There was still a chance
The sea rose.
The wind rose.
And out of the murk on Bismarck’s port bow, two great shapes came on through the spray, holding their fire, coming steady, coming close.
The senior surviving gunnery officer on Bismarck, Lieutenant Commander Burkhard von Müllenheim-Rechberg, 30 years old, watched them come.
Years later, when he wrote his memoir, he’d describe that moment in words that have never lost their weight.
“They advanced,” he wrote, “as imperturbably as though they were on their way to an execution”.
He was right about the execution.
He was wrong about whose it would be.
8:47 in the morning, the 27th of May, 1941.
The sea was heavy.
The sky was low.
A cold wind was blowing out of the northwest, and the light was the color of wet iron.
On the bridge of HMS Rodney, Captain Frederick Dalrymple Hamiliton lifted his glasses one last time, looked at the great gray silhouette on his starboard bow, and gave the order that 1,400 dead men on Hood had been waiting for.
“Open fire”.
Nine 16-in guns turned in three enormous turrets crammed together at the bow of the ship.
Together they weighed more than most destroyers.
Together they could throw more than nine tons of steel and high explosive across 23,000 yd of ocean in a single instant.
They fired.
The concussion was not a sound.
It was a physical event.
Windows on Rodney’s bridge blew inward.
Loose gear on her deck was hurled sideways.
In the messes below, plates that had survived 14 years at sea shattered on the deck.
Every man aboard felt his organs move inside him.
Nine great fingers of black smoke reached across the water toward Bismarck, and Bismarck fired back.
This is the part of the story that is sometimes forgotten.
Bismarck was not a helpless target in those first minutes.
Her fire control was superb.
Her gunnery officers were among the best trained in any navy.
Her second salvo straddled Rodney, and the third came close enough to throw green water across her decks.
For the first stretch of the battle, nearly 20 minutes of it, the German battleship shot the way she had shot in the Denmark Strait.
The way she had shot when she killed Hood.
And then, at about 9:09 in the morning, a heavy shell came down out of the gray sky and struck Bismarck’s forward superstructure.
The historical record does not tell us for certain whose shell it was.
It might have been Rodney.
It might have been King George the Fifth coming in from a different bearing under Admiral John Tovey.
British sources have argued about it for 80 years.
The German survivors could not know, because most of the men who might have known were already dead.
What we know is what the shell did.
It smashed into the area around Bismarck’s forward command position.
In that space, or in the compartments immediately below it, Admiral Günther Lütjens almost certainly died.
Captain Ernst Lindemann almost certainly died.
Every senior officer who had been directing the battle from the bridge was killed in a single terrible instant.
The most powerful battleship in the German fleet had, in a matter of minutes, been decapitated.
Command passed downward through the chain of officers.
It fell, eventually, to Lieutenant Commander Burkhard von Müllenheim Rechberg in the after fire control station at the stern, 30 years old.
A junior gunnery officer who had woken up that morning as a subordinate on a great ship, he was now the senior officer left alive on a great ship that was being killed.
He gave the orders he could.
He aimed his after turrets at King George V.
He fired the salvos he could still fire.
And then a British shell smashed his station, too, and his rangefinders went dark, and the last coherent gunnery on Bismarck effectively ended.
Around him, above him, below him, the ship was coming apart.
The forward turrets, Anton and Bruno, were knocked out over the next 20 minutes.
A 16-in shell from Rodney is believed to have struck the face of Anton and blown out the rear of the turret.
Bruno went silent not long after.
The men inside those turrets, in that armored steel now peeled open like a can, did not survive.
And now Dalrymple Hamilton did the thing that battleship captains almost never do.
He closed, he gave orders that took Rodney closer, and then closer again to a burning enemy.
Not the ranges of a modern gunnery duel, 20,000 yd, 15,010, he took her inside all of them.
Rodney’s rangefinders, at one point in the last part of the battle, were reading a range of about 2,700 yd.
2,700 yd, under a mile and a half, point-blank range in a battleship fight, a distance so short that Rodney’s great guns were firing almost flat on a nearly horizontal trajectory, hurling 1-ton shells across the water like a rifle firing across a field.
Almost every shot hit.
There has never been a duel like it in the history of modern battleships.
There will never be one again.
Rodney was hurting herself, firing her forward guns at such extreme angles so close aboard the enemy, the blast of her own broadsides was tearing into her own structure.
The concussion cracked plating on her decks.
It shattered fittings in her superstructure.
It ruptured pipes.
It broke plumbing.
According to Rodney’s own damage reports, one of the most curious details of the entire battle is that the most serious damage suffered by HMS Rodney that morning was inflicted by the recoil and muzzle blast of her own 16-in guns.
Bismarck barely scratched her.
The treaty compromise, the discarded design, the ship the naval press had dismissed for 15 years was breaking the newest battleship in the German fleet and the only thing hurting her was the violence of her own reply.
There is a story from this part of the battle that has never been fully settled.
Rodney still carried those two enormous torpedo tubes, 24 and 1/2 inches across, the largest ever fitted to any capital ship in history.
At some point during the action at close range, she fired her torpedoes at Bismarck.
Rodney’s own officers later claimed that at least one of them hit.
If that claim is true, it is the only occasion in all of naval history in which one battleship has struck another battleship with a torpedo.
The claim has never been settled.
Von Müllenheim-Rechberg, the senior German survivor, did not believe it.
The wrecks of both ships have been surveyed on the seabed by Robert Ballard in 1989 and by James Cameron in 2002 and neither expedition found clear evidence of a torpedo strike on Bismarck’s hull.
The British historian Ludovic Kennedy, in his classic book on the pursuit, treated the claim with polite skepticism.
The truth is probably this.
Rodney’s crew believed they had made history.
They may have.
They may not have.
The evidence is not there and the men who fired the torpedoes and the men who might have been struck by them are almost all gone.
Take it as what it is, a proud claim, honestly made, never fully proven.
The gunfire is not in dispute.
By 9:30 in the morning, Bismarck’s main battery had fired her last salvo.
Her guns were dead, her upper works were an inferno.
Fires burned along her length, smoke rolled in black columns into the low Atlantic sky.
She would not sink.
This is what makes the last hour of the battle so hard to describe.
Because Bismarck’s builders, whatever else they had done, had built her stability into her bones.
She had watertight compartments so cleverly designed that even torn open by dozens of heavy shells, she refused to roll over.
She refused to go down.
Rodney and King George V, having ceased to be attacked, now became executioners.
They stood off.
They fired.
They fired again.
Slow, deliberate, methodical salvos into a burning wreck that would not die.
16-in shells, 14-in shells, 6-in secondary batteries.
The two British battleships poured metal into the German ship the way you’d pour water on a fire that refused to go out.
By the end, Rodney had fired roughly 380 16-in shells and over 700 more from her 6-in guns in a single morning of work.
Aboard Rodney, some of the men who had cheered the first salvo were not cheering now.
There is a strange truth about revenge.
It is one thing to want it.
It is a different thing to watch it.
Below decks on Bismarck, the horror was total.
Fires everywhere, water rising in some compartments, trapped men in others.
The last coherent orders, according to the survivors, were to scuttle the ship.
Explosive charges in the engineering spaces.
Sea opened.
Whatever hastened the end.
Around 10:10 in the morning, Admiral Tovey looked at his fuel gauges.
He looked at the ship still burning across the water.
He gave the order that no admiral in that position ever wanted to give.
Cease fire.
His battleships had done what they had come to do.
Now they had to save themselves.
King George V and Rodney turned away, low in the water with fuel exhaustion, and steamed north toward home.
The finishing was left to a cruiser, HMS Dorsetshire, which closed and fired torpedoes into Bismarck’s port and starboard sides.
At about 10:39 in the morning on the 27th of May, 1941, Bismarck rolled over onto her port side and sank stern first into the gray Atlantic.
The question of what finally killed her has never been fully answered.
Ballard’s expedition in 1989 found her hull relatively intact and argued for scuttling.
The British investigator David Mearns, working with wreck footage in 2001, found evidence of shell damage below the waterline and argued that Allied fire had also opened her hull.
The likeliest truth is that all three killed her, the guns, the torpedoes, the scuttling charges.
She died from all of them together.
Of her crew of over 2,000 men, 114 survived, and here is one of the ugliest facts of the whole story.
The rescue was not enough.
Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori pulled sailors out of the freezing water for less than an hour before a submarine alarm sounded.
There may have been a U-boat, there may not have been, but the risk was too great and both ships got underway and left.
Hundreds of German sailors were still in the water when the British ships pulled away.
Most of them died there.
It is a decision that has been argued about ever since.
There is no clean answer to it.
There is only the ocean and the men who did not come home.
Somewhere among the ships circling the sinking, on the deck of the Polish destroyer Piorun, a young officer named Eryk Sopocko watched Bismarck go down.
He was 27 years old.
His country was under German occupation.
His family was somewhere in a Poland he could not reach.
He is the man who wrote later the words that came to be associated with that morning, “Justice, you still exist”.
He did not survive the war.
He was killed on the 16th of June, 1942, when the Polish destroyer ORP Kujawiak struck a mine off the coast of Malta.
He was 28 years old, but the sentence outlived him.
Justice, you still exist.
The ships turned for home.
Rodney’s part in the war was not over.
She would go on to serve through the Mediterranean campaigns, through the invasion of Normandy, where her 16-in guns would fire in support of Allied troops on the beaches.
She would finish the war worn down almost to the point of collapse, her machinery finally beyond repair.
In 1948, 3 years after the peace, she was towed to the breakers at Inverkeithing in Scotland and cut up for scrap.
There was no ceremony.
There was no memorial.
The ship that had avenged Hood ended in a shipyard, sold by weight, taken apart by men with cutting torches.
The three Hood survivors lived on.
Ted Briggs, 18 years old on the day his ship broke in two, went home.
He served in the Royal Navy for another 32 years.
He spoke when he could bear to about what he had seen.
He founded the HMS Hood Association.
He carried Hood’s story into old age.
He died on the 4th of October, 2008, at the age of 85, the last living survivor of the mighty Hood.
Bob Tilburn died in 1995.
William Dundas, who had climbed out of a hatch as the ship rolled, was killed in a car crash in 1965.
He was 42.
On the German side, Burkard von Müllenheim-Rechberg, the young Lieutenant Commander who had taken command of Bismarck in her last minutes, survived the sinking.
He was pulled from the water by Dorsetshire before the U-boat alarm.
He was taken prisoner.
He lived.
He wrote a book called Battleship Bismarck, A Survivor’s Story.
He died on the 18th of June, 2003, at the age of 92.
And this This perhaps the last twist of all.
Ted Briggs and Burkhard von Mullenheim Rechberg met more than once in the years after the war at ceremonies, at reunions.
At the small quiet gatherings where old sailors of enemy navies remember old dead friends, two men who had been on opposite sides of the greatest surface battle of the Atlantic war.
Two men whose ships had killed each other’s shipmates, they shook hands, they spoke as men, not as enemies.
They understood something that only survivors ever really understand.
The critics of 1925 had looked at HMS Rodney and called her obsolete.
They had called her ugly.
They had said she was slow, awkward, a treaty compromise, a relic of a a lost design philosophy, a floating tanker with a bad haircut.
They had measured her by the standards of a peaceful drawing board and found her wanting.
And on a gray morning in May of 1941, 400 mi west of the coast of France, that tired old battleship had crossed a thousand miles of storm, closed to point-blank range with the pride of the German fleet, and torn it apart with the heaviest broadside any battleship in the world was permitted to carry.
The Atlantic covered the wreck.
The war went on.
The old ship went back to work.
But somewhere in the deep water, 400 mi west of the coast of France, a debt written in the blood of 1,400 men had been paid in full.
And the ship that paid it was the one nobody thought could.
