John Vivian Auchmuty Musters
On 8 April our destroyers went into Vestfjorden, laid their mines, while we and our destroyer screen hovered off somewhere near the Lofoten Islands outside. Meanwhile the German invasion of Norway was going full swing and the ten big German destroyers, which took the German troops into Narvik at the head of Vestfjorden, passed our mine-laying destroyers, which had laid their mines and were on the way out. Neither side saw the other because of a snowstorm. There’d have been a considerable slaughter if they had sighted each other, and we would undoubtedly have come off worst.
Before that, on our way north, one of our destroyers, Glowworm, had lost a man overboard and she turned back with the permission of our Admiral, Admiral Whitworth in Renown, in order to try to find him. I don’t think they had a hope of finding him alive in that very cold and very rough sea, but they did what they could and searched for him, and then they turned north again to rejoin Renown’s group, from which they were, by now, probably a couple of hundred miles astern. Glowworm fell in, at that point, with two German destroyers which were part of the German invasion group, which included the heavy cruiser Hipper, waiting to go into Trondheim, when the moment arrived for all the Germans to go into Norway at different places at the same time. Glowworm fought a gun battle with the German destroyers, which fell back on Hipper. Glowworm was overwhelmed and sunk by Hipper, after having rammed her and done a bit of damage. It didn’t stop Hipper going into Trondheim and landing her 1,700-odd troops there.
Well, meanwhile we were up north with our own five screening destroyers plus the mine-laying destroyers, which had rejoined us. The weather now was quite appalling, a north-westerly gale and a very heavy sea indeed. Very early in the morning of 9 April we were patrolling somewhere south-west of the Lofoten Islands and news was coming through of German activities all the way up the Norwegian coast, and we’d been at action stations since the previous afternoon, which took us to about half past three in the morning of the 9th. By that time one of our anti-torpedo bulges on the port side for’ard had been damaged by very heavy weather, having quite an effect on our potential for full speed.
My job in the gunnery control team was range-spotting officer, which meant making the corrections to range up or down. I was stationed in the Gunnery Transmitting Station, a sort of calculation station. We had six 15-inch guns in three pairs, two pairs for’ard and one pair aft and, since the ship had been reconstructed, we had a gun range of about 32,000 yards, which was quite good for an old ship. The loading interval of a 15-inch gun is about 40 seconds, it takes anything up to 60 seconds for the shells to arrive at the other end. This meant a long pause before any alteration to bearing and range, based on observation of the splash made by the preceding salvo, could be made, and, in the meantime, the enemy could have altered course or speed. So what we did was fire one gun in each turret simultaneously, as the “A” salvo, and then, 10 seconds later, having made some arbitrary corrections to line or range, we’d fire the other three, which would be termed the “B” salvo. That gave you a better idea of how you were getting on than if you just had one great clump of shells landing at longer intervals.
Well anyway, we are now in the very early morning on 9 April somewhere south-west of the Lofoten Islands, steaming rather slowly north-east, keeping our speed down because the destroyers were astern and they couldn’t really go very fast in that sort of sea. At about 3.50 in the morning, people on Renown’s bridge sighted one and then two warships to the eastward, quite a long way away in a clear patch between snow squalls. The eastern horizon was just then beginning to get light as dawn was breaking. At first it was thought that it might have been Repulse, our fellow battlecruiser on this operation, plus somebody else with her. We did not know quite where Repulse was, but we did know that she was at sea somewhere off the Norwegian coast. Anyway, we increased speed and turned to a parallel course while we tried to identify these vessels, and then a little later we made a positive identification that the leading ship was the German fast battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and we thought that the ship next astern, the second ship, was probably a ‘Hipper’ Class cruiser. All the German naval ships looked extraordinarily alike. Accordingly, we turned on to a parallel course, which was about north, and we were all at action stations already. What we did then was to bring the main armament to the ready, checking receivers, testing firing circuits, usual drill before a shoot, and then the order came through to load the main armament with 15-inch armour-piercing shells on full charges.
My memory of time is a little uncertain, but some 20 minutes after we sighted the ships we decided to engage. The Captain, Captain Simeon, at this point turned Renown slightly away from the enemy, in order to bring their return fire further aft on a relative bearing, because we only had 6 inches of side armour and that wouldn’t stop an 11-inch armour-piercing shell, certainly not a German one. I should say here that we could not place the enemy’s range by our optical range-finders because they were so full of salt water from heavy spray, so nothing could be seen through them. We had no radar. So the Gunnery Officer, who was up in the main director, estimated the range at 18,000 yards, which was not a bad guess at all; in fact, it was only 1,000 yards out. One of our first two salvos was reported spotted short and that was passed down to me and I then took over the range spotting. So for third and fourth salvos, the next pair, I ordered an up 400 ladder, up 400 for the first salvo, our number three, and then up another 400 for the next one, and then we waited for those to arrive. In retrospect, it is quite clear that, on such scanty information about the enemy’s range, 400-yard steps was a bit too conservative. It would have been prudent to have gone up in two steps of 800. Well, we waited for those second pair of the up ladder to fall, and they were both short and this had me slightly worried. Anyway, I ordered another up 400 ladder, hoping to hell that this would cross the target and do the trick, because it is necessary to cross the target, to bracket the target, and the smaller the bracket the better, and then you can start filling in the gap. Well, at this point we got our first salvo away, which was number five of the shoot, and I was waiting to see the gunnery lamps come on for the second salvo, and that never happened for quite a while. Apparently they had quite some trouble in the turrets; the violent motion of the ship due to the heavy seas resulted in water coming down the spouts of the for’ard turrets. So I waited and then the first salvo fell, and to my relief it fell over, so then I was able to take off the last up 400 correction and come down 600 in order to push the middle of the bracket we had now achieved, so we got that one away and we waited for that one to arrive, and that, to everyone’s astonishment, hit the leading ship, which happened to be the Gneisenau, not the Scharnhorst, and that was Admiral Lutjen’s flagship. That was seen to produce an orange glow in her for’ard superstructure, which was a hit straight in their sort of tower mast which those ships had, just abaft the bridge. On top of that was their Main Armament Control Tower Director.
After that Gneisenau’s shooting was considered to have gone a bit ragged and uneven and erratic. Then we fired about half a dozen more salvos and we got two more hits on Gneisenau. One hit its for’ard turret and put that out of action, another hit arrived somewhere amidships – people up top saw a flash and clouds of smoke.
After this Gneisenau turned away to the north-eastward and her next astern, which we thought was Hipper, actually Scharnhorst, which was the other half of that dangerous pair, came across her stern and we shifted fire on to Scharnhorst. We never got a chance to sort of settle down for a shoot at her before she turned away, following Gneisenau away to the north-north-east. They went off at very high speed. We turned to follow and from time to time they were obscured by more snow squalls, but occasionally we had a good sight of them. We were only able to fire our two for’ard turrets at this stage, because we were more or less end on to the enemy and two gun salvos don’t get you very far if you don’t get a hit. Gradually they drew away and, after about 20 minutes of pursuit, obviously we weren’t going to catch up with these people. Because of the damage due to bad weather, we could only make 26 knots and, for firing, we had to come down to about 23, because when we went into that sea an awful lot of water came down the spouts of the 15-inch guns, making loading quite difficult. So after about 20 minutes of ineffectual shooting by us and plenty of ineffective shooting by them, they