De Form Sl 1917: Fill & Download for Free

Liége in Belgium, on 6 August 1914, bombed by a German Zeppelin.The city commands the railway crossing over the River Meuse, and it was absolutely vital that the Germans capture it quickly if they were to keep to the timetable of the Schlieffen Plan. The Belgian government had fortified the city with a ring of 12 concrete forts encircling it, defended by 30,000 troops.The Liége forts in 1914(The city’s name was spelled as Liége in 1914. In 1946 it was changed to Liège.)The Germans had prepared a specially trained assault force to seize the city by a surprise attack on the night of 5 August. The plan was to infiltrate inside the fortress ring, capture the city centre, and then hopefully the isolated forts would surrender. If they did not, then heavy artillery would have to be brought up to destroy them one by one.However, when the German forces advanced into Belgium they immediately met with heavy resistance: much more determined than they had expected. It quickly became clear to General Emmich, commanding the assault force, that he had lost the benefit of surprise. He sent a message to the commander of the Liége garrison demanding surrender, but received a defiant response.Accordingly, the German attack began at 2:30 am in the small hours of 6 August. It was a failure: the German troops were driven back with heavy casualties.It was at this point that the bombing raid on Liége was carried out. The motive may have been to try and demoralise the Belgian defenders by subjecting them to this unfamiliar form of attack.This is LZ 24, built six months later than the Zeppelin which attacked LiégeZeppelin LZ 21 had been manufactured in November 1913 and acquired by the German army, which gave it the designation Z VI. It was based at Cologne, and its primary duty was reconnaissance. On the afternoon of 6 August, however, its crew loaded it up with bombs. These were improvised from artillery shells, since purpose-made bombs had not yet been developed.The airship made its way down the Rhine and across to Liége, and dropped its bombs on the city centre. Nine civilians were killed.A few days later, a German publishing house in Munich (Albert Ebner Kunstanstalt) produced this celebratory postcard to commemorate the attack. ('Lüttich' is the German form of the name Liége.)Hurrah for our Zeppelin!However, LZ 21 did not survive its victory over the Belgian civilians. The airship had been forced to fly low due to the weight of the bombs it was carrying, and it was hit several times by ground fire. The gasbags started leaking hydrogen, and by the time the Zeppelin was heading back to base, it had lost too much gas to remain airborne. LZ 21 made a forced landing near Bonn and was destroyed on impact.The following night, however, a staff officer named Erich Ludendorff took over command of a German brigade when its own commander was killed, and successfully led it through the fortress ring into the centre of the city. By 7 August Ludendorff had captured the main citadel of Liége, an achievement for which he was awarded Germany's highest medal for gallantry and a promotion to chief of staff of the 8th Army in East Prussia. The surrounding forts still then had to be shelled to destruction, which took another two weeks.The aerial attack on Liége inspired further attacks. Two bombing raids were carried out on Antwerp on 25 August and 2 September, again by airships. The Germans also carried out the first bombing raid on a national capital, on 30 August 1914, using a heavier-than-air aircraft.On that day Lieutenant Ferdinand von Hiddessen flew his Taube monoplane to Paris, and dropped five small homemade bombs over the side of his cockpit onto the Quai de Valmy. He killed two civilians, both women. He also dropped a note demanding that the inhabitants of Paris should surrender immediately. (They didn't.)Taube aircraft similar to the one which bombed Paris in August 1914Several more such attacks were carried out over the rest of 1914. The Allies were slow to respond: it was not until December 1914 that France first bombed a German city, Freiburg. These bombing raids were all small-scale and caused little damage, but had a great morale effect.On 7 January 1915, Kaiser Wilhelm gave authorisation for the first ever full-scale bombing campaign against enemy cities. The target was Britain, since the Germans were frustrated that behind the shield of the Royal Navy Britain seemed secure from attack. Bombing raids by Zeppelins would bring home to the British people that they were not immune to the trials of war.The Kaiser did order his air force not to target London, apparently because he was worried about his royal relatives there being caught in the destruction. However, on 12 February this prohibition was lifted.During the course of 1915, German airships carried out a total of 20 successful bombing raids on England. (Other raids were turned back by bad weather.) The Zeppelins dropped 37 tons of bombs and inflicted 636 casualties including 181 killed.While these numbers seem tiny compared to the massed air raids of the Second World War, they had a great psychological effect on a population entirely unused to such a novel method of warfare. The Zeppelins floated high in the sky, out of reach of any defences, and rained down death on the cities below.Kings Lynn, Norfolk, scene of the first Zeppelin attack on England in 1915It was not until 3 September 1916, nearly two years after the Zeppelin raids began, that the British finally managed to shoot down one of the attacking airships. William Leefe Robinson, flying a BE-2c, emptied three drums of ammunition into the airship SL 11 and managed to set it on fire; it crashed with no survivors. For this feat Leefe Robinson was hailed as a national hero and awarded the Victoria Cross.Leefe Robinson’s feat became the subject of numerous artist’s impressionsThe Germans continued the bombing campaign, but now they started to suffer casualties of their own as the defences became more effective. It was decided to switch to using twin-engined bombers rather than airships, which would be less vulnerable. A special unit was set up for the purpose: officially the High Command Battle Squadron 3 (Kampfgeschwader der Obersten Heeresleitung 3, Kagohl 3) but unofficially the 'England Squadron'.Its first mission was flown on 25 May 1917, as 23 Gotha bombers attacked London. Heavy cloud cover forced them to attack a secondary target instead, Folkestone, and they caused 390 casualties. Their third mission managed to reach London, on 13 June. This inflicted 594 casualties, including 162 deaths. Those killed included 18 children who died when a bomb fell on their school.Over the entire course of the First World War the German air force launched 78 air raids on British cities, causing 4,722 casualties including 1,392 dead and inflicting around £3 million in property damage (£1.7 billion in equivalent economic cost value today).German Gotha V bomber preparing for a missionAttacks were also carried out by both sides on other fronts, but for the most part these were directed, at least nominally, against military targets: supply dumps, bridges, railway stations and so forth. (In practice, given the inaccuracy of bombing methods in the day, civilians were by no means immune to attack.) The German air campaign against England was the only deliberate sustained attack on civilian targets between 1915 and 1918.In June 1918, however, Britain formed the Independent Air Force of heavy bombers, with the express purpose of retaliating by attacking German cities and industrial targets. In five months it dropped 560 tons of bombs on Germany. Britain was even developing a four-engined bomber, the Handley Page V/1500, with sufficient range to drop three tons of bombs per aircraft onto Berlin itself. The first of these bombers entered service on 8 November 1918, and on the morning of 11 November a flight of three of them was just warming up its engines for its first attack on Berlin when news reached them that Germany had surrendered.British Handley Page V/1500(For the record, the first city to be bombarded by artillery was Belgrade, on 29 July 1914. A river monitor of the Austro-Hungarian Danube Flotilla fired the first shots of the war.)

Edit: Since this answer has drawn some attention, I paste in below a 24(!) page treatment of Rheinubung I wrote fifteen years ago or so, and have put up on the Interwebs elsewhere. It is heavily based on Rhys-Jones, so if you want the real story, go there. It was also originally written as the operational section of a “chapter” that had already grown to over 70 pages, with a 51(!!) page treatment of interwar industrial and technical developments.This was, as you might expect, the point where I started asking myself whether anyone was interested in a 2000 page “If I Were a Boy, I Would Run Away to the Air”: Britain in World War II, An Industrial History of StrategyI hope it makes some of the issues of the Rhine Undertaking more clear.It would have been the naval-operational crisis of the Second World War. As Churchill told the people, we have to sink the Bismarck. However, the Kriegsmarine’s window of opportunity was running out pretty quickly due to the rapid development of naval radar and air strike capabilities. As it was, Sheffield’s ability to shadow Bismarck from outside visual range was a very unpleasant surprise for Luetjens and Raeder, and led to the decision to abort Rheinuebung even before Ark Royal’s air group crippled the battleship.Naval operational warfare was a surprisingly complicated business before the satellite age. If you can track down a copy of Graham Rhys-Jones’ The Loss of the Bismarck: An Avoidable Disaster.If you’ve followed my links (honestly, who does that?) you’ll see that I’ve cheekily linked to Johnny Horton’s novelty hit, “Sink the Bismarck.” Much as I hate to say this about the songwriter behind “Battle of New Orleans,” I think that that silly, silly song is right about what was at stake. Had the Germans been able to simultaneously sortie Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Gneisnau, they might have been able to win World War II.(Hopefully we’d have the sense to put the blame where it belongs, on Andrew Cunningham and his habit of getting carriers into fender benders.)Because of its insular status, every British war is a naval war, but some are more so than others. In WWI the navy apparently spent most of its time at harbour in Scapa Flow, and its presence in the Boer and Crimean Wars was even less obvious. WWII changed that, with every branch of the Royal Navy strained to its limits in a battle for survival against the German war on trade, and later to reassert Britain’s great power status and earn continued American Lend-Lease by taking a place in the final battle with the Japanese in the Pacific. Convoy actions, coastal forces dogfights in the North Sea and elsewhere, the great Pacific air-sea battles, the quiet and patient struggle of the minesweepers; these were the most characteristic, difficult and important types of naval actions in 1939–45. But long before that, in the spring of 1941, the Royal Navy faced the prospect that had loomed before it since 1914 as its most serious threat: a modern navy, securely based along the coast of France, the Netherlands and Germany due to German land victories, directed against Britain’s Atlantic trade. The German navy of 1941 was, to be sure, small. But naval tacticians who had studied the issues argued that there were ways in which a small navy could exploit Britain’s enormous vulnerabilities and defeat that nation by a joint air-sea “siege” of the British Isles. The idea was made all the more attractive to the German commander-in-chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder by his knowledge that Germany, for once deprived of a land enemy and compelled to turn to its navy as the senior strategic partner, was about to acquire a new continental enemy when it invaded Russia on 22 June. More importantly, that war would be fought with “conventional” naval forces, with capital ships and cruisers alongside submarines and offensive mining forces, albeit with the former unconventionally deployed. Past experience might have suggested that battleships such as Bismarck would be a far less effective siege weapon than some others that came to hand, but Raeder had taken up all the new weapons of naval warfare before unleashing his battleships, and one by one the new weapons had fallen short. Only the battleship was left, and by 28 May 1941, it was clear that in materiel terms the German navy had been large enough to prosecute its siege and either drive Britain out of the war, or, more likely draw the United States into it. It would also be clear that in this, the kind of war that Whitehall had long prepared to fight, Britain’s engineering resources had been able to close the door of vulnerability and defeat Germany in spite of what proved in the end to be a razor-thin margin of error.This point was brought home with final force by the outcome of Rheinübung, Bismarck’s fatal 21–6 May sortie into the Atlantic. The tragic outcome of this battle, the one that the German navy had to win, was the rock on which the hopes of the German Naval High Command, OKM, had foundered. Paradoxically, Germany’s opportunity had begun with its ally’s loss. The German navy was too small to defeat its enemy, but fortunately, it had a stronger naval partner drawing off a large proportion of British naval power; Italy. And even stranger, Germany’s prospects were built up on a year of Italian disaster. Italy’s first year of war had been a disaster, with industrial shortcomings and economic constraints limiting the effectiveness of its naval forces and permitting the British Mediterranean Fleet to fight an aggressive forward strategy. Compounding strategic error with political, the Italian government precipitated Greece into the war, permitting the Commonwealth to establish a naval base at Suda Bay on Crete. With Italy’s economy dependent upon coastal shipping, an enemy naval base hard by its shores on Crete (but outside of bomber range) was a potentially lethal threat, and this and other matters made a German-led invasion of Greece, followed by an attack on Crete. Faced with this threat to its Mediterranean windfall, the Admiralty adopted an even more aggressive approach, opting to deploy the Mediterranean Fleet in the Aegean to interdict amphibious forces operating from Greece and Italy, and forcing a climactic confrontation between air and seapower. Even as Rheinübung was going on in the west, this terrible battle raged on in the eastern Mediterranean, distracting the Admiralty and, with its heavy casualties, establishing the context for risking operational losses in the Atlantic. On 21 May 1941, with Bismarck, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen making their final preparations for their sortie, the Mediterranean Fleet stood out from Alexandria with a force 3 battleships, 1 aircraft carrier, 12 cruisers, and 20 destroyers. A gun line was required, for the Italians might sortie, but if they did not, the main enemy would be the Luftwaffe, and this was how things developed, In a battle that lasted 10 days, the RN was to lose 2 battleships, 1 carrier, 7 cruisers, and 14 destroyers damaged, and 3 cruisers and 6 destroyers sunk. The Mediterranean Fleet retired from the Aegean on the 24th, but incurred many of its casualties later during the evacuation of Crete. It was a severe defeat, but not entirely one-sided. So fierce had been the air-sea battles that many of the warships sunk, and particularly the cruisers, were not seriously damaged until they had run out of AA ammunition, while the Luftwaffe wrote off 300 aircraft, equally divided between transports and combat aircraft, less than a month before Barbarossa.Raeder’s 1941 siege, unlike the continuing effort that followed, did not depend entirely on the submarine, but did not ignore it, either. The submarine force had pushed Britain to the edge in 1917 and the potential that would lead to its emergence which would emerge as the greatest naval threat to Britain’s survival in WWII was already clear. The difficulty was that there were not enough submarines, and British ASW forces had proven too tough in recent months. British shipping had been hit hard in the first weeks of the war, and far more seriously in the summer and fall of 1940, but the successes of these campaigns had proven short-lived and far from decisive, no matter how damaging. In the course of the winter of 1940–41, the number of submarines at sea fell under the pressure of losses, dispersal, and training evan as the Royal Navy was recovering from its heavy casualties in the spring of 1940 and solving the maintenance problems of its expanding force, driving escort availability rates from 50% in February 1941 to 65% in June.[i] Sinking rates declined dramatically as German chief of submarines, future Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, was forced to order his submarines further out into the Atlantic where both resistance and pickings were weaker. Dönitz’s prewar bet that British sonar was not infallible had been correct, but he had still gravely underestimated its effectiveness in inshore waters, and just as improving spring weather eased operational difficulties, the British escort force began to show truly unexpected fight. In the 17 days 2–19 March 1941, the Germans lost 5 submarines, 25% of the operational force, and an additional two boats were heavily damaged in action. At OKM some suspected that the Royal Navy had stolen a technological march, but the consensus rejected this pessimism. In fact, the pessimists were right. Type 286M radar, rushed into service and deployed at sea only months before, had played a critical role in wounding the submarine force. Although not all convoy battles in the spring of 1941 ended well for the escorts, this was cold comfort to Submarine Command, which had to concede that with only 3 months to go before Barbarossa, the underwater arm was nowhere close to liquidating the western front.[ii]Before the war, most commentators, taking their cue from the defeat of the German submarines in 1918, had predicted that the main threat to British trade would come from the air. As with so many other predictions of immediate airborne Armageddon, the outbreak of war proved anticlimactic, as the German air force was busy defeating Poland –and losing 10% of its force to combat and operational losses in the process. Matters therefore remained quiet until after the fall of France, which brought the Luftwaffe to the shores of the Channel and North Sea, in close range of Britain’s east coast shipping routes. Raeder thought these inshore waters a poor theatre for siege warfare, since much of the coastal shipping was carrying domestic British production rather than imports, preferring strategic bombing attacks on ocean ports, including London. Unfortunately, the Luftwaffe’s commitment to the siege was less than total. During the Battle of Britain in particular it “dispersed” its efforts against many other targets rather than concentrating on Raeder’s siege. Nevertheless, on 17 September 1940, two days after the famous day fighting over London on Battle of Britain Day, German aircraft inaugurated a night bombing campaign against Liverpool, Britain’s largest import/export port. Aircraft returned to Liverpool on 8 more nights in September, but not yet in sufficient strength. Really heavy attacks had to wait for the second half of November, which also saw heavy attacks on the western Channel port of Bristol. The Liverpool docks were heavily hit and the London, Midlands, and Scotland railway station behind the docks flooded , the bombs thus being more successful in destroying and delaying cargo on land than while still aboard ship. The Welsh ports of Cardiff and Swansea, the western Channel/naval bases of Portsmouth and Southampton, and the London docks were hit in January, while on 12 March the raiders finally had a real success against Liverpool, with 340 bombers sinking 2 ships as a prelude to an early May attack that “devastated” the docks and sank 80,000 tons of shipping while blocking about half the port’s more than 300 berths. In the second week of March the bombers attacked Glasgow with 280 aircraft, but revealed the limits of the campaign. Glasgow was the second largest city in Britain and a huge port, but it lay at the extreme limit of effective bomber range. Despite numerous sorties, it proved impossible to substantially damage, unlike the naval port towns of Plymouth and Devonport, levelled in April raids that nevertheless did little damage to the actual docks even as the Royal Navy was dealing similar damage against the new German base of Brest opposite. With the coming of summer the possibilities of successful night attacks would decline with the lengthening days, and with those possibilities went the Luftwaffe’s contribution to Raeder’s siege.It would be even better to attack ocean convoys in the Western Approaches, but the Luftwaffe lacked specialised aircraft for this role –not suprisingly, as we have seen. As a substitute for the operational solution that could not and did not yet exist, in the course of 1939–40 the air force obtained a supply of the prewar four-engined Focke Wulf 200 “Condor” long range transport aircraft. Despite its makeshift status, from their first effective sortie on 20 February 1941, the FW 200 earned an impressive reputation as a direct antishipping weapon, but lacking the capacity to supply accurate navigational fixes for the submarine arm, they had limited value as a reconnaissance tool, while low availability rates prevented them from sustaining a strong air offensive on their own. Raeder responded with ill-considered anti-Luftwaffe invective, but the truth was that real successes for this strategy could only follow massive infrastructural investment on navigational training and equipment, and on meteorological services, and ideally the replacement of the FW 200 with a safer aircraft designed for military operations. None of this was forthcoming any time soon, leaving the FW 200, like the Luftwaffe’s more conventional bombing arm, to fall short of the ambitions of the most enthusiastically air minded.[iii]Meanwhile, the real naval cooperation branch of the Luftwaffe soldiered on prosecuting the siege with the most effective weapon in its inventory, the air-dropped mine. In November 1939, emboldened by the early success of the dip-needle magnetic mine developed in Germany in 1932 on the model of a British design used in 1918, Admiral Raeder ordered a deployment surge to ensure that the available stock was used before the British instituted effective sweeping measures. Since existing surface force, and even more submarine, laying capacity was limited by operational considerations, he ordered that aircraft laying begin. Understandably, he was concerned that night laying would soon lead to the British recovering mines, which it duly did on 23 November 1939, the third night of laying, with 77 mines delivered. The German magnetic mine was a type of ground influence weapons, invulnerable to conventional sweeping methods, but the hydrostatic limitations of conventional mines are such that in the German weapon’s case even this very large weapon was not effective when laid in more than c. 15 fathoms of depth. This limited its use to coastal waters, and off the east coast of England meant in effect that they often had to be dropped into narrow channels between shoals and mud flats. These narrow channels made the mines more effective, but also made their recovery from the flats virtually inevitable once air laying began. Moreover, November is a bad time to launch an air campaign involving long, low speed night flying over North Sea waters. By January, the Luftwaffe naval air arm was grounded for three months. This did not mean that the magnetic (or conventional) mining campaign ceased, and in any case it wasted few opportunities, as German magnetic mine production was low, perhaps due to the great manufacturing difficulties experienced with the high precision dip needle firing mechanism.The delay was to have fatal consequences. HMS Vernon had designed an experimental magnetic sweep even before the outbreak of war based on the British magnetic activator, but having no idea what particular kind of magnetic, or indeed acoustic or pressure actuators might be encountered in wartime, the device was understandably not rushed into service. Once it became clear in September that the Germans were using influence mines, a series of more energetic, if rather scattered experiments were pressed forward, but it was the recovery of two German magnetic mines on 23 November that gave purpose to the original investigations and triggered rapid defensive action. Once its mechanism was understood, effective defence measures both passive (the installation of magnetic-field wiping degaussing equipment on merchant ships and warships at considerable material cost) and active –the deployment of a specialised anti dip-needle “LL” sweep from mid-February 1940-- were put in place. By the time the Luftwaffe returned to the attack, LL sweep-equipped craft were numerous enough to contain the magnetic mine threat. The German naval and air high commands had evidently counted on having at least a year before the British implemented effective countermeasures, which seems rather insouciant, but once they realised that the magnetic mine had lost its full early war effectiveness they ordered more elaborate designs that considerably complicated the sweeping task, and in August the first magnetic-acoustic mine was delivered. Acoustic sweeping began in December 1940, and since the Germans did not deploy a pressure mine until June of 1944 (having held it in reserve to meet the invasion), this ended the period of German attempts at overcoming British defences by qualitative means. The mine warfare campaign never ended, nor was it a failure, but by the spring of 1941 it was an attritional struggle pitting minesweepers against minelayers with merchant shipping losses closely managed. Although it might be added that the actual imports lost due to mine-caused delays were more significant than the shipping losses would suggest.[iv]As the submarines, mines, and naval air arm had all failed to bring the siege of Britain to a close in good time, Grand Admiral Raeder was left to look to his surface arm. In the first year of the war the warships of the German navy had made little contribution to the war against trade, understandably considering that it had instead been committed to the invasion of Norway and the susequent abortive Sealion mobilisation instead. Only after the definitive cancellation of Sealion was Raeder able to muster full ship complements for the recently repaired veterans of the Norway campaign and begin his long planned war on British trade, now with access to the whole coast of Europe from Norway to Biscay, and above all to the French ports and bases that had been designed for just this use, albeit by the French navy, not the German. There remained only the question of effective use of the weapon.Over the previous two decades, operating under the constraint of the most restrictive of all qualitative and quantitative naval limitation clauses, those of the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans had built up a remarkable little navy. Wishing above all to normalise its international relations by such expedients as forcing its way into the Washington Treaty regime, the leaders of the Weimar Republic had approved a series of warship that, by a tour de force of machinery design, gave their minute, Versailles-restricted cruisers and battleships a worldwide range. But this triumph had a downside, for it was achieved by the use of novel high-speed diesel engines. To the outside world, compelled to plan on the basis of the worst case, it was a given that the Germans had made remarkable strides in designing plants that overcame the inevitable severe vibration problems and realised in practice the theoretical economic advantages of the diesel cycle, always a problem in military applications. Within the German navy, those problems were admitted, but evidently slighted. That was not to say that they seriously believed their 6,000 ton light cruisers had the intercontinental range claimed for them in the international press, but when in the later 30s the naval high command evolved its siege strategy, it was accepted that at least the three 12,000–14,000 ton “pocket battleships,” including Admiral Scheer, built during Weimar would be used as commerce raiders in distant waters to stretch the patrol resources of the Royal Navy. In fact, at least the first of the class, Lützow, proved too unreliable to sustain a steady pace of operations. As a result, although one, Admiral Scheer, ended a long and effective patrol just before Rheinübung, Lützow, was not available for operations. Had he been able to been able replace Scheer and continue its excellent work stretching Commonwealth cruiser deployments, Raeder would have made a substantial contribution to the effectiveness of Bismarck’s raid.In 1935 German designers, dissatisfied with the pocket battleships, improved on this concept with a pair of battlecruisers, the legendary 31,300 ton, 160,000 hp, 32 knot, 9 11" gun “battlecruisers” Scharnhorst and Gneisnau. Announced as 26,000 ton battleships, these much larger ships were in the tradition of the German battlecruisers of WWI in that while they protected only a little less heavily than the Bismarck, they had an excellent turn of speed, gained at the expense of main armament. The battlecruisers were expected make long Atlantic cruises, evading battleships while obliterating convoys with their cruiser and destroyer escorts (their protection would suffice to shrug off a few lucky battleship hits if they happened on an Allied battleship in poor visibility conditions). Yet their potential for mayhem was again fatally compromised by overreaching engine design. This time it was not diesels, but an otherwise conventional steam turbine plant operating its steam at a radically high temperature and high pressure. It was a spectacularly ill-advised move, for the new plants, intended to save weight and space for other capabilities, in fact absorbed more space than their British equivalents, and proved cramped and flimsy in operation, guaranteeing a poor reliability that was on frequent exhibit during Rheinübung, an operation in which Bismarck gradually lost the support of a heavy cruiser and two battlecruisers to successive mechanical casualties and resulting vicissitudes. The final German construction programme to play a role in Rheinubüng were a class of very powerful 14,000t heavy cruisers that easily overmatched the British 8" cruisers and thus presented serious problems to the Admiralty, which had to seriously consider escorting exposed convoys with 2 8" cruisers in order to guarantee superior fighting power. However, they were even more seriously handicapped by the same machinery problems that limited the battlecruisers, although one, the Prinz Eugen, accompanied Bismarck. Also playing a role in Admiralty fears but not OKM calculations were the light cruisers mentioned earlier, two never-completed heavy cruisers and an aircraft carrier, and some destroyers that were never practically Atlantic-capable, even had they not been hampered by the same kind of machinery that lamed the cruisers.[v]The Germans and Italians also equipped a fleet of converted merchant ships as commerce raiders. These ships, heavily armed with hand-operated 6" guns and torpedo tubes concealed by dummy deck installations, had been commonly suggested in the prewar period. In action they proved quite capable of sinking a cruisers if they were allowed to approach close enough, although by the same token a number were involved in fiascos due to their lack of armoured protection, which in extreme cases led to two commerce raiders being beaten off with heavy damage by the gunfire of an Allied freighter and an 800 ton minesweeper. But this was not their purpose, which was to use subterfuge to stalk and capture or sink independently routed Allied freighters in distant waters, thereby forcing the Allies to disperse cruisers and perhaps institute convoys, leading to serious loss of patrol and shipping capacity. Unfortunately, there was an inevitable tension in this mission, in that the British would not take countermeasures unless they were aware of the raiders, and the raiders’ only hope of safety was concealment. Nonetheless, this was the peak of the raiding war, with nine raiders on the loose, dispersing British cruisers worldwide. Supporting these ships on their long cruises, the German navy operated a large force of tankers and supply ships on the open ocean, severalof which were diverted to support Bismarck. Also vital to the Bismarck’s sortie was a small fleet of weather ships, supported by Axis submarines.Raeder’s siege concept as it developed after the postponement of the invasion of Britain in September 1940 called for an escalating series of attacks on the British Commonwealth’s worldwide maritime communication network, culminating with the first joint sortie of Bismarck and Tirpitz in the fall of 1941. The first blow was landed by the first German warship to become sea ready after September, the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, which slipped through the Denmark Straits between Iceland and Greenland in October 1940. The Strait was an ideal body of water for such operations. It had severe weather, short winter days, poor flying conditions, and floating ice to confuse lookouts, restrict operations, especially of thin hulled destroyers, and force caution on navigators. As a result, Scheer had little difficulty making its passage in the wake of the raiders and supply ships. Once in the Atlantic, Scheer “annnounced” her breakout by attacking an Atlantic convoy with some success. OKM, looking forward to a steady ascent towards the battleship crescendo, was well pleased with its first movement. Scheer was directed to cruise for the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, where it would wreak havoc by taking independent freighters, picking on a particular sore spot by threatening the numerous Commonwealth troop convoys on their way to the Middle East from the Indian Ocean dominions and India. It was crucial that Scheer not be left the sole focus of the Royal Navy for very long, and the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper sortied to distract the Royal Navy, but a mechanical casualty quickly cut the cruiser’s speed below the safety margin, causing it to abort towards Brest. On its way, on 25 December Hipper encountered a heavily escorted outbound Middle East convoy and fought a brief and ineffectual action with it that understandably focussed British attention on this supposedly dangerous German unit and the fortress port of Brest, diverting resources to establish a blockade squadron. Scharnhorst and Gneisna sortied under the command of the analytic Admiral Gunther Lütjens and a staff whose size and effectiveness (typical of the flagships of the era) is a striking change from the universal practice of the Jutland era. Lütjens reached the coast of Norway on 31 December, the same week that the seventh German merchant raider successfully passed the Straits outward, but storm damage forced the squadron to abort for repair. Scheer was on its own for the interim. The battlecruisers made their next attempt south of Iceland rather than through the Straits. They did so with great caution, knowing that they had been spotted early in their passage, and that the Luftwaffe had been unable to locate the British Home Fleet. Was it at sea? In the early morning of 28 January, the battlecruisers’ radar detected unknown contacts on both quarters that in the ensuing hours closed as near as 7,000 yards, but visibility was such that both sides had to depend on radar, and the British cruisers were unable to vector the Home Fleet onto the Germans before they turned north and broke contact. Lütjens passed through the Straits into the Atlantic on 3 February, while simultaneously, Hipper left port. At last the pressure was off Scheer. In the first two weeks of February Lütjens was casting for British convoys in the central north Atlantic, where intelligence analysis suggested that the two old British battleships based in Halifax for convoy duties turned back to Halifax, leaving the convoys to proceed independently. This conclusion was proven incorrect when on the 8th Lütjens encountered HX 109 with the 27,500 ton, 42,000 hp, 23 knot, 8 15" gun 1912 battleship Ramillies in company.[vi]Ramillies was not escorting a convoy because the Admiralty had chosen it for the front line. On the contrary, it and its three surviving Revenge-class sisters were the least valuable battleships in the King’s fleet. Originally designed for firepower and resilience on the line of battle, they had formidable protection, armament, and speed by WWI standards, but unlike the other WWI-era battleships selected for retention in WWII, the Revenge‑class had not been designed as particularly fast ships. The difference between the fast and slow battleships of the 1916 era was relatively minor, but the difference in plant weight and volume required to achieve that speed difference was significant, and when it came time to refit the WWI battleships for a third decade of life, it was possible to reduce machinery weight by half and volume by one third. In the 5 fast battleships of the Queen Elizabeth and in particular in the two Renown-class battlecruisers the weight and volume thereby saved permitted a substantial improvement in tactical capabilities,[vii] but there was far less to be gained in upgrading the Revenge-class, and this was never done. As a result, Ramillies retained its WWI-era fire control, 15m elevation main turrets, and WWI armour scheme. Despite its appearance of stolid impregnability, a gunnery duel between Ramillies and the battlecruisers had a far from certain outcome, but the Germans were under instructions to avoid excessive risks, and one lucky 15" hit could prove exactly that.The sudden appearance of a three-turreted German capital ship (only one battlecruiser was spotted) off one of its convoys in the Atlantic left the Admiralty to reconcile conflicting data. Unaware that the German battlecruisers were out, it was straining its cruiser force to hunt the three-turret Scheer, believed to be in the Indian Ocean, while on 12 February, Hipper, which could also look deceptively like either Scheer or Scharnhorst in poor visibility, devastated another convoy in the vicinity of Gibraltar before running into Brest again. (Another highlight of this operation was a failed attempt at air-sea cooperation with a FW 200.) Meanwhile, Lütjens’ squadron, on the basis of a newly developed staff appreciation, moved west. Radio and air searches by onboard aircraft bore fruit on the night of 21/ 22 February, when radar led the battlecruisers to a previously-detected outbound convoy that had just dispersed to their various North American ports. Radio jamming prevented reports getting out, and the convoy was destroyed, but the difficulty of the operation brought home to Lütjens the fact that a 2 ship search line was just too small to locate convoys, and that the air outfit of his force was inadequate, particularly because the battlecruiser design did not provide a hangar for routine maintenance out of the fierce weather. Meanwhile, simple human strains were severely restricting operations, to the point that the next phase of operations consisted of a rest break, a planned 5 days in the sun southwest of the Azores, with the 24 February order of the day calling for “today, sleep, fully clothed in hammocks, tomorrow undressed.”[viii] This south Atlantic idyll was cut short, however, when his onboard intelligence division correctly suggested that by a prompt move to the southeast he might catch a Middle East convoy.In the interim, Admiral Scheer’s luck had almost turned. On 22 February, an aircraft operating from the British cruiser Glasgow found the German raider off the east coast of Africa. Staying skillfully out of range of Scheer’s AA, the aircraft’s pilot homed in Glasgow and no less than 6 other British, Australian, and New Zealand cruisers, as well as the older British carrier Hermes and RAF reconnaissance aircraft. Glasgow was unable to relieve its aircraft in time, and Scheer eluded the British over the next few days. It was an uncomfortable reminder of just how difficult it could be to track a solitary raider.Lütjens’ command intercepted the northbound SL 67 off the northwestern coast of Africa on 8 March, but found that the convoy had picked up the battleship Malaya at Freetown for escort through Hipper’s waters. This 27,500 ton, 75,000 hp, 25 knot , 8 15" gun member of the 5 ship 1912 Queen Elizabeth class had not had the engine upgrade carried out on others of its class, but had been improved by increased armour in some areas, an improved anti-aircraft armament, and most importantly, aircraft equipment. Once again the battlecruisers were spotted, this time by one of Malaya’s embarked Fairey Swordfish Torpedo/Spotter/Reconnaissance aircraft, but Malaya was far too slow to overtake them. Damaged by submarine torpedo soon after, Malaya took no further part in the spring campaign.This was not true of the fast task force that responded to Malaya’s alert, the fast carrier task force based on Gibraltar, Force H, built up around the modern fast carrier, Ark Royal and the battlecruiser Renown. Renown was the elder of an extraordinary pair of 1915 27,000 ton, 112,000 hp, 30 knot, 6 15" gun battlecruisers. The power plant required to generate 112,000 hp with Admiralty-approved machinery was enormous, and accommodating it had required reduction of the armament to 3 turrets, and armour was reduced to a minimal 6" maximum belt, compared to 13" for the Revenges. The Battle of Jutland revealed this as blatantly inadequate, and interim refits consumed significant money and time in 1916–20. Finally, a full-scale and very expensive £2.5 million engine refit that involved opening up the ship to the point where it could be said without exaggeration that there was nothing but the keel plating left of the original hull, allowed Renown to take heavier armour, improved anti-aircraft armament, and turrets modified to increase maximum elevation to 40m, greatly increasing its gun range, and the new fire control.[ix] When the battlecruisers clashed in a pursuit battle off Norway in 1940, Renown scored on Gneisnau at 19,000 yards, an experience that no doubt helped shape future German tactical caution. (At the time the Germans were not being unreasonably cautious, given that there was a whole flotilla of torpedo-laden British destroyers wallowing through heavy seas behind Renown.) Renown, despite its expensive history as a dockyard queen, was one of the Royal Navy’s indispensable warships in the first years of the war, operating at a peak efficiency with Admiral Somerville’s Force H and spending almost a full year at sea before a serious structural casualty put it out of action in July 1941.The battlecruisers evaded Force H at high speed, but it was the last straw for the delicate machinery of Gneisnau, now only able to steam at high speed in emergencies due to damage in the auxiliaries, while Scharnhorst’s steam lines and boiler superheaters had been seriously damaged by overheating.[x] It was just as well that Lütjens was now instructed to stay out, evading contact before docking at Brest in March. OKW was now looking forward to Bismarck and Prinz Eugen’s entry into service at the end of April, and intended that the battlecruisers would unite with them and form a 4 or 5 ship task force, addressing Lütjens’ concern with the short length of his search rake and providing him direct control of the larger, hangar-borne air group of the Bismarck. The news of Scharnhorst’s engine troubles, which would require lengthy repairs, struck a blow to these plans, but Gneisnau would still be available. In the meantime, Lütjens destroyed another westbound convoy headed towards the Western Hemisphere oil ports on 15–16 March, sinking two ships and captured 14. It was a gem of an action scarcely marred by the fact that Force H intercepted most of the prizes. It would require only interception of an outbound convoy with oil in the tanks to make it perfect. That would require defeating the escorting battleship –but for what else had Bismarck been built?With three German heavy raiders, their machinery problems unknown in London, now berthed at Brest, a threat that had remained a potential throughout the steam age was now a reality. A natural anchorage on the southern head of the Breton Penninsula, Brest had been recognised as France’s best base for a war on Britain’s Atlantic trade since the eighteenth century, and in repeated crises during the latter half of the nineteenth century British sailors had speculated about its potential as a base for steam warships raiding into the Atlantic. With its heavy coastal defences, shipyards, and rail connections with the interior, it remained a superb base for operations under 20th century conditions, as Hipper’s repeated, undetected sorties had already demonstrated. If it had a drawback, it was that Brest lay in close proximity to British air bases. Already the Royal Navy had abandoned its great Mediterranean base at Malta and scaled down work at its Channel-cost dockyards for fear of air attack. Could the RAF turn those fears into reality for the German navy? Factions in the aviation community had made large claims for the RAF’s ability to sink battleships from the air. Raeder had assured Hitler that they were exaggerated and the Admiralty had hoped the same, but the situation was desperate enough that the Admiralty found itself in the position of cheering on the RAF’s best efforts. Bombing attacks on battlecruisers, surprisingly small targets from upwards of 7000 feet, particularly given the massive AA force of more than 1000 guns, searchlights, smoke generators, and fighters the Luftwaffe rushed into Brest, proved more difficult than interwar bombing enthusiasts had dreamed. Inasmuch as numerous Bomber Command raids against assorted German cruisers and battleships in both Brest and Wilhelmshaven had already failed, Raeder had every reason for his optimism.On the night of 4/5 April, a bomb fell into Gneisnau’s dry dock, landing unexploded in twelve feet of water. This unexploded charge now presented a serious risk of shock damage if it detonated later, and the captain of the Gneisnau and the harbour master agreed that the battlecruiser should be shifted out to a mooring in the harbour while the bomb was removed. Although there were heavy anti-torpedo measures in place, Coastal Command nevertheless sensed an opportunity, and in a breakdown of the still-novel AA control and communications arrangement, the guns did not open up at all when a single Coastal Command Beaufort breasted a mole less than 100 feet above the water, dropping a torpedo while still above the mole that cleared the anti-torpedo nets and struck home in the hull of the Gneisnau. TAA belatedly brought the bomber down, but Gneisnau was forced back to the drydock,, just in time to be struck by four AP bombs delivered at low altitude under “perfect bombing conditions” on the night of 10/11 April by 36 Wellingtons and 5 Manchesters, supported by 12 Blenheim fighters. Although failing to detonate, the bombs penetrated the thin armoured deck of Gneisnau, doing structural damage that finished the work of the torpedo. Many more raids were to follow, but the heavy defences at Brest, and particularly the smokescreens, were too much. It took until late July for Bomber Command to score against Scharnhorst, hitting with several detonating bombs, including one that penetrated through to a boiler room and would probably have sunk the battlecruiser had it been at sea.[xi]Rheinubüng began at noon, 19 May 1941, when Bismarck and Prinz Eugen slipped their berths in the Baltic port of Gotenhafen on their way to the Atlantic via the Denmark Straits, although the Admiralty’s battle did not begin until it received definite information on 20 May. Repeated false alarms since early April had desensitised it, and the fighting off Crete was a further distraction. The knowledge that Bismarck was at sea was not entirely welcome, though. There was a real danger that, as at the time of the battlecruisers’ breakout, the Home Fleet would be mobilised too soon, and be forced to break off for refuelling before the German task force made its breakout. Nevertheless, it was clear that the cruiser forces in the Gap had to be reinforced. On 23 May, HMS Norfolk arrived in the Denmark Strait with noted explosives expert Rear Admiral Wade-Walker aboard as commander designate of an ad hoc cruiser squadron built around his flagship and the radar pioneer HMS Suffolk, already on station. Admiral Tovey, CinC Home Fleet, with the new battleship King George V, the battlecruiser, Repulse, and the 3 ship Second Cruiser Squadron under command, as well as an additional 5cruisers posted in the Iceland–Faeroes gap and the brand new carrier HMS Victorious, with its ad-hoc air group of training squadrons. Two capital ships, a cruiser screen, and an aircraft carrier with a green complement made a minimally adequate core for the Home Fleet, but it was what was available. Already at sea was the Fast Battleship Squadron of Hood and the not-yet fully fit for action Prince of Wales. HMS Hood, the only survivor of an abortive 1916 class of 35,000 ton, 144,000 hp 32 knot 8 15" battlecruisers, was not only by far the largest and fastest battleship laid down up to that point, but also the first capital ship designed around small tube boilers and a geared turbine, improvements that permitted the combination of 32 knot speed with the heavy armament and armour of the 28,000 ton Queen Elizabeth-class on only 35,000 tons. Hood was later redesigned with heavier armour, reaching a final displacement of 45,000 tons and speed of 30 knots. Hood was the largest war machine on Earth for over 20 years, combing elegance of line with a combination of speed and gunpower unmatched anywhere, and an innovative and effective, if inadequate, armour scheme. Although the numerous weak spots in its protection scheme were becoming an increasingly serious matter as WWII approached, Hood remained a symbol of British sea power, a striking contrast with the undersized, undergunned Prince of Wales.The other forces available on the Atlantic station included Force H still with Renown and Ark Royal as its hard core, Nelson, now based at Freetown in West Africa as a counter to the German raiders at Brest, Revenge and Ramillies in the western Atlantic covering convoys, and Rodney, preparing to sail for the United States for a refit at the New York Navy Yard. This left five battleships in the Mediterranean, Resolution was out of service for refitting, two battleships and two aircraft carriers under repair in the United States, and the old carriers Furious and Argus, operating as ferry carriers supplying Malta and Takoradi in British West Africa and without embarked carrier air groups. Cruiser forces were also stretched, with 4 attached to the Home Fleet, 1 to Force H, 15 in the Mediterranean, 8 patrolling the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, 3 operating independently in the Atlantic, and 6 in the Indian Ocean. Virtually every warship in the Royal Navy at sea in either the Mediterranean, hunting German raiders, or waiting for Bismarck’s breakout, and most of those that remained were either docked for repair or escorting convoys in other waters. It was an high rate of readiness only made possible by the navy’s living on its capital of prewar maintenance, but it had sufficient strategic justification in that it could be expected that the Italians and Germans would falter first. Renown’s failure in the summer of 1941, when its right torpedo defence bulge peeled back from the hull while steaming after spending 330 days in the previous 365 at sea, pointed directly to what might be expected if the Royal Navy continued at this tempo, and although sound and efficient machinery and good maintenance schedules were at the core of the achievement, it must be added that the senior officers in charge of fleet maintenance themselves admitted that the workload on shipboard artificers in particular had been permitted to rise to excessive levels already in the prewar period, so that the record of ships such as Renown is a great tribute to the skills of the Royal Navy’s personnel.[xii]At 19:22, May 24, the 14 year old British heavy cruiser Suffolk, 9,800 tons, 8 8" guns, was sweeping the north side of a search pattern in the Straits of Denmark when it showed up on German radar at 13,000 metres. All this year, a bizarre Scapa Flow-side workforce of radio technicians and academics had laboured to get the new Type 284 50cm surface search radar at sea. Sets were being built by hand on test benches, and hurriedly installed on the warships of the fleet during their brief refuelling visits to Scapa Flow. Type 284 was a stopgap system intended to assist gunnery. Although very accurate for rangefinding it gave only the vaguest bearing information, but nonetheless, Suffolk’s by now skilled Type 284 operators now detected their targets at 12 miles. In the battle for information that was about to break out in the Straits, 284 won a critical victory over the very similar German Seetakt, an 80cm radar deployed at sea from 1938 by achieving and holding detection at longer ranges and continuing to operate under the stress of battle even as Bismarck’s equipment went out of action due to shock of gunfire (–a rather serious malfunction in a gunnery radar). But this was much more than Type 284's tactical debut in the Atlantic.[xiii]Nor was it a miracle technology. 284 did not give first contact. It was Suffolk’s lookouts who first spotted the Germans at 19:45, but with their help it was possible to train the 284 on Bismarck and track it continuously from radar contact. This was the first time that a British surface search radar had appeared in the Straits, and the effect was immediate, for Bismarck was now held under radar observation, where all the previous German warships, raiders, and even tankers that had gone before it had escaped undetected. With this technology Suffolk could track Bismarck as it attempted to separate, and to prepare itself when Bismarck exploited visibility conditions to turn in and close to gun range. At 20:00, Suffolk alerted the Admiralty, as well as Wade-Walker aboard Norfolk, that it was in contact with a German battleship and cruiser. Suffolk’s message, and its subsequent shadowing commentary, broadcast on long wave for Admiral Holland’s benefit, was closely monitored right around the north Atlantic basin, giving the wider world a hair-raising glimpse into the tactical situation, although only Whitehall knew that two battleships were homing in on Wade-Walker’s neatly handled shadowing operation. About 22:00 Lütjens attempted to break contact, but the Suffolk was spotted again through the fog a few hours later, still holding on. At last this one able German commander realised that the British had powerful and effective radar at sea. In fact, he now veered to an exaggerated belief in its capability that in a moment shattered at least some small part of Nazi faith in German technical superiority. OKM would not yet allow itself to be forced to understand that it had not been luck or particularly well-defended convoys that had thwarted the submarine arm in the last few months, but Lütjens at least now realised that things had changed in a fundamental way. Although he did not panic, for he believed that the British Home Fleet was at harbour, the wily evader knew that the fundamentals of his art had just been upset. None of the many thinkers who had argued for and against a raiding war against British commerce over the last century had eever visualised a situation in which the simple balance of vision had swung so between raider and pursuer, and he was on new ground and thinking on his feet. And he had yet to confront the fact that the British also had aircraft-mounted surface search radar at sea on their carriers.[xiv]Reality was even more disheartening than Lütjens knew, for the Home Fleet was at sea. King George V, Repulse, Victorious,and four cruisers were north and east of Iceland in the Norwegian Sea, prowling north of the cruiser picket line. South of the Straits and headed north was the Fast Battleship Squadron with five destroyers attached. Only the cruisers, Victorious, Ark Royal, Hood, Renown, and Repulse could maintain 30 knots, and only Victorious and Ark Royal had the speed to keep up with Bismarck. Either the destroyers would have to hold on into good torpedo weather, or the carrier-borne torpedo aircraft would have to take their place and slow the German for the kill. Or, a British commander would exploit intelligence from radar and radio direction finding to pull off a perfect battleship on battleship interception on converging courses. It was a manoeuvre that would require precise navigation and favourable visibility conditions.Vice-Admiral Holland, was a skilled commander who, to make matters worse, had just completed several successful radio intercept-based interceptions of German weather ships. With Suffolk’s reports, and medium frequency direction finding equipment to double check its navigation, Holland had the information and skill needed to place his command on course for a perfect interception, but with only 300 miles in 5 hours to accomplish it, he was critically dependent on a continuous flow of course information, and Bismarck’s brief evasion threw off his calculations, forcing him to accept a much less favourable initial fighting angle. The interception worked, in that when he did break into sight of the German squadron, he was already at long gun range and the two commands were converging quickly enough to guarantee an exchange of fire well under 20,000 yards, but it was imperfect. Hood and Prince of Wales were at highly oblique angles that masked their own rear arc guns and offered excellent targets to German gunnery. Any benefits that might have accrued from this tactically superb interception were about to be erased by effective (or lucky) gunfire.[xv]Bismarck came visible to the Fast Battleship Squadron at 5:30, 24 May, at a distance of 34,000 yards in the south central reach of the Straits of Denmark. The Germans were slow to identify the approaching ships. They had been warned of approaching ships via Prinz Eugen’s hydrophone operators, but this latest in a long series of alarms was misinterpreted as a torpedo track, and Prinz Eugen was still manoeuvring to avoid the torpedo when the enemy came in sight. More useful information came in a transmission from OB West at 5:37, after the British ships had gained visual touch. Shore stations had picked up fire control chatter between Hood and Prince of Wales and noted no sign of awareness of this on Bismarck in an extraordinary display of inefficient radio reconnaissance. (Failure to make visual detection is much more understandable. As experience was to show off Guadalcanal in the next year, the ships expecting to make visual contact almost always do so first.) Bismarck reported opening fire to OB West at 5:52, with the distance down to 26,000 yards. The German squadron was now unable to turn away without masking its forward arc guns, and Lütjens maintained his current course, firing at the oncoming British, who in less than 5 minutes closed to between 18,000 14,500 yards distance. This was the decisive range for gun duels, where accuracy rates were likely to be as high as one hit per salvo, and shells could penetrate any practically conceivable belt armour, while the deck armour of the Hood (and that of the equally vulnerable Bismarck) would be immune to plunging fire. At this range Prince of Wales and Bismarck could exchange penetrating hits indefinitely with little fear that a critical hit would penetrate and explode in the magazines or engine machinery spaces, because it was so unlikely that a penetrating shell would remain fit to burst, or for that matter have a sufficient downwards trajectory to reach the magazine or engine spaces. Although the Bismarck was much better protected against this eventuality than the Prince of Wales, the liklihood was that the two modern battleships would pound each other into ruin, riddling each other and leaving both ships in sinking condition in 30–40 minutes. That is not what happened. At this short, albeit disputed range, Hood was struck by one or more 15" shell from Bismarck and sank after several seconds due to complete structural failure, leaving only 3 survivors. The trajectory of the fatal shell will never be known with certainty, but an Admiralty board of inquiry concluded that a high velocity 15" shell could penetrate Hood’s deck, thin upper belt, possibly its main belt and forward bulkhead, or even underwater, and that the explosion followed by structural collapse could be explained by a shell detonating in the magazines causing a deflagration that ruptured the ship’s heavily laden main transverse bulkhead. Moments after the loss of the Hood, having shifted its fire to Prince of Wales, Bismarck struck another damaging blow when a shell passed through the lightly armoured space in the superstructure that accomodated Prince of Wales’ command group. The light armour, as intended, did not detonate the shell, nor were the cables from fire control damaged or deranged in their carefully balanced relationship with the predictor, but splinters nevertheless caused heavy casualties. For precious minutes Prince of Wales was under local control as Captain Leach hurried to the auxiliary control station. When he got there, he was faced with the loss of his ready aircraft, not yet launched and now riddled by splinters, and one of his 4 gun turrets disabled by a mechanical casualty.[xvi] Leach decided to retire into the fog and regroup. Although some hotheads among Lütjens’ staff were eager to follow and “finish off” the British battleship, Lütjens more sensibly declined to contravene his rules of engagement, or for that matter to try further consequences with a ship that had cut his squadron speed by almost 10% with only three hits.[xvii]In the minutes after Hood’s loss, Prince of Wales, despite the inefficient performance of its unreliable main armament, scored three hits on Bismarck. One hit was trivial, but a second had passed through the soft structure of the bow forward of the armour just ahead of the trim waterline without exploding but flooding several compartments, while the third shell, striking water just short of Bismarck, plunged beneath its rather shallow belt to pass through unarmoured hull and burst against the high tensile steel of the torpedo bulkhead, splitting welds to flood Number 4 generator and threaten the Port 2 boiler room. Damage control had little success in recovering the compartments or turbogenerator, but at least contained the flooding and kept the boiler operating. The loss of the machinery compartments damaged mobility somewhat, and speed was cut to 28 knots later to 24. Unsuspected at this point was a steady oil leak. At this point, Admiral Lütjens had to accept that Rheinübung was over. Bismarck had to abort, and Lütjens decided to make for Brest.[xviii]Neither Admiral Wade-Walker on the scene, nor Admiral Tovey in the Norwegian Sea, nor even the Admiralty could know this, however. For them, loss of the Hood was an immediate and terrible blow, albeit quickly rationalised. Admiral Tovey feared that Lütjens was going to head back towards Norway at the earliest moment, walking away from the table on a win, or head west into the trade routes, where 11 convoys were at sea. The Admiralty envisioned a nightmare scenario, where the British ships would have to abort their pursuit to refuel, while Bismarck refuelled from oilers hidden along the barren coast of Greenland before rampaging across the shipping lanes. From London came instructions to Ramillies to depart her convoy in the western waters and sail to interpose herself between the enemy and the trade, and for Revenge to follow as soon as refuelling at Halifax was complete. The captains of the old Royal Sovereigns had to be aware that they were unlikely to survive a final confrontation in the Denmark Straits. Admiral Somerville and Force H, just returned from Gibraltar on a Malta convoy, was summoned into the Atlantic, and Rodney was ordered into action notwithstanding the fact that it was already loaded with parts for its American refit. Three cruisers were disposed in a patrol line in the Norwegian Sea against Tovey’s fear, while 3 others were summoned up from anti-raider patrols. A motley assortment of 3 oilers spread right across the Atlantic were called up in the hope of extending the range of at least some of the ships now set in motion. In total, 7 battleships, 2 carriers, 11 cruisers, 10 destroyers, and 6 submarines were now under way to intercept the Bismarck.For Admiral Wade-Walker, to whom command had devolved after the death of Admiral Holland, the problem, as he later described it for an Admiralty court of inquiry, was whether Prince of Wales should re-engage under suddenly much more unfavourable odds, or else incorporate Prince of Wales into his shadowing force. He decided for the latter, and the Admiralty ultimately upheld the decision. The advantage of this course was that Lütjens’ force could shake off the shadowing force by lunging at the cruisers, forcing them off, and then rapidly changing course. It was (for the cruisers) a potentially lethal form of hide-and-seek. There was no rule that said that Bismarck’s big shells would continue to miss. With Prince of Wales added to his force, the cruisers could now fall back on the battleship, drawing the Bismarck into a British firetrap. Over the next few hours this was exactly what happened. The battleships exchanged fire once more, but the Germans did not shake the British deliberately. It was a powerful illustration of the battleship’s power to support the other naval arms.Miles to the north, the Home Fleet was running on a converging course. Unfortunately, this convergence might be long delayed. For the moment Bismarck and Tovey were running along two legs of a triangle converging towards an interception point somewhere in the western Atlantic, but Bismarck might turn away at any moment towards the south and make it a stern chase. Home Fleet was beginning to run low on fuel, and Admiral Tovey decided to detach Victorious, and send it south at high speed to cut off the Bismarck. As Victorious only had to close within comfortable aircraft range of Bismarck to make an interception, the Germans could be brought to battle much more quickly by these means, but if Bismarck shook of its pursuers and turned north, it might well run right into Victorious. At their highest convergence rate, Bismarck and Victorious could cover the distance from the maximum effective air strike range of WWII, about 200 nautical miles, and maximum gun range, in less than 3 hours. The risk was even greater than Tovey realised, for Lütjens had already successfully detached Prinz Eugen from his force, although the cruiser was headed south, rather than north. Victorious had armoured protection, intended in part to ward off a lucky hit by a cruiser-calibre weapon in just such situations, but Prinz Eugen would sink it in time, while even a single 15" hit might be fatal. The 27,000 ton American fleet carrier Franklin would be knocked out of the war by a 500lb bomb that killed 724 crew in 1945.[xix] To reduce the risks, Tovey attached Victorious to Second Cruiser Squadron, forming an impromptu fast carrier task force. At 22:00, 24 May, Victorious flew off her strike. Regrettably, the 9 Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers of 825 Naval Squadron, after successfully intercepting Bismarck at 100 miles’ range, scored only one ineffective torpedo hit. The escorting Fairey Fulmar fighters of 800Z Squadron, less well-handled by their inexperienced crews, failed to intercept, and only two aircraft recovered to their carrier. The surface search radar carried by the Swordfish permitted them to track down Bismarck through the low cloud cover and fog banks, while their excellence as a navigational mount brought them home in conditions where even two-seat fighters went astray. Fortunately, Bismarck had no fighters aloft (if that was ever a concern), and we can only conjecture what might have been the impact of the Fulmars used in a defence suppression role, as we can also only conjecture what might have been the result had Tovey delayed at Scapa Flow to pick up Victorious’ detached 848 squadron of Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers. Yet there was no cause for alarm, for with dawn would come another chance.[xx]The Swordfish attack had one major unintended consequence, Bismarck’s radical manoeuvring and defensive barrage undid the work of damage control, renewing flooding in both the bow compartments and the machinery spaces. Paradoxically, this event precipitated the great crisis of the hunt. Lütjens’ ordered a minor change of course to make directly for the French repair base of St. Nazaire, just as, by unfortunate coincidence, the shadowing Suffolk turned away on the outward leg of an antisubmarine zig-zag. Given that OB West was still trying to put a submarine trap together on Bismarck’s course, it was a sound precaution, but by 0515, 25 May, it was clear to Wade-Walker, and soon after to Tovey, that Bismarck had finally evaded her shadows, and there were only sufficient British forces to cover a fraction of the area of interest. Lütjens himself remained blissfully ignorant if this unintended consequence of his manoeuvre. Between 0812 and 0848 GMT, he sent to OB West that he was under continual surveillance by British forces employing “detection equipment with minimum range of 35,000 metres” that severely affected Atlantic operations.[xxi] Lütjens was obviously rattled. The assumption that Suffolk’s surface search equipment ranged out to the radar horizon was at best a guess whose only merit was that it did not underestimate the enemy. Considering that he had arrived at his current fix by virtue of a plan that simply assumed that the British had no seaborne radar, and that several intelligence “tells” of Bismarck’s sortie had been ignored by the Admiralty, it was about time that someone in the German High Command took a more realistic stance, and a pity that it occurred at precisely the wrong time. Fortunately for Lütjens, even though he continued to broadcast status reports to OB West, British naval intelligence’s accurate fix of his current location and destination was not passed on to Tovey, whose embarked staff was instead only supplied with the raw data, which they managed to misinterpret. Instead, Tovey’s staff managed to convince itself that Bismarck was pursuing the most dangerous possible course of action, a run north towards Norway, away from Wade-Walker, the now detached Prince of Wales, Rodney, Ramillies, and cruiser Edinburgh converging from the south, and towards Home Fleet, and his most valuable search instrument, Second Cruiser Squadron with Victorious attached. The risk to the carrier, in particular, must put a crimp in the search plan, for it had to be handled carefully if it were to be guaranteed that it would be aircraft, and not the valuable ship itself, that found the German battleship. For its part, the Admiralty declined to interfere with the Commander-in-Chief’s discretion, and in any case was aware that Home Fleet possessed its own excellent direction-finding equipment that might have made a more accurate fix than was available to the Admiralty.[xxii]Prince of Wales, Wade-Walker, Home Fleet and Second Cruiser Squadron, vigorously searching all the wrong areas, were the only units affected by this diversion, which lasted until 1810 and carried Home Fleet at least 100 miles further away from Bismarck. Rodney was sailing on its own captain’s best estimate of an intercept course, and Force H, with Admiral Somerville in command, was coming up from the south. Force H still consisted of Renown (flag), Ark Royal as well as cruiser Sheffield. It had already had a busy May, including a convoy mission towards Malta during which Somerville’s Lieutenant (Air) Mark Somerville was lost in air-to-air combat during a fierce air-sea battle on 8 May. Somerville was a very air-conscious admiral, having flown many times with his air group, excellent experience for an admiral who was once again to serve in the role of a fast carrier task force commander. Despite his experience in carrier operations, he was impressed and surprised with his own air group when it began flying off Ark Royal at dawn on 26 May in spite of weather blowing 50 knots over the deck a measured 55 foot rise and fall of the flight deck ends. The Fairey Swordfish proved up to the conditions. Somerville’s task was to head off Bismarck from Brest, only a contingency in the morning, but by the afternoon he had become the Admiralty’s main hope. He had to find Bismarck, and, moreover, slow it with a torpedo. Otherwise, it would be impossible for the Home Fleet and Rodney, the only capital ships now available, to intercept. The search was not straightforward. Force H would be heading north rapidly, so its own aircraft would fly a complicated pattern, which had to be integrated with Coastal Command searches. Somerville and his staff planned their search pattern in constant radio contact with Admiralty staff ashore, but credit for finding Bismarck lay in the last analysis with Coastal’s staff, which laid in a search pattern slightly different from the Admiralty’s and found Bismarck at 10:30, 26 May on their own predicted course: perhaps the rusty former sailors at Coastal Command headquarters had more insight into Bismarck’s Captain Lindemann than the professional sailors at the Admiralty. Bismarck’s location, abaft Force H’s aft beam and very close. Somerville kept first aircraft and later Sheffield on station shadowing Bismarck, permitting him to close to within 38 miles at the time that his second, 15 aircraft torpedo attack was flown off. Somerville reported that his command closed within 16 miles of Bismarck at one point, easily within gun range in better visual conditions. For Somerville, it was a forceful reminder of the risks entailed when high speed naval forces were manoeuvring in searches.[xxiii]Ark Royal’s Swordfish got a single torpedo hit. It was no more than Victorious’ air group achieved, but had profoundly different results. The Victorious hit whipped the Bismarck hard enough to fatally dash a man against a wall, but did no noticeable structural damage, but Ark Royal’s torpedo struck well aft, whipping the stern structure and snapping a welded join between the main structure that was vulnerable due to a design error. The battleship actually lost its stern entirely when it sank, as did several other German warships, while in the meantime the battleship’s rudders wre jammed so seriously that it was not even possible to steer with the propellers. Bismarck was still turning in wide circles despite the best efforts of damage control when the Home Fleet caught up with it the next morning.[xxiv]Obviously the extent of the damage was unknown at the time, even to the Germans (the other torpedo attacks had not yet occurred). The Admiralty, Tovey, and Somerville only knew that the Bismarck’s course towards France had been temporarily arrested, just barely outside of aircraft range of the coast. If British forces acted quickly, it might still be possible to sink the German battleship before it passed under the Luftwaffe air umbrella. With his characteristic alacrity, first on the scene was Captain Philip Vian, whose 5 destroyer half-flotilla had recently been detached from a troop convoy to join the hunt. His 32,000 hp, 34.5 knot, 1970 ton, 8 4.7" made a peculiarly fortunate interception. His “Tribal” class destroyers had been specifically designed to deal with enemy raiders without heavy support, but Vian’s force accomplished little except to wear out Bismarck’s gunners. This is not very difficult to understand when the design of the “Tribals” is placed in context.Within an hour and a half of sunrise, King George V and Rodney were both up in range of Bismarck and ready to engage. His situation was not comfortable. His ships were very low on fuel, and he knew that German bombers had been on their way since dawn, perhaps within an hour of contact –granted perfect navigation. It was not even inconceivable that if they could drive off the British, the tugs and an oiler now at sea, would be able to take the great battleship in charge. But soon after Rodney opened up at 0843, 27 May, Tovey’s fears, and German hopes, were reduced to unreality. Bismarck’s shooting was surprisingly good early in the action, but so was the British. Rodneyscored a straddle with the third salvo. King George V got her first straddle and a definite hit off a Type 284 radar range fix soon after. By 0859 both battleships were on target and firing steadily. At 0902, a 16" round from Rodney fell forward of the superstructure, and according to after-the-fact reconstructions, penetrated Bismarck’s thin upper belt to detonate in a space between its lightly armoured weather deck and the main armoured deck. In design terms, it was vital that such “sacrificial spaces” not contain any vital capabilities, but Tirpitz, when damaged in this space by armour-piercing bombs, lost its centralised fire control, indicating that important (unarmoured) turret services were carried in this volume, and Bismarck shared the same flaw, losing the forward turret temporarily. Soon after, another turret was penetrated by a British shell, and the fire control centre itself was lost to a massive explosion and fire in the superstructure. In the midst of the action, a shell detonated in the engine spaces, probably a short passing under the belt. After 15 minutes of fighting, Bismarck was out of action, a mission kill. In the next few minutes, the British closed to pointblank range and took the ship apart with gunfire. By 0950 both British battleships were at 4000 yards range, holding Bismarck in a devastating crossfire. Yet Admiral Tovey was far from content. His ships were very low on fuel, there was a German reconnaissance aircraft overhead, and bombers were on their way. Believing that Bismarck was already beyond salvage, Tovey called off his ships. The wreck has been visited, and Tovey has been proven correct. The wreck and reveals multiple penetrations of even the heaviest armour, including the conning tower, where Lütjens presumably died. Survivors’ stories confirm at least two systemic failures of the armour scheme: the shell from the Prince of Wales that penetrated beneath the belt and flooded two machinery spaces, and the “deck penetration” that detonated in a boiler room. To be sure, Bismarck did not blow up, thanks in part to its separate internal magazine armour protection. It was picked apart by weight of fire. Like those ships, it was still floating, and would have remained floating for hours yet, because its battering occurred above the water line.. The obvious solution was to let some water in, and with destroyers, a squadron of torpedo bombers from Ark Royal and several cruisers available, it is a little surprising that it was left to Wade-Walker, in at the last as at the first, to send Devonshire in to give a torpedo coup de grace at about 10:30.In some respects, this final battle demonstrated how exaggerated the worst fears of the Admiralty had been. Bismarck’s great size was absorbed in giving it invulnerable (at short range) magazines and superior speed. The fact that the design failed in certain respects is not surprising. By 1941 battleship design was so complex that such weaknesses were probably inevitable. The real solution to this problem is redundancy in ships. Had Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Gneisnau, and Hipper been available for this operation, and for that matter, had Prinz Eugen been fully reliable, Rheinubüng would quite probably have been a very significant success. In retrospect it is clear that the German decision to proceed with high rate steam plants in their warships was a terrible error from their perspective, and that the Brest attacks by the Royal Air Force, often dismissed as a useless waste of effort, was of vital importance. The mediocre endurance of the British warships involved in the chase was certainly a serious issue, but the solution to this problem is not as obvious as it first appears. Certainly it was not lack of superheat, nor basic inefficiencies in King George V–class machinery. However, the fleet certainly did pay for the omission of economisers, but the few twin-boiler destroyers in the pursuit at various points were not at a disadvantage, as the later would be in the Pacific, because three boiler destroyers would not have been able to leave a boiler unlit, anyway. Because of the speed of the chase there was certainly no question of having oilers accompany the squadrons. Even the fastest American and British fleet oilers had only 18 and 15 knots in hand, respectively, and while it is just conceivable that the Admiralty could have had oilers in position to refuel the battleships at some point during their battle with Bismarck, the idea does not seem very practical given the presence of German submarines and aircraft in the area.Otherwise, British naval gunnery performed well, even taking its radar superiority into account. The Bismarck’s rapid loss of fire control demonstrates the hidden difficulties facing the designer. King George V’s protection was not directly challenged, but that of Prince of Wales was. Command personnel proved to be very vulnerable in the chart room space provided for them –but so did the Germans in their heavily armoured conning tower. Ironically, despite its weight-consuming underwater belt strake that had so challenged the manufacturers, Prince of Wales was still penetrated below the belt, but the Bismarck, which took much more serious damage via the same route, demonstrated the seriousness of the problem.Air power played a critical role in the battle, but also a limited one. Probably no naval air force other than the Fleet Air Arm could have put aircraft over the Bismarck in the weather conditions that characterised Rheinubüng, and certainly no other air force could have found Bismarck, lacking surface search radar. On the one hand this illustrates the continuing relevance of surface warships in every navy other than the RN, but even the successful attack on Bismarck was a near-run thing, and the downside risks of the success of a full-scale German breakout eloquently justifies the Admiralty’s expenditure on new battleships, even as the Scheer’s long rampage shows that the Commonwealth now needed more cruisers than it could ever afford to build. As the chases for Bismarck and Scheer demonstrated, while the Commonwealth did not lack the means needed to put German warships down once it found them, it desperately needed more reconnaissance capability. This was the real crux of the air war over the world’s oceans, as we shall see in the next chapter.[i].John E. Cooke, “The Changing Pattern of Maintenance and Repair of the Machinery of the Fleet,” Proc. Inst. Mech. Eng. 169 (1955): 936. Rear Admiral Cooke noted that during the war the Royal Navy essentially drained a “reservoir of maintenance” that had been topped up during peace, and that smaller ships such as escorts drained that reservoir more quickly. This trend of declining serviceability crossed another trend of improving maintenance capability [and declining escort age] in the first quarter of 1941with the result that the escort serviceability trend line continued upward for the rest of the war.[ii]. See Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1996-8): 1, 254–61.[iii]. Blair, Hitler’s, 24–6.[iv].Geoffrey K. Hartmann, Weapons that Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, [1979]), 61; Eric J. Grove, ed., Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping, 1939–45: A Revised Edition of the Naval Staff Histories Volume 1A (Text and Appendices) and 1B (Plans and Tables) (Aldershot, U.K.: 1997), 178–80, 181–3, 187–90, 193–5; in September 1944 the British-controlled minesweeping force peaked at 1,520 vessels.[v].For further detail, see M. J. Whitley, Cruisers of World War Two: An International Encyclopedia (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1995) and German Capital Ships of World War Two (London: Arms & Armour, 1989); details of Scharnhorst from Oscar Parkes, British Battleships, “Warrior,” 1860 to “Vanguard,” 1950: A History of Design, Construction, and Armament (London: Seeley Service, [1966]), 678; Brown, Nelson to Vanguard, 20.[vi]. The original treatment is Parkes, 581–5. 23 knots is the legend speed, but WWI only deep displacement trials were conducted on the Revenges due to the press of war, and these returned speeds of 20.5–22 knots. 23 knots should be regarded as an unlikely upper bound.[vii].”Length of engine and boikler rooms reduced by 22.5 per cent. Floor space occupied by machinery, including various auxiliaries such as electric generators, hydraulic engines, etc., reduced by 34 per cent. Weight per shaft horsepower reduced by 50 per cent” (Preece, 62–3.)[viii]. Citation translated from Lütjen’s war diary by Graham Rhys-Jones, The Loss of the Bismarck: An Avoidable Disaster (London: Cassell, 1999), 55.[ix].Stanley Goodall emphasises the technical challenges of the refits in “The State of the Royal Navy in 1939,” Trans. Roy. Inst. Nav. Arch. (1945)[x].There are any number of possible reasons for this, but the most likely possibility offered is poor pipe assembly technique (M. L. Ireland, H. W. Semar, and N. L. Mochel, “Higher Steam Conditions for Ship’s Machinery: Problems in the Selection and Application of Cycle Components and High Temperature Materials,” in International Conference of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 68. In Transactions of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects 93, 1951).[xi]. Martin Middlebrook, Bomber Command War Diaries, 126ff.; contemporary accounts from The Engineer, 8 April 1941, ?;[xii]. Playfair, 2: 239; “Statement on First Year of Force H’s Operations,” in Sir James Somerville, The Somerville Papers: Selections from the Private and Official Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville ed. Michael Simpson ([Aldershot, Hants, U.K.]: Scolars Press for the Navy Records Society, 1996), 285; Letter to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, 2 July 1941, 284; Letter to First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley North, 5–6 August 1941, Somerville Papers, 297–8; Cooke, “Changing Pattern,” 936.[xiii].F. A., Kingsley, ed. The Applications of Radar and Other Electronic Systems in the Royal Navy in World War 2. Ed. (London: Macmillan, 1995), 369, 395; Coates, 49.[xiv].Graham Rhys-Jones, 104–7; Stephen W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939-1945 3 vols. (London: HMSO, 1954), 1: 404.[xv]. Rhys-Jone, 113–17. An additional factor for Hollands’ calculations was the difficulty his destroyers were experiencing keeping up with the battleships in the heavy seas.[xvi].It is worth noting one thing that did not happen at this point; in spite of the riddling of a gasoline-laden aircraft poised on a hangar to which all that gasoline was delivered from extensive tanks, there was no gas fire.[xvii]. Rhys-Jones, 117–20; W. J Jurens, “The Loss of the Hood –A Re-examination.” Warship International 2 (1987): 122-161. Jurens accepts the rather unlikely outside range of 20,400 yards, and with postwar information about the relatively mediocre muzzle velocity of the German guns, concludes that such penetration was actually unlikely. In this case, the sometimes mentioned terminal underwater trajectory of the decisive shell becomes more plausible. If Hood was sunk by a 15" shell diving under its belt, it really was a very unlucky hit. As for the subsequent destruction of the ship, this was unfortunately not surprising given the amount of explosives in any battleship magazine and their limited venting space. Although the greater volatility of British propellant compared to early war American propellants meant that in some marginal cases American ships survived magazine deflagrations that would have destroyed British units, this was not the case with Hood. Contrary to what has sometimes been stated, the employment of a brass cartridge to contain some proportion of the propellant, as used in German ships because of their breechblock design, would have had no effect. German, French, Japanese, Italian, and American battleships all suffered magazine explosions during WWII.[xviii].Rhys-Jones, 127–8; Edwyn Gray, Hitler’s Battleships (London: L. Cooper, [1992]), 106–9.[xix].Franklin, although rebuilt and recommissioned after the war as a public relations exercise, arguably should have been condemned on arrival in San Francisco as a “Total Constructive Loss,” giving that single 500lb bomb credit for destroying the ship. See Morison, Two-Ocean War, 448; Friedman, US Aircraft Carriers,[xx]. Rhys-Jones, 99–102, 148–51.[xxi]. Lütjens’ “long despatch” has been cited often, but cf. Rhys-Jones, 160.[xxii]. Rhys-Jones, 154–7, 162–3.[xxiii]. Rhys-Jones, 178–90; Somerville Papers, 260–78.[xxiv]. David K. Brown, Nelson to Vanguard, 100.�N�0

The Five Cricketers of the Year represent a tradition that dates back in Wisden to 1889, making this the oldest individual award in cricket. The selection of the Five is a perk of being editor, and it is up to him whether he wishes to take soundings from others. Excellence in the previous English summer is the major criterion for inclusion in the Five, but not the only one. In fact, the award is a recognition of a player's influence on the last English season, allowing Matthew Engel, editor of Wisden 1997, to select Sanath Jayasuriya, who had not played in England in the preceding year. However, his batting at the 1996 World Cup changed the shape of the one-day game for good. Just as importantly, no one can be chosen more than once. Well, two exceptions prove that particular rule: after bei(more)