Why Britain’s “Outdated” HMS Rodney Was the Battle…
According to the men who lived through it, the temperature in our one boiler room climbed to around 124° Fahrenheit.
51° C.
It is a number so brutal that a modern industrial safety inspector would shut a factory down for exposing workers to it for 10 minutes.
Rodney’s engineers stood in it for hours.
They wore rags soaked in water tied around their heads.
They took shifts of a few minutes at a time because a full watch was impossible.
They tended boilers whose linings were cracked, whose tubes were worn, whose gauges climbed into red zones no engineer wanted to see.
They kept her steaming.
Up on deck in the driving spray, other men were doing something almost as strange.
They were throwing the future overboard.
Those crates of spare parts, those boiler tubes bound for the Boston shipyard, the new fittings still packed in grease.
Anything that was loose, anything the sea could pick up and hurl into a superstructure at 40 knots of relative wind.
It went over the side, or it was lashed down with wire, or it was manhandled below into any compartment that would hold it.
The deck of a battleship going to war is not a deck stacked with cargo, so the cargo went, the gold stayed.
There was no way to move that, and somewhere on the horizon, invisible, unreachable, Bismarck was slipping away.
For 31 hours, she vanished.
This is a piece of the story that is hard to feel now in an age of satellites and GPS.
But in May of 1941, the Atlantic was still large enough to swallow a battleship.
Bismarck had shaken off the shadowing cruisers in the early hours of the 25th.
And then, silence.
No radar, no sighting, nothing.
On the flagship King George V, Admiral John Tovey, 56 years old, a small, precise, deeply religious man, faced a nightmare.
He had no idea where his enemy was.
He had lost her, and every hour she was lost, she was closer to the umbrella of German air cover off the French coast, where U-boats and Luftwaffe bombers would make any British approach suicidal.
On Rodney, Dalrymple-Hamilton listened to the wireless traffic and heard the sound of a hunt going cold.
Then, Bismarck made a mistake.
Admiral Lütjens on the German bridge believed his ship was still being tracked.
She was not, but he did not know that.
And so, on the morning of the 25th of May, he sent a long radio message home to Germany, a message about the battle in the Denmark Strait, about the sinking of Hood, about his intentions.
British radio direction finders across the North Atlantic caught the transmission.
They plotted the bearings, they drew the lines, and they gave the Admiralty a rough position for a ship that had, until that moment, been a ghost.
It was not enough on its own, but it was a beginning.
And then, on the morning of the 26th of May, a Catalina flying boat came out of the clouds 10 miles from Bismarck, and the whole hunt turned on its axis.
Here is the fifth twist, and it is one of the strangest facts of the entire Second World War.
The Catalina was British.
She flew for Coastal Command out of Loch Earn in Northern Ireland.
She wore Royal Air Force roundels on her wings.
But sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, hands on the controls of an American built aircraft flying for the British against the Germans, was a young man named Leonard B.
Smith.
He was an ensign in the United States Navy.
The United States of America in May of 1941 was not at war.
She was neutral.
Pearl Harbor was six months away.
American servicemen were not officially supposed to be flying combat patrols over the Atlantic looking for German warships.
But they were.
There was a quiet unofficial exchange program between the US Navy and the Royal Air Force.
American pilots experienced with the Catalina were sent to Britain to help teach the aircraft to British crews.
They flew missions.
They saw combat.
It was a violation of American neutrality that both governments preferred not to talk about.
And on the morning of the 26th of May, one of those American pilots was at the controls when a great gray shape appeared through a break in the clouds.
Ensign Smith looked down at the ship.
He circled cautiously.
He identified her, Bismarck.
The signal that went out from the Catalina rewrote the war.
Six months before Pearl Harbor, before America was officially anyone’s ally, an American Navy pilot had put Britain’s most hunted enemy back on the map.
And now the hunt had a target again.
But there was still a problem, a terrible problem.
Bismarck was found.
But nothing that could sink her was close enough to catch her.
Nothing except one thing, one old, fragile, almost absurd thing.
Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers flying off the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal.
You have to see these aircraft to understand what came next.
The Swordfish was a biplane.
In 1941, a fabric-covered, open-cockpit, three-man aircraft with a top speed of around 90 knots.
It looked like something out of the First World War.
Pilots called it the string bag because like an old lady’s shopping bag, it could carry almost anything.
It flew low, it flew slow, and in the imagination of anyone who saw it, it had no business at any of a modern battleship.
On the afternoon of the 26th of May, in a full Atlantic gale, 15 Swordfish took off from Ark Royal’s pitching deck.
The wind over the deck was so strong that the aircraft were nearly stationary at the moment of launch, held in the air by the storm itself.
They flew out to find Bismarck, they found her.
The attack was chaos, anti-aircraft fire everywhere, wind tearing at the fabric wings.
Pilots trying to line up torpedo runs on a ship that was throwing up shell splashes the size of houses.
Most of the torpedoes missed, some ran wide, some ran deep and passed harmlessly under the target, one did not.
One Swordfish at low level put a torpedo into the sea that ran true and struck Bismarck near her stern.
It exploded against her rudders.
This is the sixth twist, and it is not what history sometimes says it is.
For decades, a British pilot named John Moffat was credited with dropping the torpedo that jammed Bismarck’s rudder.
Moffat himself claimed it late in life.
It became one of the war’s famous stories.
The historical reality is more honest and less satisfying.
The records from that day do not clearly identify which Swordfish put its torpedo into the stern.
Several pilots dropped in the same attack window.
Several attacked from angles that could have produced a hit.
The men who could have known are almost all gone, and and their memories, taken years apart, contradict each other.
What we know for certain is the result.
The torpedo detonated in almost the only spot on Bismarck’s hull where it could her.
It wrecked her steering compartment.
It jammed her rudders in a hard turn to port, and it left the fastest battleship in the world unable to steer anything but a slow, helpless circle to the north.
North was exactly the direction from which the British were coming.
On Bismarck’s bridge, Admiral Lütjens understood what had happened before the damage damage control reports came back.
He signaled Berlin with a message that has been quoted ever since.
“Ship unmaneuverable.
We will fight to the last shell”.
That evening, in the wardrooms and the crew quarters of the German battleship, they read the messages that came back from home.
From Hitler, from Grand Admiral Raeder, from naval headquarters.
Lütjens, according to the survivors who lived to talk about it, made a speech to the crew.
It was not a speech of hope.
It was a speech about honor, about dying well, about the fatherland.
His captain, Ernst Lindemann, 47 years old, a professional officer respected by his men, is remembered as being furious.
Lindemann had not given up.
Lindemann believed there was still time.
There was still a chance.
Perhaps Luftwaffe bombers would reach them at dawn.
Perhaps U-boats would break the pursuit.
He is remembered as saying, in effect, that the crew did not need to be told to die.
They needed to be told to fight.
The two men, Lütjens and Lindemann, had disagreed for days about the mission.
About the return route.
About whether to go into port for repairs after Denmark Strait.
Now, in the last night of both their lives, they disagreed about how to face what was coming.
Neither would live to see the argument settled.
That night on Bismarck was a night of small mercies and small horrors.
Men wrote letters they would never send.
Men drank cognac from the officers’ mess.
Some slept.
Some prayed.
Some sat by their guns in the wet dark and waited.
And around them in the black wind, the destroyers came.
Five destroyers, four British and one Polish.
The Polish ship was the ORP Piorun and her captain was Commander Eugeniusz Pławski, 46 years old.
Pławski had watched his country crushed by the German army in 1939.
He had escaped.
His crew were exiles.
Poland was under occupation.
Warsaw was in German hands.
Every man on that destroyer had lost something.
Piorun sighted Bismarck first in the last light of the 26th of May.
Pławski did what almost no destroyer captain does in the face of a battleship.
He charged.
He put his tiny ship, less than 2,000 tons, on a course toward the largest and most powerful surface of warship in the German fleet.
And as he closed, he ordered his signal lamp to flash a message across the water.
Four words, “I am a Pole”.
There is no evidence Bismarck ever answered.
Her guns did.
Great 15-in shells fell around Piorun, throwing up water taller than her masts.
Pławski held his course for over an hour before finally breaking off.
He did not put a torpedo into her.
He probably could not have, but he had said something the war remembered.
“I am a Pole”.
Through the night, the four British destroyers under Captain Philip Vian, 46, a hard, aggressive officer who would later become one of the Royal Navy’s most famous fighters, kept up the attack.
They fired torpedoes in the dark.
They fired star shells to keep Bismarck lit.
They pulled away and came back and pulled away again.
They did not sink her.
They probably did not even hit her, but they kept her awake.
They kept her exhausted.
They kept her fixed in place.
By dawn, Bismarck’s crew had not slept for days, and behind them, coming up out of the west, the heavy ships of the Home Fleet were finally in range.
On Rodney, in the dark hours before the 27th of May, Dalrymple Hamilton spoke to his ship’s company.
He told them what they were about to do.
He told them who they were about to fight.
The men who wrote about that moment later remembered the silence.
Rodney’s crew was not a crew of green sailors.
Many of them had been at sea for years.
Many of them had friends on other ships.
And many of them, when the captain said the word Hood, went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with discipline.
The debt was personal.
Everyone on Rodney knew somebody or knew somebody who knew somebody.
Below decks, gun crews were nursing the last of Rodney’s armor-piercing shells into the hoists.
The gunnery officers were running through firing solutions.
The engineers were coaxing another hour, another half hour, out of boilers that should have been condemned months ago.
Up on the flagship King George V, Admiral Tovey faced the seventh twist, and this one was the cruelest of all.
He was running out of fuel.
The chase across the Atlantic drained his tanks.
His His destroyers had already been sent home one by one as they hit their bingo point.
Now King George V herself was down to the last hundreds of tons.
Rodney was in the same trouble.
If the battle did not start soon and did not end quickly, Tovey would have to break off and turn for home with Bismarck still afloat.
He set himself a deadline.
If the enemy could not be finished by early afternoon, he would have to withdraw the battleships and leave the cruisers to try to sink her with torpedoes alone.
It would be the end of the great gun duel he had wanted.
It would take from the Royal Navy the moment they had crossed an ocean to have.
Hood would be avenged, if she was avenged at all, by torpedoes fired in the murk by lighter ships.
It would not be the same.
Bismarck, on the other side of the horizon, did not know any of this.
She did not know how thin Tovey’s fuel was.
She did not know how close he was to being forced to turn away.
She did not know that her greatest weapon in those last hours before dawn was simply time.
That if she could hold out through the morning, the British would have to leave her.
She could not know because she could not steer.
She could no longer choose to run.
She could only wait.
And in the last hour of darkness on the 27th of May, 1941, from three sides of the compass, the ship that had crossed an ocean for one purpose closed in on her.
The sky in the east began to gray.
