This being the second follow-up to the post at reference 2. That is to say, notice of the sinking of the Bismark (reference 1), following notice of the sinking of the Yamato (reference 3). The context of the sinking was the attempt of the brand-new Bismarck to break out of its Baltic home port, to get out into the north Atlantic to harry the British conveys, conveys on which our staying in the war depended. Given the much greater strength of the Royal Navy, secrecy was important. A mission which ran for about ten days in all, in May 1941, getting on for two years into the Second World War.
Unlike Yoshida Mitsuru, the author of this book was a talented career officer, an aristocrat from a once Alsatian family, who joined the navy at about the time that Hitler came to power. One of the many higher-class Germans who went along with Hitler’s military plans. More than went along with all the money he poured into the military. After the war, most of which he spent as a prisoner in Canada, he became a diplomat, for which see reference 4.
A different kind of book from the other, a much fuller account of the short career of the Bismarck. An account which gives a much better idea of all that was involved in bringing such a ship and its crew up to fighting fitness and what was involved in fighting it. We also get a good number of maps and illustrations. I even got a dust jacket. A book commissioned by the United States Naval Institute of Annapolis.
In the event, our Admiralty got to know about the mission more or less as soon as it got underway and stationed cruisers in what turned out to be the key position in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland to watch out for the Bismarck. Cruisers equipped with the latest radar and much better able to track the Bismarck than her commanders had reckoned with. The Bismarck had its own radar, but it was not as good and it was badly damaged by the shock of its own big guns.
Big guns which sunk the Hood – but which did not stop the Bismarck taking serious damage itself from the guns of the accompanying Prince of Wales.
Noting in passing that the lack of secrecy worked both ways: the Bismarck seemed to have no trouble reading the signals that the shadowing ships sent back to the Admiralty.
After various vicissitudes, the Royal Navy’s last chance to stop the Bismarck reaching the safety of France, was a heroic attack by carrier borne torpedo bombers, antique biplanes called Swordfish. This attack was successful in that it crippled the Bismarck’s rudder which left it easy meat the next morning for the battleships lumbering up behind.
It took about an hour for the Royal Navy to smash the Bismarck, during which time the Bismarck took massive casualties. On this account, by an officer mostly confined to his gunnery control battle-station, there was no massive break down of discipline. But by the time that abandon ship was ordered, maybe 500 men of the original 2,000 made it into the water, of whom a little more than 100 were picked up, rescue having been aborted by a U-boat scare. The Navy was not going to risk losing another big ship to a torpedo.
While there was no massive break down of discipline, the way that communications on board were handled meant that there were some big ups and downs of morale and a lot of the mainly very young crew, on their first mission, were pretty despondent about its likely outcome. A lot of hope was pinned on various, ever more unlikely possibilities. Maybe not so different from the Yamato after all: some fraction of the crew were fanatics, all for going down with all guns blazing – but most of them just went along with it because there was nothing much else that they could do. And nothing much to be gained by behaving badly. And no doubt there was some bad behaviour at the margins.
The snap above is a note sent to the author by the captain of the rescue ship on the morning after the rescue. At that time at least, martial courtesies were preserved; not like the Eastern Front at all. One wonders at the note surviving to be photographed.
Other matters
A sense that all these big battleships were much the same. The might not have standardised details like the calibre of their guns, but the designs were much of a muchness. Heavily armoured, floating gun platforms – plus the bits and bobs needed to bring those guns into action and to keep them there.
They also took a long time in the building – a big problem at a time of rapid change.
With a different line of development being the monitors deployed by our Navy during the First World War, little more than motorised barges equipped with a very large gun. With relatives being the very large guns, often naval guns, deployed on the land, mounted on special railway wagons.
Conclusions
A mission which was nothing like the suicide mission on which the Yamato was sent. This was a fighting mission to escape into the north Atlantic and there to sink British merchant ships: things only began to get sticky in the last week or so, when it was clear that the Royal Navy, at that time much larger than the German Navy, had got wind of the mission and was concentrating massive force to put a stop to it. A massive force which was more big guns than the waves of carrier borne aircraft that sunk the Yamato a few years later – but not forgetting here that it was the lucky hit by a small torpedo dropped by an antiquated biplane which sealed the Bismark’s fate.
A reminder that there is a lot of luck involved in war, both good and bad. The results of which can seem large when the chips are large – in this case huge ships carrying thousands of men. A different order of magnitude from a tank or an aeroplane.
But I am left wondering about the state of mind of an admiral – I assume it was his decision rather than the flag captain’s – to go down fighting, with only a hundred or so surviving from a complement of well over 2,000 men, mostly quite young. Why not put up a decent fight, make sure that this powerful ship, a state-of-the-art battleship, would never fight again and then surrender in good time – in time to save a much larger fraction of the crew? Would not honour be thus satisfied?
PS 1: the sort of mission, the sort of battle on which I dare say one could, one does, build war games, games involving evaluating options, weighing possibilities. Either for professionals or for boys.
PS 2: the Swordfish, if not these particular ones, were commemorated in the name of a public house in Hillhead, not far from Portsmouth which I once used to use for lunch occasionally. We may even have stayed there more recently. A public house which Bing tells me was demolished in 2004 to make way for housing.
PS 3: a week later, after a second reading: I can see now that it would be difficult to surrender a battleship in the margins of a ship battle, in wartime conditions. On the one hand, a battleship, even fighting against long odds, is capable of doing a great deal of damage, so surrender would not be very honourable. On the other, it would be hard for the person you thought to surrender to have a proper care for his own ship and to be sure that your ship was going to be taken permanently out of enemy hands. And then there might be submarines from one or both sides lurking underneath. Capturing a lightly crewed merchantman is one thing, capturing a warship stuffed with men, some more fanatic than others, is another. One could, no doubt, devise a protocol which would work, but not on the fly.
References
Reference 1: Battleship Bismark: A survivor’s story – Baron Burkhard von Müllenheim-Rechberg – 1980.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/we-germans-interim-report.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/yamato.html.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkard_Freiherr_von_M%C3%BCllenheim-Rechberg.
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