Special: To Die Gallantly

n 3 September 1939, the day Great Britain and France declared war on Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German Navy, made a grim entry in the Naval War Staff war diary. “The Kriegsmarine ... is in no way equipped for the great struggle with England,” he wrote. Although Germany could deploy a well-trained submarine force, it was far too small to exert a decisive influence. “Furthermore,” he continued,

“the surface forces are so few and so weak in comparison to the English fleet that—assuming their active employment— they can only show that they know how to die gallantly. . . .

The roots of Raeder’s pessimism lay in the treaty imposed upon a defeated Germany at Versailles in 1919. Germany’s once-formidable navy was reduced to little more than a coast guard, bereft of dreadnought battleships, submarines, and air­craft, and limited to 15,000 sailors. Soon after coming to power, Hitler announced that Germany would no longer ob­serve the treaty restrictions, and in 1935 he proceeded to ne­gotiate an agreement with Britain allowing the Kriegsmarine to build up to 35% of the strength of the Royal Navy in sur­face ships and 45% in submarines. Hitler had then informed Raeder that, for planning purposes, he could discount any possibility of war with Britain before 1944. On the basis of this assurance, Raeder had begun to construct a powerful, balanced fleet. The onset of war in 1939, therefore, caught the Kriegsmarine between two stools. Four years had not been long enough to build a balanced fleet and the time had not been spent mass-producing a sizable submarine force for which the four years would have sufficed.

As Raeder well understood, the embryonic Kriegsmarine could never challenge the Royal Navy for command of the sea. Its only possible offensive strategy was guerre de course—war on trade. In contrast to German practice in World War I, this campaign would not be entrusted wholly to U-boats and an occasional auxiliary cruiser. Raeder believed that the handful of heavy surface units could play an impor­tant if risky part, breaking out of the North Sea to attack the merchant convoys, upon which, in the final analysis, the sur­vival of Britain depended.

Operations in the opening months of the war appeared to vindicate Raeder’s surface strategy. True, the pocket battle­ship Graf Spee, caught overseas at the start of the war, came to a bad end off Montevideo; but otherwise all went well.

The only German battleships in commission, the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, broke out into the Atlantic in November 1939. Both returned safely, as did the pocket battleship Lut- zow (ex-Deutschland), which had been at sea at the outbreak of hostilities. The pocket battleship Scheer and heavy cruiser Hipper duplicated their exploit a year later, and in early 1941 the Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and Hipper made another suc­cessful sortie. Not all of these cruises were especially produc­tive in terms of tonnage sunk, but the need to guard every convoy against the appearance of heavy surface raiders strained even the Royal Navy’s resources.

Generally satisfying as these excursions had been, they paled to insignificance in comparison to the eruption that Raeder began to organize at the beginning of 1941. The sister ships Bismarck and Tirpitz, laid down in 1936, were expected to be combat-ready in late spring. At 53,000 tons full-load displacement, with a main battery of eight 38-cm. (approxi­mately 15-inch) guns and a design speed of 29 knots, they would be the most powerful battleships operational anywhere in the world. Raeder’s plan called for them to break out through the North Sea at the same time as the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst steamed from Brest, France, where they had an­chored after their latest deployment. Had this four-battleship sortie taken place, the consequences clearly would have meant mayhem in the mid-Atlantic.

Unfortunately for the Kriegsmarine, Raeder’s grand design fell apart within weeks. The Scharnhorst’s engines required a lengthy overhaul; it became evident that the Tirpitz would not be ready to go to sea until autumn; and a British bombing raid damaged the Gneisenau. These developments confronted Raeder with a difficult choice; should he postpone Exercise Rhine—as the operation has been code-named—until some of these vessels became available? Or should he let it proceed with only the Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, originally assigned to replace the Scharnhorst? In the end, he concluded that the ostensible advantage of maintaining pres­sure on the enemy outweighed the risks of sending the two ships out alone. It was to be a fatal decision. The German fleet commander, Admiral Gunther Liitjens, who would fly his flag in the Bismarck, recognized it as such. Calling on a friend before he departed, he said, “I’d like to make my farewells, I’ll never come back.”

The Bismarck steamed from Gotenhafen (now Gdynia) in company with the Prinz Eugen on 19 May 1941. From that date until her sinking eight days later, her service was a clas­sic demonstration of Murphy’s Law at sea. With the notable exception of her destruction of the famous British battle­cruiser Hood, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The security intended to enable the ships to break out unobserved disintegrated on 20 May after sightings by Royal Air Force aerial reconnaissance and the Norwegian under­ground. This intelligence contributed to the detection of the ships in the Denmark Strait by the cruisers Norfolk and Suf­folk on 22 May, which in turn led to their interception by the Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales the next day. The brief, ensuing action ended in the spectacular destruction of the Hood and the withdrawal of the Prince of Wales.

Yet the engagement was not entirely one-sided. The Bis­marck took two hits that admitted approximately 2,000 tons of sea-water into her forward compartments and cut the lines to 1,000 tons of fuel oil stored there. Moreover, the Norfolk and Suffolk, whose radar capability had come as an unwel­come surprise to the Germans, maintained contact with them. Under these circumstances, Liitjens decided to detach the Prinz Eugen to conduct cruiser warfare while setting the Bis­marck on course for St. Nazaire, France, for repairs.

The Prinz Eugen was detached on the afternoon of 24 May. Later that day, the Bismarck endured an air strike from the carrier Victorious without serious damage. At about 0300 the following morning she finally succeeded in shaking her shadowers. Assuming that the British retained radar contact, however, hours later Liitjens radioed a long situation report to Germany. His transmission allowed the British Admiralty to compute the Bismarck's position and around 1030 the follow­ing day, 26 May, she was spotted by a Catalina flying boat on patrol from Northern Ireland. The cruiser Sheffield ap­peared on the horizon shortly thereafter.

Even so, at midday the Bismarck seemed to have every prospect of eluding the huge dragnet the Admiralty had cast to avenge the Hood. Of the two-score vessels deployed to in­tercept the German ship, the only one with any chance of stopping her was the aircraft carrier Ark Royal. At 1450, the Ark Royal launched 15 Fairey Swordfish—the same lumber­ing, open-cockpit, canvas-covcrcd “Stringbags” that had dev­astated the Italian battle line at Taranto the previous No­vember—which mistakenly attacked the Sheffield. The cruiser escaped unscathed, but by the time the planes could recover, rearm, refuel, and launch again, it was 1915. One way or another, the fate of the Bismarck would be decided by this sortie, the last to have a serious chance of finding her in the gathering dusk. If the Stringbags could cripple their quarry, British battleships coming up astern might overtake her. If they failed to do so, dawn would find the Bismarck safely closing the coast of France and under the cover of German land-based aircraft.

But they did not fail. Courageously pressing their attacks, British aircrews put three torpedoes into the Bismarck. Two exploded almost harmlessly against her sturdy sides. The third jammed her rudders 12° to port, leaving the battleship turning great circles in the sea. The Germans’ attempt to make good the damage or to overcome it by steering with the engines proved futile. In order to maintain steerage way, the Bismarck had to head into a heavy wind blowing out the northwest—the direction from which her pursuers were ap­proaching.

Although the first of these forces, a destroyer squadron, made contact with the Bismarck around 2300, neither side suffered any damage in an intermittent action that flickered throughout the night. The real battle began a few minutes before 0900 on 27 May, when the battleships Rodney and King George V and cruisers Dorsetshire and Norfolk closed in for the kill. Concentrating her fire on the Rodney, the Bis­marck shot superbly at first, bracketing her target with her third salvo, but moments later her main fire-control was de­stroyed, a blow from which her gunnery never recovered.

Both the other fire-control stations had been disabled by 0913. The last 38-cm. turret, firing under local control, fell silent at 0931. By then, the mighty Bismarck had been re­duced to a smoking ruin. About a half-hour later, orders were given to scuttle and abandon ship. The Dorsetshire assisted in the Bismarck’s immolation, closing to within 3,000 meters and firing three torpedoes between 1020 and 1036. The Bis­marck disappeared beneath the waves at 1039. Down with her she took the wreck of Raeder’s surface strategy. Never again would a major German fleet unit threaten Britain’s Atlantic convoys.

Of the more than 2,200 men on board the Bismarck, possi­bly 800 made it into the water. British ships rescued 110 be­fore an erroneous report of a periscope sighting caused them the leave the scene. Later a U-boat saved three men; a Ger­man weather ship picked up two more. The survivors did not include Admiral Liitjens or the Bismarck's commander, Cap­tain Ernst Lindemann. A survivor remembered seeing Lin- demann standing on the stem of his sinking ship, his hand raised in salute to the quarterdeck, as she went down. “I always thought such things happened only in books,” the seaman recalled, “but 1 saw it with my own eyes.” In one respect, the Bismarck had certainly fulfilled Raeder’s expecta­tions. She had showed that she knew how to die gallantly.

For Further Reading: Robert D. Ballard, with Rick Arch­bold, The Discovery of the Bismarck (New York: Warner/ Madison Press, 1990); Baron Burkard von Miillenheim- Rechberg, Battleship Bismarck: A Survivor’s Story, trans.

Jack Sweetman, second edition (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990); Ludovic Kennedy, Pursuit: The Chase and Sinking of the Bismarck (London: Collins, 1974).

Dr. Sweetman is a member of the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, naval historian, and author.