The discovery of the final resting-place of the World War II German battleship Bismarck recalled to this reporter a footnote to the Bismarck's history that he found while doing other research on World War II and which the British Admiralty at the time - 24 years after the Bismarck went down - refused to declassify.
Now another two dozen years have gone by and the reason the Admiralty would not release the information has long been public knowledge. There can be no harm in telling the tale.The source was a report the Admiralty gave the U.S. Navy in 1941, when American warships were protecting convoys to Britain, but four months before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the War. I found it misfiled with technical reports in the archives of the Chief of Naval Operations.
In early 1941 Germany was riding high. She had forced the British out of Greece, was taking Crete with a lightning paratroop attack, had decimated the Mediterranean Fleet under Adm. Cunningham, and was threatening Egypt.
The Graf Spey rampaged in the South Atlantic in 1940 before being sunk, and the cruiser Scheer destroyed ten Allied ships in three months in early 1941, returning safely to Germany. The Hipper stalked the Atlantic after the Scheer returned, and the battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau broke out into the North Atlantic, sinking 16 ships in three days, a total of 22, while Hipper blasted seven more.
Coming atop heavy U-boat sinkings, the German surface marauders were strangling Britain and stretching the British Navy almost to the breaking point. Prime Minister Winston Churchill found the situation so serious he proclaimed it "The Battle of the Atlantic," and created a special committee to deal with the crisis.
The German Kriegsmarine, following up on its successes, rushed to complete the Bismarck. Armed with 15-inch guns, she was then the most heavily armored battleship in the world. Only the Japanese Yamato of 1944 would ever exceed her in size.
The Germans planned to break Bismarck out into the Atlantic with the cruiser Prinz Eugen, passing them through the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland to roam at large among British shipping, well out of reach of the Royal Air Force. With the Bismarck's heavier weapons, no British ship could defeat her in a gunnery duel.
Her weakness, however, was supply. With no German base to refuel and restock her with food and ammunition, the Bismarck would be forced to return to Germany in a month. To solve that problem, the Germans, as they had done for the Graf Spey, the Hipper, and other raiders, sent supply ships out to prearranged stations in unfrequented parts of the Atlantic.
The report I found dealt with one of those ships the Gdynia, named after the East Prussian port.
Stocked with enough materiel to keep the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen at sea for a month, the Gdynia slipped out of Kiel well ahead of the Bismarck's sortie from the Kattegat on May 21, 1941. She steamed, under cover of bad weather, through the North Sea, seemingly immune to British patrols.
Suddenly, as she approached the Arctic Circle east of Iceland, a British destroyer sprang out of the fog almost alongside, a squad of Royal Marines leaped aboard and siezed the Gdynia from her startled crew.
So rapidly did the British take the ship that the officers did not have time to radio a distress message or destroy their secret papers, codes, or orders.
It was a rich haul for the British Navy. At once they knew that the Bismarck, or some heavy raider, was about to sail, what her general operating area was, her likely endurance, and her rendezvouspoints. Best of all, they had the keys to the German Naval codes.
It was an intrepid feat of arms. Not since the days of sail had British officers signaled "away boarders." Only once again during World War II was an allied commander to give that order, when U.S. Adm. Dan Gallery gave it to capture a U-boat in 1944.
It takes nothing away from the British to reveal that they knew the Bismarck's plans, for that is what the Gdynia's capture gave them. At the time I read the report, still secret in 1964, the Admiralty was still protecting a greater secret, the breaking of the German Enigma code, which told the British Navy where to look for the Gdynia. The Gdynia's code books gave the British the rest of the German secrets.
The Bismarck was sighted by the cruiser Suffolk the night of May 23, between Iceland and Greenland. The Suffolk called for heavier guns and the battleships Hood and Prince of Wales raced to cut off the Germans at first light.
Firing first at 25,000 yards, the Hood engaged the enemy. The Bismarck, with her heavier guns, replied. Eight minutes after the battle began, a high-angle shell from the Bismarck penetrated Hood's unarmored deck and her magazines blew up, killing 1,497 of her 1,500-man crew.
The 14-inch gunned Prince of Wales, outweighed, was forced to break off the fight after taking three 15-inch hits, but penetrated Bismarck's stern with two shells that holed her fuel oil tanks. The 45,000-ton Bismarck disappeared in the fog to the southwest toward an unsuspecting British troop convoy, trailing oil.
Suddenly the German ships turned back toward the shadowing British ships, and in the melee lost their pursuers.
For more than 24 hours the Bismarck was at large in the Atlantic while the British searched franctically for her. It was not until 1974 that the British allowed it to be told that they found her by decoding a message her commander, Adm. Lutyens, sent to his headquarters.
British carriers launched Swordfish torpedo planes - mid-1930s biplanes - which found the Bismarck attempting to reach the port of Brest in occupied France. Led by Lt.-Cdr Esmonde, the Swordfish hit and again damaged the German ship. The British concentrated their entire fleet of heavy warships against her, but Swordfish attacks disabled Bismarck's rudder, leaving her steaming in circles.
Lutjens promised in a message to the Kreisgmarine "we shall fight to the last shell" as destroyers closed to pound him with more torpedoes. The battleships Rodney and King George V moved in to finish the fight, leaving the ship a shambles, her guns silenced. Finally, struck by torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire, Bismarck rolled over and disappeared, not to be seen again until oceanographers photographed her last month.
Of a crew of 2,000, 115 survived.