The end was apocalyptic. Within 11 minutes of the first ‘earthquake bomb’ striking amidships, the giant warship had toppled over, belching fire, smoke and steam and trapping those who had not been killed in the explosions in a coffin of Krupp steel.
As the crews of the Lancaster bombers of 617 — The Dambusters — and 9 Squadron headed home through the gin-clear Norwegian morning sky on November 12, 1944, they could congratulate themselves on one of the great coups of the war.
After four years of relentless attacks by sea and air, the ship Churchill branded ‘The Beast’ was dead. When he heard the news at the British embassy in Paris, he dashed off a telegram to Stalin. ‘RAF bombers have sunk the Tirpitz,’ it said. ‘Let us rejoice together.’
From October 1940, Tirpitz (pictured) was the target of 24 air and sea operations requiring the highest levels of skill and courage
Before her annihilation 75 years ago this week, the 42,500-ton battleship had cast a long shadow over Britain’s war. She was faster, longer ranged and better armed than anything in the British fleet, and was said to be unsinkable.
She mesmerised the admirals, who feared the terrible destruction she could wreak if she broke out into the Atlantic, cutting the vital lifeline to the Americas.
Even sitting in port, her very existence was enough to tie up vital naval assets, forcing the most powerful ships in the Home Fleet to keep a constant watch.
Churchill’s concern bordered on obsession. ‘The crippling of this ship would alter the entire face of the naval war,’ he declared in January 1942. ‘The loss of 100 machines and 500 airmen would be well compensated for.’
An aerial picture taken in 1944 during WWII shows smokes rising from the Tirpitz, Germany’s biggest battleship following an attack by allied bombers as it sailed in a Norwegian fjord
From October 1940, Tirpitz was the target of 24 air and sea operations requiring the highest levels of skill and courage.
Fear of her power inspired a heroic feat, the blowing-up of Brittany’s St Nazaire dock in March 1942, depriving the battleship of the only haven big enough to take her, should she make it to the Atlantic.
It also triggered the shaming decision to scatter the escort accompanying the Arctic convoy PQ17 — carrying hundreds of tanks and planes and other supplies to the West’s Russian Allies — when it was thought the battleship was at sea, leaving PQ17 to the mercy of German bombers and submarines.
Tirpitz was launched on a cold April day in 1939 in the Wilhelmshaven naval base in the presence of the Führer.
Hitler knew little about naval warfare, but he appreciated the symbolism of big ships and their pyschological effect on his enemies, and Tirpitz and her sister ship Bismarck were seen as emblems of Nazi invincibility.
Bismarck’s demise, sunk after an epic chase during her first operation in May 1941, was a huge boost to British morale.
But as long as Tirpitz was afloat, her destruction remained an imperative. The Navy dreamed of destroying her in an epic sea battle that would neutralise the Kriegsmarine (Nazi navy) for ever.
A scene in Above Us The Waves, the film about the midget submarines’ daredevil operation
In March 1942, they got their chance when Tirpitz set out from its Norwegian base at Trondheim to attack an Allied convoy carrying supplies for the Russians.
The Home Fleet put to sea under Admiral Jack Tovey, who, after orchestrating the sinking of the Bismarck, thirsted to complete the double. The longed-for clash never came, but the Navy got close enough for an air attack from the carrier Victorious.
Fleet Air Arm crews in obsolescent Albacore biplanes flew through a blizzard of anti-aircraft fire to drop torpedoes that failed to find their mark only due to the superb seamanship of the battleship’s commander, Karl Topp.
Then it was the RAF’s turn. It launched several unsuccessful attacks while Tirpitz was still being fitted out.
There were three mass raids after the move to Trondheim, but the narrow Faettenfjord where she lay gave natural protection, and the RAF’s underpowered bombs made no impression on her armour.
And so desperation forced innovation. The next scheme was to send two-man crews wearing immersion suits and breathing apparatus, astride submerged electric-powered ‘chariots’, to penetrate the battleship’s lair.
The man in front steered, while his mate behind was charged with cutting through the heavy steel nets protecting the target and placing a detachable warhead on the nose to the battleship’s hull.
An appeal for volunteers for ‘hazardous service’ provided a crop of daredevils driven by boredom, ambition or a thirst for adventure.
After months of training in Scottish lochs, Operation Title was launched.
Two chariots were carried on the deck of a small cargo boat, Arthur, skippered by Leif Larsen, one of a band of intrepid Norwegian mariners who operated a clandestine shuttle service ferrying agents and saboteurs between the Shetlands and Norway.
The crews were concealed in a secret compartment below decks and, for the last leg of the voyage, the chariots would be towed on steel hawsers under the hull.
The Arthur set off from Lunna Voe on October 26, 1942. After several setbacks, Larsen managed to bluff his way through the German controls at the entrance to the Trondheim fjord.
Ten miles from their target, a storm blew up. The chariots broke from their moorings and sank. They were forced to head for the Swedish border, 50 miles away and ran into a German patrol.
In the ensuing firefight, Able Seaman Bob Evans was wounded. The others escaped, but Evans was captured. He was executed as a saboteur three months later.
Success had been tantalisingly close, and the failure lent urgency to another exotic plan using midget submarines known as X-craft.
For the scheme to work, the men inside the claustrophic hulls would need extraordinary reserves of physical and mental stamina and courage.
Once again, when the call went out for unmarried men, aged under 24 and good swimmers of ‘strong and enduring physique’, there was a rush of volunteers. They were a motley bunch, from seasoned naval veterans to peacetime playboys and included South Africans, Irishmen, Frenchmen and Australians.
Among them was John Lorimer, son of a Scottish doctor, who had joined the Navy at 18 as a rating and was subsequently commissioned. Many years later, he still could not identify what it was that made him step forward. ‘Perhaps we were all mad,’ he said.
The dangers of the mission — the subject of the 1955 film Above Us The Waves — seem almost unbearable to modern eyes. The four-man crews were crammed into a 50ft-long metal tube no wider or higher than 4.5 ft.
To reach their target — now at anchor in Kaafjord, 30 miles from open sea — they would have to negotiate minefields and numerous reefs and rocks.
Then there were the heavy, steel-mesh, anti-submarine curtains and anti-torpedo nets to get through.
They could dive beneath the nets, but the curtains reached the seabed, and a diver would have to leave the X-craft by a ‘wet and dry’ compartment, cut a hole and usher the sub through.
Almost every manoeuvre carried the prospect of death, and training had already claimed several lives.
But if the challenge was great, so was the prize.
Lorimer recalled how a sense of ‘tremendous responsibility’ weighed on the crews. If they succeeded, he added, ‘the British Home Fleet could give its protection to the U-boat haunted Atlantic convoys and the lives of thousands of merchant seaman might be saved’.
In September 1943, conventional submarines set out from the north of Scotland pulling six X-craft behind them. The towlines were made of hemp and kept breaking. One midget submarine was lost with all hands and another began leaking and had to be scuttled.
When they approached the Norwegian coast, the attack crews took over the four surviving craft. X10 was forced to turn back after its periscope and compass failed.
That left X5, X6 and X7 to press on. X6, Lorimer’s craft, captained by Lieutenant Donald Cameron, managed to slip through a gate in the anti-submarine defences and, after tussling with the network of steel hoops protecting the battleship from torpedoes, laid two two-ton charges below the hull.
Lieutenant Godfrey Place in X7 also managed to wriggle through and plant his mines.
X6 was forced to surface and the crew taken prisoner, while X7 sank, trapping two men.
Meanwhile, X5 had arrived, but was sunk by the Tirpitz guns, with the loss of all inside.
The mines were timed to explode in an hour. Lorimer was being interrogated by the captain when he felt ‘a bloody great bang — he went flying one side of the desk and I went flying the other’.
Tirpitz was crippled, but afloat. It would take seven months to repair. Cameron and Place were awarded the VC for the feat.
The attack was the beginning of the end for the Tirpitz. In its brief life, it had done very little fighting and sunk not a single enemy warship. The 2,000-strong crew lived pampered lives, watching films in the ship’s cinema and eating bread from the onboard bakery, while their army comrades froze and died on the Eastern Front.
Multiple attacks by the Fleet Air Arm in the summer of 1944 weakened her further. But Churchill and his admirals were determined to finish the business, and turned again to RAF Bomber Command.
With typical bombast, its chief Arthur Harris claimed that he promised the Admiralty ‘we would sink the Tirpitz in our spare time’.
Even so, success came only at the third attempt. Tirpitz was now lying off the Norwegian island Haakoy, near Tromso, where it served as a floating gun platform to repel an expected Allied invasion.
The move brought her within range of RAF bases in Scotland.
On the morning of November 12, 1944, 32 Lancasters from 617 — The Dambusters — and 9 Squadron, armed with 12,000 lb Tallboy bombs designed by Barnes Wallis to create an earthquake effect, closed on the battleship.
Dambusters leader Wing Commander ‘Willie’ Tait remembered: ‘The sky was cloudless, the air calm, and the aircraft rode easily without a bump to disturb the bomb aimer.’
Freddie Watts, flying behind, said to his bombardier: ‘My God, Mac, they’ve had it today.’
As they were spotted, Tirpitz’s 15 in guns opened up, hurling at the attackers shells weighing nearly a ton each. It was no use.
The first Tallboy slid from Tait’s machine into an aerodynamically perfect descent, spinning like a rifle bullet.
Thirty seconds later, it hit. Tait looked back to see the battleship ‘almost hidden by smoke. A jet of white steam was gushing out and amidships she blazed fiercely’.
After a second direct hit, an explosion blew one of the giant gun turrets 100 ft in the air and the ship turned over, burying its superstructure in the soft seabed.
Above decks, many were killed in the storm of fire and blast. Below, the Arctic brine rushed through the great gaps torn in the sides by the numerous near-misses, overwhelming men as they scrambled for a ladder or hatch.
As the Lancasters turned for home, the ship was in its death throes.
Despite the rejoicing at home at the destruction of the pride of Hitler’s navy, the man who led the raid took little satisfaction in his work.
A year later, Tait visited the wreck. It made a melancholy sight. It was ‘huge, hideous and stank like a charnel house’, he wrote.
‘There were nearly a thousand bodies still inside the flooded hull . . . the rusty tomb was nothing to gloat over.
‘It affronted the Arctic stillness of the unpolluted hills.’
- Patrick Bishop is the author of Target Tirpitz, published by HarperCollins at £10.99.