Operation Rheinübung

Operation Rheinübung (“Rhine Exercise”) was an attempt to send Germany’s newest battleship, Bismarck, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen out into the Atlantic to attack Allied convoys. The force was commanded by the Fleet Commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens. The ships left occupied Gdynia, which the Germans had renamed Gotenhafen, on 18 and 19 May 1941, stopped near Bergen and on 23 May entered the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. On the morning of 24 May their way was barred by the battlecruiser Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, and the new battleship Prince of Wales. After eight minutes of firing Hood blew up; of more than 1,400 men, three survived. But Bismarck had been hit and was losing fuel, and Lütjens turned for France. The British threw dozens of warships into the chase. On the evening of 26 May torpedo aircraft from the carrier Ark Royal jammed her rudder, and on the morning of 27 May Admiral John Tovey’s battleships reduced her to a blazing wreck. Bismarck sank with more than two thousand men. After this defeat Hitler never again allowed a battleship to be sent into the Atlantic.

Name and dates

The codename Rheinübung was given to the operation by the German naval command. It had nothing to do with the purpose of the sortie and was merely a cover name. In Polish and British writing the events as a whole are usually called the chase or the hunt for the Bismarck, or the operations against the battleship Bismarck; the first engagement, on 24 May, is the Battle of the Denmark Strait.

The operation is framed by the dates 18 and 27 May 1941. On the evening of 18 May, at about 9.20 p.m., Prinz Eugen left Gdynia, while Bismarck, which had cast off from the quay that day and anchored in the roads, put to sea at about 2 a.m. on 19 May. At about 10.40 a.m. on 27 May Bismarck sank. Formally the operation went on for a few more days: Prinz Eugen, detached on 24 May, did not put into Brest until 1 June, and in the first half of June the British rounded up most of the German tankers and supply ships stationed across the ocean for the two warships. These events, however, belong to its aftermath. Times are given according to British ships’ logs; the German ships kept their records in German time, so the same moments in the two sides’ accounts usually differ by an hour or two.

Background

Raeder’s cruiser warfare

The German navy could not match the Royal Navy in open battle. Plan Z, the programme for building a great fleet announced at the beginning of 1939, was meant to change that within a few years, but the war broke out before the keels of most of the ships had been laid. In September 1939 Hitler ordered that only the ships far advanced in construction be completed: the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz and the cruiser Prinz Eugen. The Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, therefore staked everything on cruiser warfare: large surface ships were to sortie into the ocean, scatter British forces, oblige the Admiralty to protect convoys with battleships and sink merchant ships wherever there was no escort. They complemented the U-boat war of Admiral Karl Dönitz, the main current of the Battle of the Atlantic.

The first sorties brought mixed results. In December 1939 Admiral Graf Spee was cornered off the mouth of the River Plate and scuttled by her own crew. The battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi in November 1939 and the aircraft carrier Glorious in June 1940. In November 1940 Admiral Scheer broke up convoy HX 84, despite the self-sacrificing defence of the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, and roamed the oceans for five months. The greatest success came with Operation Berlin: from January to March 1941 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, under Lütjens’s command, sank or captured 22 ships totalling some 115,000 gross register tons, and then put into Brest on 22 March. Raeder wanted to go further. In the spring of 1941 he was planning a joint sortie by Bismarck and Prinz Eugen from the Baltic and Scharnhorst and Gneisenau from Brest, which were to meet in the Atlantic. Such a force could have attacked even a convoy protected by an old battleship.

A shrinking plan

Little remained of this design. Scharnhorst needed a boiler overhaul that was expected to last until the summer. On 6 April 1941 an RAF Beaufort torpedo bomber hit Gneisenau in Brest harbour, and a few days later she was also struck by bombs in dock, which put her out of action for many months. Tirpitz was only just completing her trials, and her crew was not yet trained. On 23 April Prinz Eugen struck a magnetic mine dropped by a British aircraft in the Fehmarn Belt, and the sortie had to be postponed by several weeks.

Lütjens, who was to be in command, was sceptical. On 26 April, in a conversation with Raeder, he proposed waiting at least for Scharnhorst or Tirpitz, since two ships so different in strength and range did not stand much of a chance. Raeder refused. According to most historians, his concern was not only to give the British no respite. He knew of the preparations for the attack on the USSR, in which the navy was to play a secondary role, and wanted the big ships to prove their worth before Hitler turned his whole attention to the east. The two admirals agreed on cautious tactics: the targets were merchant ships, and engagements with enemy heavy units were to be accepted only when an attack on a convoy required it and it could be done without undue risk. Lütjens also said that he saw the greatest danger not in British battleships but in carrier-borne torpedo aircraft.

On 5 May 1941 Hitler, together with the chief of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, toured Bismarck and Tirpitz at Gdynia and spoke with Lütjens. The admiral set out his misgivings, but Hitler did not cancel the sortie. Raeder informed him that it had begun only once the ships were already under way; Hitler accepted this reluctantly, fearing both the loss of the ship and the reaction of the United States.

Opposing forces

Germany. Bismarck, commissioned in August 1940, was the largest warship yet built in Europe: some 42,000 tons standard displacement and over 50,000 tons fully loaded, eight 380 mm guns, a speed of up to 30 knots and very strong belt armour. She was commanded by Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann. On board were about 2,200 men, including Lütjens’s fleet staff and the prize crews who were to man captured ships. Prinz Eugen, under Kapitän zur See Helmuth Brinkmann, an Admiral Hipper-class ship, carried eight 203 mm guns and a good radar. Seven tankers and several supply ships were sent out into the ocean, and Dönitz was to support the force with U-boats if needed. The weak point of the sortie was fuel: Bismarck left Gdynia without full tanks and did not top them up in Norway.

Britain. The Home Fleet at Scapa Flow was commanded by Admiral John Tovey. At his disposal he had the new battleships King George V and Prince of Wales (ten 356 mm guns each), the battlecruiser Hood, the aircraft carrier Victorious and cruisers. Hood, commissioned in 1920, had for two decades been the largest warship in the world and a symbol of British sea power; she carried eight 381 mm guns, but her deck armour was too thin to withstand shells plunging steeply from long range. In the summer of 1940 she had been the flagship of Admiral James Somerville at Mers-el-Kébir. Prince of Wales had formally entered service only a few weeks earlier; civilian technicians from the shipyard were still at work on board, and her gun turrets were giving trouble. Also in the Atlantic were the battleships Rodney (nine 406 mm guns), Ramillies and Revenge and the battlecruiser Repulse, while at Gibraltar lay Somerville’s Force H with the battlecruiser Renown, the carrier Ark Royal and the cruiser Sheffield. A dozen or more convoys were at sea, among them the large troop convoy WS 8B. In all, six battleships and battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, a dozen or more cruisers and over twenty destroyers took part in the chase at one time or another, as did aircraft of Coastal Command.

Course of the operation

From Gdynia to Bergen (18–21 May)

The two ships met before noon on 19 May off Cape Arkona on Rügen and, with three destroyers, set off through the Danish straits. Around noon on 20 May they were spotted in the Kattegat by Swedish aircraft, and then for two hours the Swedish aircraft cruiser Gotland kept them company. The Swedish report reached the British naval attaché in Stockholm, Captain Henry Denham, and that same evening the Admiralty. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, who were already reading some Luftwaffe signals but still could not keep up with the naval cipher in real time (the material captured from U-110 on 9 May would begin to pay off only in June), knew from decrypted messages that the German ships had taken on prize crews and charts of the Atlantic. Norwegian resistance members also reported the ships’ movements along the coast to London.

At noon on 21 May the force anchored in the Grimstadfjord near Bergen. Prinz Eugen took on fuel, Bismarck did not, and the crews painted over their Baltic camouflage in grey. That same day the pilot of a Spitfire reconnaissance aircraft, Michael Suckling, photographed both ships from high altitude. Tovey sent Hood and Prince of Wales, with six destroyers, under Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland to Hvalfjörður in Iceland, from where they could bar the way into the Atlantic. The heavy cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk of Rear Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker patrolled the Denmark Strait, and light cruisers watched the passage between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. On the evening of 21 May the Germans left Bergen. The weather over the fjord was so bad that it was not until the afternoon of 22 May that a reconnaissance aircraft from the Orkneys established that the anchorage was empty. That evening Tovey sailed from Scapa Flow with King George V, Victorious, cruisers and destroyers; Repulse joined him at sea.

The Denmark Strait (23–24 May)

Lütjens chose the route through the Denmark Strait, which in May was narrowed by pack ice off the coast of Greenland and by British minefields off Iceland. Fog and rain were to help him. At 7.22 p.m. on 23 May Suffolk, equipped with modern radar, detected both ships and hid in the fog. An hour later Norfolk came too close, and Bismarck fired several salvoes at her that straddled her without scoring a hit; the cruiser escaped behind a smokescreen. The shock of firing put Bismarck’s forward radar out of action, so Lütjens ordered Prinz Eugen to take the lead. Throughout the night the two British cruisers shadowed the Germans by radar, reporting their position.

Holland steamed to intercept. He wanted to close the Germans quickly, even at a sharp angle, because at short range Bismarck’s shells would strike Hood’s side rather than her weak deck. After midnight Suffolk lost contact for an hour and a half, and the approach was delayed. On the morning of 24 May the two squadrons sighted each other; at 5.52 a.m. Hood opened fire at a range of about 24 kilometres. The British were steaming almost bows-on towards the enemy, so only their forward turrets could fire, while the Germans engaged with full broadsides. Hood at first fired at Prinz Eugen, mistaking her for Bismarck; Prince of Wales engaged the right target from the start. According to Bismarck survivors, Lütjens held his fire until Lindemann demanded permission, saying that he would not have his ship shot out from under his backside. The German ships quickly found the range. A shell from Prinz Eugen started a fire among the anti-aircraft ammunition on Hood’s deck.

At about 6 a.m., as Holland was making a second turn to bring his after turrets into action, Hood was struck by Bismarck’s fifth salvo. At least one 380 mm shell pierced her armour and set off an explosion in the after magazines. The ship broke in two and disappeared beneath the water within about three minutes. 1,415 men were killed, Vice Admiral Holland among them. The destroyer Electra picked up three survivors from the water: Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn and William Dundas.

Prince of Wales had to swerve to avoid the wreck and was left alone under the fire of both German ships. She took seven hits, four of them from Bismarck; a shell that passed through the compass platform did not explode, but killed almost everyone there except her captain, John Leach. One after another her guns broke down, and at 6.13 a.m. Leach withdrew behind a smokescreen. Lindemann wanted to pursue and finish her off; Lütjens refused, holding to his orders to avoid battle with heavy ships. But the victory had its price: three shells from Prince of Wales had hit Bismarck. One passed through her bow and cut off about a thousand tons of fuel in the forward tanks from the engines, while water poured in through the hole; another flooded one of the boiler rooms and a turbo-generator room. The ship trailed a broad slick of oil behind her and could no longer work up to full speed.

The chase and the lost trail (24–25 May)

The news of Hood’s sinking shook Britain. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, demanded that Bismarck be destroyed at any cost. The Admiralty drew in ships from every direction, even stripping convoys of their escorts. Rodney, on her way to Boston for a refit, left the liner Britannic; Ramillies left convoy HX 127; Revenge sailed from Halifax; and Somerville’s Force H, which had left Gibraltar to cover a troop convoy, was sent north.

Lütjens reported his victory and his damage and announced that he would detach Prinz Eugen to wage war on shipping independently, while he himself took Bismarck for repairs to Saint-Nazaire, the only port on the French coast with a dry dock large enough for her. Dönitz deployed two lines of U-boats, south of Greenland and in the Bay of Biscay, into which Bismarck could draw her pursuers. Norfolk, Suffolk and Prince of Wales, which was being repaired at sea, were still following the Germans. On the evening of 24 May Bismarck unexpectedly turned towards them and exchanged salvoes with Prince of Wales; in the meantime Prinz Eugen broke away to the south and vanished.

Tovey, who was still several hundred kilometres from the enemy, tried to slow her down from the air. At about 10 p.m. nine Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde took off from Victorious, a carrier without an experienced air group (part of her deck was taken up by crated fighters for Malta). After midnight on 24–25 May one torpedo hit Bismarck on her armour belt, killing one sailor but doing no serious damage. The violent manoeuvring, however, loosened the collision mats in her bow and she had to reduce speed. All the aircraft returned to the carrier in the dark.

At about 3 a.m. on 25 May, while the British cruisers were zigzagging for fear of U-boats, Lütjens made a wide circle and slipped out of Suffolk’s radar range. Contact was lost. Lütjens, however, did not know of his success: his receivers were still picking up the pulses of British radar, and the admiral believed he was still being shadowed. In the morning, on his 52nd birthday, he sent two long signals to headquarters. British stations took bearings on the transmitter, but aboard King George V the bearings were plotted wrongly and Tovey concluded that Bismarck was heading north, back to Germany. For several hours the fleet steamed in the wrong direction. By the time the mistake came to light, Bismarck had a lead of several hundred kilometres. According to the Bletchley Park codebreakers’ accounts, a Luftwaffe signal decrypted on 25 May helped, as it showed that the ship was making for Brest. By the evening the British were certain that Bismarck was heading for France. That day Lütjens addressed the crew in a speech announcing a fight to the end; its sombre tone, survivors recalled, robbed the men of whatever optimism they had left.

The Catalina and the Swordfish (26 May)

On the morning of 26 May some of the British ships had to break off the chase for lack of fuel. Prince of Wales, Repulse and Victorious dropped out. At about 10.30 a.m. on 26 May a Catalina flying boat of No. 209 Squadron RAF, which had taken off from its base on Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, found Bismarck some 1,300 kilometres north-west of Brest. Its pilot was Dennis Briggs, and the co-pilot was an American naval officer, Leonard Smith, one of a dozen or so Americans who were training British crews on the new aircraft even though the United States was not at war. Aircraft from Ark Royal then took over the contact.

Tovey, with King George V and Rodney, was too far away to catch the Germans before they came within range of German air cover. The only hope was Force H. Somerville had no intention of exposing the old, thinly armoured Renown to Bismarck’s guns and put his faith in aircraft. The first attack, in the afternoon, ended in fiasco: the airmen, who had not been told that the cruiser Sheffield had been sent ahead to shadow Bismarck, attacked their own ship. Fortunately the torpedoes, fitted with new magnetic pistols, either exploded prematurely or missed, and Sheffield escaped unscathed. For the second attack the aircraft were armed with torpedoes fitted with reliable contact pistols.

At about 7.10 p.m. fifteen Swordfish took off from Ark Royal’s pitching deck in a very strong wind and under low cloud. At about 8.50 p.m. they attacked Bismarck from several directions. Two torpedoes – three, according to some sources – found their mark. One struck her side amidships without doing much harm. The other exploded at the stern and jammed the port rudder about 12 degrees over. The battleship could not hold her course for France: in the strong wind and heavy sea, despite attempts to steer with her propellers, she turned in circles and then steamed slowly north-westwards, straight towards the approaching British battleships. Lütjens rejected the idea of blowing the rudder off with explosives, because it risked damaging the propellers. At 9.40 p.m. he signalled to Germany: “Ship unmanoeuvrable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer.” That evening the German submarine U-556 found herself in an ideal position to attack Ark Royal and Renown, but she had not a single torpedo left.

During the night of 26–27 May the destroyers of Captain Philip Vian arrived on the scene: Cossack, Sikh, Maori, Zulu and the Polish ORP Piorun, which a few months earlier had defended Clydebank with her guns. Vian had detached them from the escort of convoy WS 8B on his own responsibility. Piorun, under Commander Eugeniusz Pławski, was the first to make contact, at about 10.38 p.m., and opened fire on the battleship, and according to Polish accounts flashed a lamp signal towards her: “I am a Pole”. Bismarck replied with salvoes from her main armament that straddled the Polish destroyer. The exchange itself lasted only a few minutes, after which Pławski withdrew out of range, but for more than an hour he kept in contact and guided the other ships to the target. All night long the destroyers harried the battleship, lit her up with star shell and fired a dozen or so torpedoes, without scoring any certain hits. What mattered most was that they did not let her vanish. Towards dawn an attempt was made aboard Bismarck to launch a seaplane from the catapult carrying the ship’s war diary and film of the battle with Hood, but the catapult was damaged.

The final battle (27 May)

Tovey waited for daylight. On the morning of 27 May, in a strong north-westerly wind and a heavy sea, King George V and Rodney approached Bismarck from the west. At 8.47 a.m. Rodney opened fire at a range of about 20 kilometres, followed a minute later by King George V. Bismarck replied at 8.50 and straddled Rodney with her third salvo, but the unsteerable ship, tossed about by the waves, could no longer aim effectively. The heavy cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire joined in. At about 9.02 a 406 mm shell from Rodney struck the forward superstructure; according to some survivors, Lütjens, Lindemann and the whole staff on the bridge were killed at that moment, although others claimed to have seen Lindemann on deck as late as the moment she sank. By 9.31 all four main turrets had fallen silent.

The British battleships closed to less than three kilometres, a range at which their heavy guns were firing almost point-blank, and for an hour they turned Bismarck’s upperworks into a heap of burning scrap. The four British ships fired some 2,800 shells of various calibres and scored several hundred hits. Most of them, however, destroyed whatever lay above the armour and killed hundreds of men without sinking the ship. At about 9.30 the executive officer, Commander Hans Oels, gave the order to abandon ship and to prepare scuttling charges. At about 10.15 Tovey, who was running short of fuel and feared U-boats and German aircraft, ceased fire and turned for home with his battleships, and Dorsetshire was ordered to finish the enemy off with torpedoes. The cruiser fired three torpedoes, which struck both sides of the ship. At 10.40 Bismarck rolled over to port and sank stern first.

The dispute over what sank her continues to this day. German survivors maintained that she was scuttled by her own crew, who opened the valves and set off the charges. The British attributed the sinking to Dorsetshire’s torpedoes. Surveys of the wreck, found in 1989 at a depth of almost five kilometres, have not settled the question conclusively. Most researchers accept that the ship would have sunk from her damage in any case, and that the scuttling and the torpedoes merely hastened the end.

Several hundred men were in the water. Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori began hauling them aboard, but when what was believed to be a submarine periscope was sighted from Dorsetshire, the rescue was broken off and both ships steamed away, leaving most of the survivors in the sea. The British rescued 110 men (one of whom died the following day); that evening U-74 picked up three more, and the German weather ship Sachsenwald another two. According to the most commonly cited figures, 114 or 115 members of the crew survived.

The escape of Prinz Eugen

After breaking away on 24 May, Prinz Eugen was so short of fuel that on 26 May she had to rendezvous with the tanker Spichern. Immediately afterwards defects in her machinery and propellers came to light that made further operations impossible. On 27 May, the day Bismarck sank, the ship was ordered to abandon the sortie, and on 1 June, unnoticed by the British, she reached Brest. She had not sunk a single ship. In the days that followed the British, now at last able to read German naval signals, rounded up several of the tankers and supply ships stationed across the ocean for the two warships.

Losses

The Royal Navy lost the battlecruiser Hood and 1,415 men of her crew. Thirteen sailors were killed aboard Prince of Wales and three aboard Sheffield, which Bismarck fired on during the evening of 26 May. The British also lost several carrier aircraft, mainly in deck-landing accidents. On 28 May, after Bismarck had already gone down, German bombers sank the destroyer Mashona on her way home, killing several dozen men.

The Kriegsmarine lost its newest and most powerful ship. According to various figures, between about 2,090 and more than 2,100 men died aboard Bismarck, among them Admiral Lütjens with his entire fleet staff and Captain Lindemann. Prinz Eugen came through the operation without loss of life, but needed a long refit. Allied merchant shipping suffered no losses at all from the German surface ships.

Significance

Operation Rheinübung brought the Germans one spectacular success and ended in defeat. The sinking of Hood was the greatest loss of life in a single Royal Navy ship during the Second World War and a blow to British prestige, and for years Admiralty inquiries examined why the ship had blown up. Three days later, however, the British recovered face. The sinking of Bismarck showed that a single ship, however powerful, could not survive on an ocean where the enemy was able to concentrate superior forces and had carrier-borne and patrol aircraft. What decided the matter was not battleships but Swordfish biplanes, a flying boat, radar and codebreakers, together with the Admiralty’s ruthless readiness to strip other theatres of their escorts for a few days. It was a lesson the British had already learned at Taranto.

For the Kriegsmarine this was the end of cruiser warfare by large ships in the Atlantic. Hitler, who had feared from the outset the loss of his prestige ships, from then on allowed them to be used only with his personal consent. The loss of most of the supply ships in June 1941 deprived German raiders of their support. Tirpitz never sailed into the Atlantic: from 1942 she lay in the Norwegian fjords as a “fleet in being”, tying down British forces, until she was sunk by RAF bombers in November 1944. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, harried by aircraft in Brest, dashed up the English Channel to Germany in February 1942 in Operation Cerberus. The position of Raeder, who had championed the big-ship strategy, was weakened; after further setbacks he resigned in January 1943 and was succeeded by Dönitz. The whole burden of the war against British shipping now fell on the U-boats.

The chase of the Bismarck also became one of the legends of naval warfare. For the Polish Navy it was a source of pride: ORP Piorun was the first destroyer to stand up to the largest German warship on the night when her fate was being decided. For the Germans Bismarck remained a symbol of her crew’s self-sacrifice, but also of a mistaken strategy that had sent a lone ship against the strongest navy in the world.