Already, within fifteen minutes of the first shots being fired, there was a marked deterioration in the Bismarck’s rate and accuracy of fire. Heavy shells from the two British capital ships were beginning to smash into her, and the concussive impact of the exploding missiles, the clouds of acrid smoke and the bedlam of sound mingling with the crash of their own guns had a devastating and utterly demoralizing effect on the already dazed and exhausted gun crews crouched within their turrets.
Those few officers who still clung stubbornly to the bridge of the Bismarck could see that the gunfire from the King George V was falling off and becoming increasingly spasmodic (suffering from the same turret troubles as her sister ship the Prince of Wales, the King George V had, at one time, only two guns out of her ten capable of firing) and ordered every available gun to concentrate on the Rodney. But it was too late.
The Rodney, close in now, had the range and had it accurately. The big 16-inch shells, each one 2,700 pounds of armour-piercing high explosive, were crashing into the vitals of the shuddering Bismarck with steadily increasing frequency. One 16-inch shell struck the fire control tower, blasting it completely over the side, and after that all semblance of concerted firing and defence ceased. Another 16-inch shell silenced both for’ard turrets at once, wrecking ‘A’ turret and blowing part of ‘B’ turret back over the bridge, killing most of the officers and men left there. Shells from both battleships were exploding deep in the heart of the Bismarck, wrecking the engine rooms, destroying the fuel tanks and adding hundreds of tons of fuel to feed the great fires now raging in the entire mid-section of the ship, the roaring flames clearly visible through the great jagged gaps torn in the ship’s side and armour-plating.
‘Nightmarish’ is the only word to describe the dreadful scenes now taking place aboard that battered, holed and flaming shambles of twisted steel and broken bodies that was all that was left of the Bismarck and its crew.
Sixteen-inch shells from the Rodney, by this time at a point-blank range of only two miles, were now hitting the Bismarck two, four, even six at a time, and groups of fear-maddened men on the upper deck were running blindly backward and forward like crazed animals seeking escape from the twin terrors of these lethal broadsides and the red-hot deck-plates beginning to twist and buckle under their very feet: most of them chose the easy way out, a leap into the shell-torn sea and death by drowning.
In the turrets, sailors abandoned their now useless guns, mutinied and rushed for the turret doors. Some of the commanding officers of the turrets committed suicide, and others turned pistols on their own men, only to be overwhelmed: and then, the men found that the doors were warped and jammed fast, and they went down to the floor of the Atlantic locked in the iron coffin of the turret they had served so well.
Hatches, too, jammed shut all over the Bismarck. Two hundred men, imprisoned thus in the canteen, were fighting madly to force their way out, when a shell crashed through the deck and exploded inside, all the concussive blast and murderous storm of flying shrapnel confined to that one narrow space. There were no survivors.
But they were the lucky ones in the manner of their dying—lucky, that is, compared to the ghastly fate of the sailors trapped in magazines. Raging fires surrounded these magazines on nearly every side, and as the metal bulkheads grew steadily hotter until they began to glow dull red, the magazine temperatures soared. That this could have only one end the few damage control men still clinging to their posts knew all too well—and they could never forget the Hood blown out of existence when her magazines went up. They had no option but to do what they had to do—flood the magazines and drown their comrades in the swiftly rising waters.
And just as nightmarish as the scenes aboard was the appalling spectacle of the Bismarck herself. Weighed down by the thousands of tons of water rushing in through the great gaps torn in her sides, she rolled heavily, sluggishly, in the troughs between the waves, a battered, devastated wreck.
Her mast was gone, her director tower was gone, the funnel had just disappeared. All her boats had been destroyed, the smashed and broken turrets lay over at crazy angles, the barrels pointing down into the sea or up towards an empty sky, and the broken, twisted steel girders and plates of what had once been her superstructure glowed first red, then whitely incandescent as the great fires deep within blazed higher and higher. But still the Bismarck did not die.
Beyond all question, she was the toughest and most nearly indestructible ship ever built. She had been hit by the Prince of Wales, she had been hit by hundreds of heavy, armour piercing shells from the King George V, Rodney, Norfolk and Dorsetshire. She had been torpedoed by aircraft from the Ark Royal and from the Victorious, and now, in this, her last battle, torpedoed also by the Rodney and the Norfolk. But still, incredibly, she lived. No ship in naval history had ever taken half the punishment the Bismarck had, and survived. It was almost uncanny.
In the end, she was not to die under the guns of the two British battleships that had reduced her to this empty blazing hulk. Perhaps, in their wonder at her incredible toughness, they had come to believe that she could never be sunk by shell-fire. Perhaps it was their dangerous shortage of fuel, or the certainty that U-boats would soon be on the scene, in force: or perhaps they were just sickened by the slaughter. In any event, the King George V and the Rodney, their mission accomplished, turned for home.
The Bismarck never surrendered. Her colours still flew high, were still flying when the Dorsetshire closed in on the silent, lifeless ship and torpedoed three times from close range. Almost at once she heeled far over to port, her colours dipping into the water, then turned bottom up and slid beneath the waves, silent except for the furious hissing and bubbling as the waters closed over the red hot steel of the superstructure.
The long chase was over: the Hood was avenged.
The Meknes
The English Channel, during the years 1939-1945, was the setting for countless extraordinary and sometimes, during the invasion summer of 1944, frankly incredible spectacles; but it can safely be said that at no time in the war did it present a sight more astonishing, incongruous and utterly improbable than that to be seen on a night in late July in the year 1940, some 60 miles off the Isle of Wight.
This sight was a ship, just an ordinary 6,000-ton cargo and passenger liner, but it was behaving in a most extraordinary fashion. One could have looked at it, then looked again, and still have been excused for flatly disbelieving the plain evidence before one’s eyes. During the hours of darkness in the wartime Channel secrecy, stealth, and above all an absolutely enforced blackout, were the essentials without which there was no hope of survival. One careless chink of escaping light, one thoughtlessly struck match or cigarette end glowing in the darkness, and the chances were high that a U-boat’s periscope or torpedo boat’s bows lined up and locked on the betrayed bearing.
Yet there was light to be seen aboard this ship. Not just one light, but hundreds of them. It was as if a section of the Blackpool illuminations had been transferred en bloc to the middle of the Channel. Every blackout scuttle had been removed, and the lights behind the portholes switched on. The lights on deck and on the superstructure blazed. The bridge was floodlit. Powerful projectors lit up the name and nationality marks painted on either side of the hull, while another illuminated the big flag painted on the deck. Finally, two powerful searchlights were trained on the tricolour flag that fluttered high above the stern.
The night was fairly calm, the sky clear, visibility good: the brilliantly illuminated vessel must have been clearly visible over at least 500 square miles of the Channel and over 10 times that area for any plane cruising overhead.
The ship was the Meknes, owned by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, and she had excellent reason for this blatant self-advertisement. Or at least, tragically, so it was imagined at the time.
The Meknes was en route from Southampton to Marseilles with 1,180 French naval officers and ratings, mostly reservists who had served aboard a French b
attle-cruiser until the fall of their country, then transferred to Britain. They had since elected to return to their own country. Marseilles, at that time, was technically a neutral port, and these repatriates were non-combatants: the French Vichy Government, under the aged Marshal Pétain, had just concluded a separate peace with Germany. The French repatriates, therefore, were entitled to be regarded as neutrals, and afforded the protection that international law demands for neutrals. Accordingly, the British Government had informed Vichy of the repatriation, with instructions that the Germans be advised and asked to provide a safe conduct. Precautions would be taken, the British added, to ensure that there would be no mistaking her identity.
And there most certainly was no mistaking her identity, when the Meknes left Southampton at 4.30 p.m., cleared the Isle of Wight, and steamed down the Channel at fifteen knots.
All went well for the first few hours, and even the most apprehensive were beginning to relax, becoming increasingly confident that the guarantee of safe conduct was being scrupulously observed, when, at 10.30 p.m., the officer of the watch heard the sound of powerful motor engines closing rapidly. Blinded by the intensity of the Meknes’s own lights, he was unable to make out even the silhouette of the approaching boat, but the phosphorescent gleam of the high creaming wake it left behind it and the familiar sound of the engines left him in no doubt at all—it was a German E-boat, out on the prowl. At once he picked up the phone to report to the Meknes’s commander, Captain Dulroc, but before he had even begun to speak, the E-boat opened up with its machine guns, raking the superstructure, deck and port side of the ship with heavy and concentrated fire.
Captain Dulroc, ignoring the fire, rushed to the bridge while all around him machine-gun bullets smashed with triphammer thuds against steel bulkheads, and whined off in evil ricochet into the darkness beyond. Dulroc still believed in his guarantee of safe passage. He was convinced this was an error in identification that could soon be rectified. He rang the engine room telegraphs to stop, and gave two prolonged blasts on the ship’s whistle to show that he was no longer under way. The machine-gun fire ceased almost at once, and Dulroc flashed out a ‘Who are you?’ signal.
The reply came immediately—an even heavier burst of fire directed against the bridge with such venom and accuracy that officers and men had to fling themselves flat on their faces to escape the murderous barrage.
Again there came a brief lull in the firing, and Dulroc swiftly seized the opportunity to send out morse signals in the general direction of their still invisible assailant giving the name, nationality and destination of the Meknes over and over again. But the E-boat captain seemed beyond either reason or appeal. He opened fire again, this time not only with machine guns but with heavier calibre weapons, probably something in the nature of two-pounders.
Within seconds every lifeboat but one on the port side was smashed and made useless. Captain Dulroc and his officers had no illusions left now. The earlier bursts of machine-gun fire might have been the results of misidentification or overenthusiasm on the part of a trigger-happy young torpedo-boat captain. But the destruction of their port lifeboats had been no accident. They were clearly visible and sharply etched against the surrounding darkness by the numerous deck-and floodlights that were still switched on. The E-boat had deliberately aimed at and destroyed them with its heavy gun, and the reason for this destruction was not far to seek.
It had destroyed their boats so that they could not be used—and their only use, of course, could be for the saving of survivors. The Meknes, Dulroc knew, was going to be destroyed.
At 10.55 p.m. the now inevitable torpedo was fired from almost point-blank range. One of the survivors, M Macé, says that he was talking to some friends in his cabin, discussing the machinegun attacks, when a terrific explosion burst in the cabin walls and threw the men, one on top of the other, in a confused heap in the middle of the cabin deck. Somebody cried out, rather unnecessarily as Macé drily observes, ‘We have been torpedoed.’ They rose dazedly to their feet and burst their way out through the broken splintered door on to the open deck, to find the ship already sinking beneath their feet, going down rapidly by the stern. But it was not that unnaturally canted angle of the ship that attracted Macé’s attention at that moment. The torpedo struck opposite number three hold—and there were over 200 men confined in that one narrow space.
Macé still remembers, with what he describes as a horrifying vividness, the screams, the moans, and the pitiful wailing of the trapped, the wounded, the dying and the drowning in that deathtrap far beneath his feet.
For the great majority of men down there death came swiftly. Many had died outright and most of those who survived were too badly hurt to make more than a token attempt to escape the all-engulfing flood of hundreds of tons of water that rushed in through the great hole in the ship’s side. At the most, Macé says, a dozen men escaped from number three hold. The situation, he goes on, was almost as dreadful on the fo’c’sle of the ship. He could clearly see it from where he stood, even though the lights had died with the blowing up of the boilers. There had, of course, been no direct damage in the fore part of the ship—only one torpedo had struck the Meknes. But there was another and almost equally terrifying and lethal agent at work there. The stern of the Meknes was already sinking below the surface of the sea, bringing the bows of the ship high up into the air until the forefoot was almost clear of the water. As the angle increased, heavy rafts, several of them already partially released, broke free from their remaining lashings and slid down and aft along the decks, maiming, crushing and killing against bulkheads, rails and stanchions groups of men so tightly knotted that for most of them there could be no escape.
Here the first officer of the Meknes, now Captain Philippe Gilbert, takes up the story. The master, he says, realized at once that there was no hope of saving the Meknes. He ordered an SOS to be sent out—on the emergency radio, as all electricity supplies had been cut off—and for the boats to be lowered at once. Such lifeboats as were still fit to be launched, Gilbert says, were in the water with quite remarkable speed. Although he himself was in direct over-all charge of the lowering, he claims no credit for this. The loss of life, he is certain, would have been far greater had it not been for the happy chance that nearly all the repatriate passengers were themselves sailors, and most of them experienced sailors at that. They did not have to be told what to do. They just did it, and at once.
Never had speed and training served men better. The Mekne’s end was as swift as it was spectacular: she broke completely beneath the surface of the Channel in less than eight minutes from the moment of impact of the torpedo, but in that time every serviceable life-boat—and almost every available raft—was in the water.
As an aside at this point, Captain Gilbert mentions one of the most remarkable things he has ever seen at sea. As the sinking vessel rolled over on its side, one of the men struggling nearby had an extraordinary experience—and escape. ‘As one of the ship’s funnels tipped over into the water,’ Gilbert recalls, ‘this man was sucked into it as by a huge vacuum cleaner. Moments later a violent counter-pressure from the other end of the funnel blew him back into the sea. He was completely black from head to foot.’
The man who is now a pilot in Marseilles was one of the lucky ones. Many of those who escaped safely from the ship did so only to die during the night.
Some of the lifeboats had capsized, one or two to drift away, empty, into the darkness. Another was found to have its buoyancy tanks ripped open by machine guns and foundered soon after launching, throwing its occupants into the sea. For the majority, therefore, rafts and floating pieces of timber—of which there were providentially plenty—were the chief means and hope of salvation. In the two minutes before the foundering of the Meknes, hundreds of men had leaped into the sea and swum towards the bobbing rafts, dragging themselves aboard as best they could. The rafts, Macé says, were soon grossly overloaded. Further, the sea was not nearly so calm as it had appeared from
the deck of the Meknes only an hour or so previously; and the combination of the overloaded rafts and unsettled sea proved an evil one.
The rafts sank under the surface of the sea, and soon most of the men found themselves chest deep in the water—and even in July the waters of the English Channel can be bitterly cold. Time and again a wave would sweep over a raft and carry a man away: the more fortunate made their way back again and scrambled aboard—if that word can be used to refer to regaining position on something two feet below the level of the sea. Again and again, Macé says, a false movement, an unconscious shifting of position and weight at the critical moment when the other side of the raft was tilting upwards under the thrust of a passing wave and the entire raft would capsize, throwing everybody into the sea. After this had happened repeatedly, only the strongest men succeeded in regaining the raft. Others sank, exhausted or choked, and were never seen again.
And if the fight for sheer physical survival were not enough, there was a still further danger—the enemy who had so recently sunk them. Survivors claimed that they had been fired at in the water when swimming towards the rafts. Though this was probably true, it is unlikely that much loss of life was caused by it. A swimmer in a darkened sea makes a poor target, and it is significant that neither Macé nor Gilbert, two witnesses whose observations and accuracy of judgment were of the highest order, sought to dwell on this. It appears reasonably certain that, once men had reached rafts or lifeboats, no further attacks were made on them, although one survivor, the purser of the Meknes, claims that men on rafts were machine-gunned and killed. So brief and utterly confused was the entire course of events that the facts are difficult to arrive at.