden was neutral, but in many respects leaned Germany’s way; iron ore from mines in northern Sweden fed the steelworks of the Reich and, following the invasion of neighbouring Norway in April 1940, German service personnel were permitted to travel across Sweden provided they were not in uniform. The Swedes were being pragmatic by accommodating the Germans; their armed forces were dwarfed by the Germans who now completely surrounded them. But being a helpful neutral hadn’t prevented Norway from being invaded, so the Swedes (cautiously) hedged their bets by maintaining good relations with the Norwegian government-in-exile, based in London, permitting them to keep control the Norwegian legation in Stockholm, despite protests from the Quisling regime in Oslo. Colonel Ragnvald Roscher Lund was the Norwegian military attaché at the legation, he was also head of Norwegian military intelligence and had good contacts in the Swedish military intelligence service: the MUST (Militära underrättelse- och säkerhetstjänsten). One of these MUST contacts passed the details of the German ship movements to Roscher the same evening. Roscher immediately sought out the British naval attaché, Captain Henry Denham, and found him just sitting down to dinner in a Stockholm restaurant. Denham abandoned his dinner uneaten and returned to the British embassy to begin the task of encoding and transmitting a message to London. Before midnight, the Admiralty had been alerted. A new phase in the Battle of the Atlantic was about to begin. [1]
Preparations.
The Battle of the Atlantic commenced with Britain’s entry into the war on 3 September, 1939. The civilian passenger liner SS Athenia, departed Glasgow on 1 September, when the world was still at peace. At 19:40hrs on the 3rd it became the first victim of the battle; torpedoed and sunk by U-boat U-30. Following that, the progress of the war at sea for Britain reflected the war on land; with considerable losses and precious few successes. The Royal Navy had gone to war extremely confident; after all, they outnumbered their German opponents by ten to one. Geography also gave them a natural advantage, German access to the Atlantic was via a limited number of narrow sea lanes patrolled by Royal Navy ships and aircraft from Coastal Command; the Germans were boxed in and (so the British thought) blockaded.
With the fall of Norway and then France, the tables had turned completely; now it was the British who found themselves blockaded. For Großadmiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, the Battle of the Atlantic was the war; prior to the outbreak of war, Raeder had concluded that the only way Britain could ever be defeated was by interrupting its maritime supply lines; for him preparations for Operation Seelöwe, the cross-channel invasion of England, was a pointless distraction and costly diversion of limited resources; the real Battle of Britain was being fought out on the grey expanse of the Atlantic.
The British economy was absolutely dependent on the maritime supply lines in the Atlantic Ocean; if they were interrupted, not only would Britain’s war industries grind to a halt, but Britain would also starve; 385,000 tons of food needed to reach the ports of Britain every week. [2] It wasn’t just that 70% of Britain’s food was imported; the food that was produced locally required nutrients imported from overseas. Raeder calculated that if Germany could sink 750,000 tons of merchant shipping per month, Britain would be forced to capitulate within a year. His calculations were actually pessimistic; the British government’s Ministry of Economic Warfare believed that if 600,000 tons per month were sunk, Britain would be forced to seek an armistice within a year. In addition to the obvious reduction in available shipping that sinking’s represented, there were also the delays caused by the organisation of convoys, the routing of shipping away from potential German attacks, and the congestion caused in ports once the convoys arrived. From an initial slow start for the first nine months of war, Kriegsmarine successes had grown enormously following the fall of France. Raeder employed sea mines, U-boats, merchant raiders, heavy warship raiders as well as long range aircraft to attack the convoys with growing intensity: in the second half of 1940, 2.5 million tons of British and neutral shipping was sunk, an average of 417,000 tons per month. In the first months of 1941, Raeder’s successes grew further: in April 645,000 tons of shipping was sunk; if that rate could be maintained or increased, Britain would be forced out of the war. German action significantly reduced the effective capacity of Britain’s remaining shipping; in late 1940 Churchill wrote to President Roosevelt that “the convoy system, the detours, the zigzags, the great distances from which we now have to bring our imports, and the congestion in our western harbours, have reduced by about one-third the fruitfulness of our existing tonnage.” Britain’s capacity to transport across the Atlantic was now “the crunch of the whole war.” [3]
During the first nine months of the war, the rate of British shipping had exceeded 45 million tons per year, but with the steadily intensifying battle in the Atlantic, that rate had dropped to a rate of less than 30 million tons per year in the closing weeks of 1940. In the first three months of 1941, the attacks on shipping by the Kreigsmarine, in conjunction with intensive attacks on British ports by the Luftwaffe, dropped that rate further, to below 28 million tons per year. This was below the volume of shipping needed to supply British industries and feed the population; if it continued, British factories would fall idle and the population would begin to starve. Raeder was winning the war; he just needed to keep winning. [4]
Although the most effective weapon in the German arsenal was indisputably the U-boat, German surface raiders had accounted for 450,000 tons of shipping sunk in 1940. [5] This was despite the fact that between June and late September almost no German warships put to sea; most remained in port, either awaiting the order to proceed with Seelöwe or still repairing damage sustained during the invasion of Norway. During the summer and autumn of 1940, only the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked shipping in the Atlantic. Raeder believed that, employed correctly, his surface ships had the potential to cause far more damage to British shipping; he was an advocate of long-range sorties by German warships, attacking British merchant shipping beyond the heavily defended area around the British Isles. This was Cruiser Warfare: Kreuzerkrieg.
Almost all of the sinkings in 1940 had been done by warships operating independently. Because they were operating at extreme distances from home ports, they had to avoid coming into battle with Royal Navy ships that had the potential to inflict damage that would limit their ability to continue the mission; consequently these solo raiders steered clear of escorted convoys. Obviously if Germany’s battleships and battle cruisers were able to operate at sea together, they could inflict far more damage than a solo raider; not only would they be able to attack defended convoys, but the British would have to concentrate more warships in their efforts to track down and attack the them, thereby weakening themselves in other locations that could then be attacked by U-boats.
The first major Kreuzerkrieg mission of 1941, Operation Berlin, began on 22 January when the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau departed Kiel harbour, bound for the North Atlantic. After successfully entering the North Atlantic via the Denmark Strait, north of Iceland on 4 February, the German ships prowled the North Atlantic, hunting for British merchant ships for the next forty-six days. Staying beyond the range of British land based reconnaissance aircraft, in an expanse known as the Mid-Atlantic Gap, the German squadron successfully located five convoys. Two of these the German commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens, chose not to attack because of the presence of a Royal Navy battleship escorting them, but the other convoys were successfully attacked, as were several other ships found sailing alone. In total 22 merchant ships were sunk or captured, resulting in the loss of 122,000 tons of British and neutral shipping. [6] Meanwhile the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, also operating in the Atlantic, intercepted another convoy; sinking seven ships and damaging three more. [7] In addition to the ships successfully attacked, Operation Berlin also provided Admiral Lütjens with a number of valuable lessons concerning how best to locate British convoys.
Planning for the next major fleet action, Operation Rheinübung, had commenced before the ships had returned to base from Operation Berlin. Ideally Rheinübung would see the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau put out to sea again in April in conjunction with the new battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz. Bismarck and Tirpitz were the newest and most powerful battleships in the world; with them the Germans would not have to pass up attacking convoys that had a battleship escort, they would attack and the sink the battleship and then go after the merchant ships. But Tirpitz had only been commissioned in February and was still undergoing sea trials in the Baltic, so Raeder decided to substitute the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen to accompany Bismarck instead of Tirpitz. This would necessitate a change in tactics; Prinz Eugen lacked the firepower to take on a battleship. Instead the German naval staff directed that Bismarck would engage and tie down the escort, while the lighter German ships concentrated on the convoy. It was less than ideal but still feasible. [8]
Another planning complication arose when Scharnhorst and Gneisenau reached Brest on the 22nd of March; during the two month operation Scharnhorst had sustained considerable engine and other mechanical damage as a result of heavy seas, the repair of which was expected to take ten weeks. Raeder had lost another battleship from Rheinübung. Gneisenau also had mechanical damage expected to take four weeks to repair; Rheinübung would have to be postponed until the last week of April. [9]
Worse was to come; on 4 April, RAF bombers attacked Brest. A bomb landed in the dock holding the Gneisenau but didn’t explode. To allow the dud to be disarmed and removed without endangering the Gneisenau, the battleship was moved out of the dock and anchored in the harbour. Anchored where it was, the ship was exposed to torpedo attack, but before nets could be put in place to protect it the RAF attacked again and Gneisenau was hit by a torpedo dropped from a Beaufort bomber. The damage inflicted was not critical, but was expected to take ten weeks to repair; either Gneisenau had to be left out of Rheinübung, or the operation delayed, at least until the end of June. Such a long delay was unacceptable, the intensity of attacks on British shipping had to be maintained, otherwise the British would be able to recover and all of the German blockade effort would be wasted; Gneisenau was dropped from the planning of Rheinübung. [10]
Rather than an expanded operation, Rheinübung now looked like a re-run of Operation Berlin; Bismarck and Prinz Eugen would leave their home port in the Baltic, have to evade the Royal Navy patrols around Iceland and slip into the North Atlantic. Once there they would disrupt British convoy operations as much as possible before either putting into one of the French ports in the Bay of Biscay, or slipping past the British blockade around Iceland again and returning to harbour in the Baltic. It was far from ideal; Raeder knew he needed to increase the pressure on the British if they were to be forced to capitulate, but at least it wouldn’t allow them a chance to recover. This operation would maintain the intensity of attacks, and a later operation could be planned for when he had all four of his battleships available; then the British would feel the squeeze!
The operation was scheduled to commence on 28 April, but more bad luck struck the Kriegsmarine on the 23rd of April. On its way from Kiel into the Baltic Sea, Prinz Eugen set off a British magnetic mine in the Fermer Belt, south of the Danish island of Lolland; repairs looked like taking two weeks. No German surface raider had been in operations in the Atlantic now for a full month, and Raeder’s tally of British shipping sunk showed the decline in intensity; Germany had sunk well over 300,000 tons of shipping in both February and March, but the figures for April were well down. Raeder was now growing desperate; the beginning of Operation Barbarossa was approaching; resources for the Kriegsmarine would be curtailed unless Raeder had a demonstrable success before the invasion of Russia began. If not, he would be unable to persuade the Fuhrer of the value of maintaining the pace of naval operations; Raeder’s work would be postponed until Russia was defeated, and then he would have to start all over again, by which time Britain may have grown stronger and the Americans may have entered the war. Time was critical.
On 5 May, Hitler visited Gdynia for an inspection of his two newest and most powerful warships, Bismarck and Tirpitz. While on board the Tirpitz, her commander, Captain Karl Topp, took the opportunity to ask the Fuhrer for his ship to be included in the upcoming operation. Originally it had been expected that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen would have put to sea in late April, while Tirpitz’s crew were still completing gunnery practice in the Baltic, but with the ongoing mechanical repairs to Prinz Eugen, the mission had been delayed. Meanwhile, Tirptiz had completed trials and was now available for operations; surely it should be included in the mission? Hitler lacked any great understanding of naval warfare and left the decision to his admirals. Raeder felt that Tirpitz’s crew could benefit with more training before embarking on a major operation, Lütjens didn’t disagree with Raeder’s assessment, but said that he would prefer to wait until all three ships were available; since further delays were now completely unacceptable to Raeder, Tirpitz, despite being fully operational, remained off the list for Rheinübung. [11]
Circumstances changed three days after the Fuhrer’s visit. Repairs to Prinz Eugen, which had already taken longer than the initially expected two weeks, were set back even further when a fuel line ruptured causing a fire in an engine room. If Prinz Eugen was to still be included in Rheinübung, the operation could not commence until at least early June. [12] For Raeder this was an unacceptable delay; it would mean that no German surface raider would have attacked British shipping for ten weeks; more than half a million tons of shipping reaching Britain every week for ten weeks! It would also mean that the Kriegsmarine wouldn’t have a major victory before Barbarossa commenced; thereafter the Fuhrer’s attention would be completely focused on Russia. Prinz Eugen was dropped from Rheinübung.
The question then had to be made: would Bismarck sail alone or would Tirpitz be included on the mission? Alone Bismarck would be unable to attack any convoy that had a battleship escort; the risk was too great of sustaining damage that would shorten or even terminate the mission, even if the Bismarck did defeat the Royal Navy vessel. Granted, the cruisers Admiral Sheer and Admiral Hipper had repeatedly found and attacked unescorted convoys, but the fact that Lütjens squadron had encountered two convoys with escorts in March suggested that the British were increasingly sending convoys with heavy escorts. The other problem that Bismarck faced if it sailed alone was simply finding the British convoys in the first place. This was actually the biggest problem the Germans faced; in the sheer size of the Atlantic Ocean, a convoy could simply disappear. Even if you knew, as the Germans did on a regular basis, where and when the convoy would be putting to sea, the potential routes that they could then sail made it difficult to track them down. This was the real reason for the success of the convoys, as Winston Churchill explained:
"The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance. There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one." [13]
If Bismarck sailed alone, it would have with it four reconnaissance aircraft, Ar 196 floatplanes, to help with the search. That was only the same number that Lütjens had had available to him for Operation Berlin, and he’d been keen for more; both to increase the area that could be searched and to provide a measure of redundancy if any were lost.[14] If Tirpitz were included in the squadron then the number of aircraft available would be doubled. Even if the gunnery on Tirpitz wasn’t up to the same standard as Bismarck, it would still provide a significant increase in firepower and add to mission flexibility. In fact including Tirpitz instead of Prinz Eugen added considerably to operational flexibility; Prinz Eugen was a heavy cruiser with a very limited fuel capacity, the squadron would have to either cruise at a slower rate of knots, or bunker fuel more often, and in all likelihood do both. Tirpitz however, was the twin of Bismarck, another battleship built with an enormous fuel capacity; consequently the squadron would be able to cruise faster and farther. This was critical, because for Kreuzerkrieg to be successful, the Germans needed to be able to out run and out range their Royal Navy opponents and this Bismarck and Tirpitz could do: cruising at 24 knots, they could both make 6,640 nautical miles; HMS King George V, the Royal Navy’s newest and most powerful battleship, could only make 6,300 nm at a cruising speed of 20 knots. Bismarck and Tirpitz really would be able to outrun anything they couldn’t outfight and outfight anything they couldn’t outrun. [15] In the end the decision was rather simple; Rheinübung had to go ahead without further delay, that ruled out Prinz Eugen, but for Rheinübung to still go ahead with any reasonable confidence of success, Bismarck could not be sent solo, therefore Tirpitz had to be included. A message was sent to a jubilant captain Topp instructing him to make his ship ready for extended sea operations by no later than 16 May.
Notes for Chapter 1:
[1] Historically, the message that was sent to London was: “Kattegat, today 20 May. At 1500, two large warships, escorted by three destroyers, five ships and ten or twelve planes, passed Marstrand to the northeast. 2058/20.” http://www.kbismarck.com/
[2] British Ministry of Food records. Thanks to the ‘Dig for victory’ campaign, rationing and other measures, the percentage of food manufactured in Britain rose to 75% by 1945.
[3] Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940 – 1943, by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6]http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignsUboats2.htm
[7] Bismarck: The Final Days of Germany’s Greatest Battleship, by Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Historically the repairs to Prinz Eugen were completed without incident and the ship fuelled and stocked with stores by 16 May, 1941.
[13] The World Crisis, by Sir Winston Spencer Churchill.
[14] Bismarck: The Final Days of Germany’s Greatest Battleship, by Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander.
[15] Specifications for Bismarck and Tirpitz: http://www.kbismarck.com/
Specifications for King George V: http://everything2.com/title/HMS+King+George+V
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