Either ship might have gone on and destroyed its opponent but both had had enough. Prince of Wales was badly damaged as well as having trouble with the gun turrets. She turned away under a smoke screen.
In London, as in Berlin, the news that the action had been broken off was not welcomed. Churchill saw the prospect of a rampaging Bismarck as a direct challenge to Britain’s traditional role, and feared that it would be ‘trumpeted round the world to our great detriment and discomfort’. The disengagement was a ‘bitter disappointment and grief to me’. Hitler felt the same way and said that Bismarck should have immediately dealt with the Prince of Wales too, and not run away.
Out in the cold grey ocean, Prince of Wales and Norfolk were joined by the carrier Victorious. So grave was the emergency that the carrier had been detached from escorting Troop Convoy WS 8B to the Middle East. These warships trailed the two Germans using the Suffolk’s radar to keep in contact, but again the operators found it difficult to keep radar contact at extreme range. That night the pursuers decided to use the carrier’s aircraft in an attempt to slow the Bismarck.
With the equipment available at that time, carrier take-offs and landings at night were sometimes permitted in perfect weather. Now the carrier was pitching and rolling in a rising gale and rainstorms from low scudding clouds made visibility zero. The air crews were fresh from training school; some had never made a carrier take-off or landing before. (The desperate shortage of navy pilots had sent these aircrews to Victorious to be instructed while the carrier was on convoy duty.) It was 2200 hours (Double Summer Time), and light was changing and deceptive. Dutifully Victorious flew off a striking force of Swordfish torpedo-carrying biplanes and Fulmar fighters.
One of the Swordfish was equipped with an ASV Mk II radar and its operator ‘saw’ a ship through cloud. But when the plane descended it was identified as a US coast guard cutter on Atlantic weather patrol. Now that the planes were below the cloud, they spotted Bismarck about six miles away, but the element of surprise was lost. It was through heavy gunfire – Bismarck had 84 anti-aircraft guns – that they made the slow, low, straight and steady approach that is required for torpedo dropping.
Despite the way in which the aircraft came in from different angles, Bismarck was able to swerve violently and avoid seven torpedoes. The eighth one hit the starboard side, near the bridge. This hit shifted one of the heavy side-belt armour plates but its backing of thick teak wood absorbed much of the armour’s displacement. The Bismarck reported to Naval Group Command West that the torpedo had done no more than ‘scratched the paintwork’. It had achieved more than that, but its immediate effect upon Bismarck’s performance was negligible.
To find a carrier at night over the ocean is a daunting task, and the Victorious’s homing beacon was not working. Upon hearing the planes returning the carrier’s captain ordered searchlights on to help them, but they were swiftly doused on the repeated order of the vice-admiral. Despite the admiral’s exaggerated caution, and with the help of the flight leader’s ASV radar, the ‘Stringbags’ found their home ship again and landed in the dark. Not all the Fulmar aircraft were so lucky. It was midnight. The crews had had an eventful Saturday night out and a memorable introduction to carrier flying.
Bismarck was not slowed. When the Swordfish aircraft attacked, it had already parted company with Prinz Eugen. Now it turned south-west on a direct route for the Bay of Biscay and the French ports. The Suffolk, unready for such a move, lost both German ships on the radar, and when daylight came, more flights from the Victorious failed to discover any sign of the enemy. Low on fuel, the force – Prince of Wales, Victorious and Suffolk – turned west, still failed to find Bismarck, and soon headed for various ports to refuel.
There was no rejoicing aboard Bismarck. It was Sunday 25 May 1941 and the 52nd birthday of Admiral Lütjens. He addressed the ship’s company, delivering a melancholy message of doing and dying. Gerhard Junack, one of the Bismarck’s engineer officers said: ‘The admiral wished with these words to rid the crew of their over-exuberance and bring them into a more realistic frame of mind; but in fact he overdid it, and there was a feeling of depression among the crew which spread through all ranks from the highest to the lowest … The crew began to brood and neglected their duties.’
Examples of this neglect now played a vital part in the battle. Because Bismarck’s electronics specialists were still picking up radar impulses from Suffolk they didn’t guess that Suffolk’s radar could not ‘see’ Bismarck’s pulses. Bismarck’s decrypt specialists were neglectful too. They were intercepting Suffolk’s regular radio transmissions, and failed to notice that the shadower was no longer sending position reports. And so it was that Admiral Lütjens didn’t know that he had given the slip to his pursuers. He betrayed his position by sending a very long signal to the German Naval Command Group West (Paris). They replied telling him that the British cruisers had lost contact with him six and a half hours before.
Lütjens’ long message gave the Royal Navy a chance to fix Bismarck’s position on the map, but owing to confusion and misunderstandings at the Admiralty – compounded by the fact that the flagship navigator used the wrong charts – the big ship was not found. In the ensuing muddle, signals from other ships were intercepted and plotted and declared to be Bismarck. The German navy’s radio traffic looked identical as regards letter-grouping, spacing, serial numbers and so on. At 1320 on 25 May, when the search was at its most frantic, a signal from a U-boat was intercepted. The Admiralty intelligence officers decided that this was from the Bismarck pretending to be a U-boat, and using the U-boat radio signals and transmitting frequency.
The bungling began to be sorted out when these transmissions were compared with oscilloscope photos of the radio wave of Bismarck’s transmitter (taken when it passed Denmark on the outward leg). By that time Bismarck’s approximate position had been estimated by someone in signals intelligence who noticed the flurry of German naval signals was no longer coming from Wilhelmshaven; it was coming from Paris. This suggested that Bismarck could probably be found somewhere along the line from its last known position to one of the French ports.
Still it was only guesswork; the Bismarck might have escaped but for a curious misfortune. The only Enigma signals that the British could read regularly and quickly were those of the Luftwaffe.
In Athens in connection with the Crete invasion, the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, worried about his youngest son who was in the crew of the Bismarck. Anxiously he called his staff in Berlin to ask what was happening to the ship. His staff in the Berlin Air Ministry found out and transmitted a radio signal (using Luftwaffe Enigma), telling him that his son’s ship was heading for the west coast of France. It was a parent’s anxiety that provided London with the information that settled the fate of the Bismarck.
An RAF flying boat crew of 209 Squadron, Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, and the flyers on the aircraft-carrier Ark Royal were briefed on the supposition that Bismarck was somewhere on a line drawn from there to Brest. It seems that no one at the Admiralty was aware that the only French port with a dry dock large enough to hold the Bismarck was St Nazaire.
It was 31 hours later, on 26 May, that a Catalina flying boat using ASV Mk II radar found Bismarck. About 45 minutes later a Swordfish from the aircraft-carrier Ark Royal flew to the spot and confirmed the sighting. HMS Sheffield, equipped with an old Type 79 radar designed for air-warning, used it to make contact with the Bismarck, and trailed along waiting for Ark Royal and the battleship Renown.
With the end of the flight deck pitching 60 feet, and a wind over the deck recorder wavering between 45 and 55 knots, the deck crews readied the aircraft aboard Ark Royal. No one there had ever tried to fly-off planes in this sort of weather but there was no alternative. One Swordfish pilot gives us this account:
Ranging the Swordfish that morning called for the strength of Hercules and the patience of Job. Time and