Operation Source

On the morning of 22 September 1943, in Kåfjord, a narrow arm of the Altafjord in the far north of Norway, four tonnes of explosives went off beneath the hull of the German battleship Tirpitz. They had been laid by the crews of two British X-class midget submarines, which, after being towed for several days across the Norwegian Sea, had made their way through minefields, anti-torpedo nets and observation posts right into the anchorage. The battleship did not sink, but the damage put her out of action for roughly half a year. Operation Source was one of the boldest actions of the Royal Navy in the whole war; the price was the loss of every craft used, and of the twelve men who entered Kåfjord, six were taken prisoner and six were killed.

“The Beast” in the Norwegian fjords

Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismarck, sunk in May 1941, had been stationed in Norway since January 1942. Hitler, convinced that the Allies might land there, kept his heaviest ships in the fjords, and the Kriegsmarine saw them above all as a threat to the convoys sailing from Britain to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. The battleship’s mere existence was enough to tie down the British Home Fleet: it was on news of her leaving Trondheim in July 1942 that the Admiralty ordered convoy PQ 17 to scatter, with disastrous results. Winston Churchill called Tirpitz “the Beast” and repeatedly demanded her destruction; it was for fear of her that the British carried out the St Nazaire raid in March 1942, to deny her the only dry dock on France’s Atlantic coast large enough to take her.

Yet the battleship could not be reached. RAF bomber raids on her anchorages near Trondheim in 1942 scored no hits, and in the autumn of 1942 an attempted attack by two Chariot manned torpedoes, which a Norwegian fishing boat was to carry into the Trondheimsfjord, failed – the torpedoes broke loose in a storm just short of the target. After the Battle of the Barents Sea on 31 December 1942 Hitler, enraged by the failure, wanted to scrap the big ships, but the new head of the Kriegsmarine, Karl Dönitz, persuaded him to keep in service Tirpitz, Scharnhorst – which in February 1942 had broken through from Brest to Germany via the English Channel in Operation Cerberus – and Lützow. In March 1943 all three gathered in the far north, around the Altafjord, the closest point to the convoy route. In the spring and summer of 1943 the British, who needed escorts in the Atlantic and feared the Alta squadron, suspended the Arctic convoys.

At the beginning of September the Germans showed that the squadron was more than a symbol. On 6 September Tirpitz and Scharnhorst put to sea with destroyers, and on 8 September they shelled Norwegian and Allied stations on Spitsbergen, including the settlements of Barentsburg and Longyearbyen. It was the only time Tirpitz fired her main guns in an offensive operation. A few days later the ships returned to Kåfjord – exactly where the British midget submarines were already heading.

The X-craft

The idea of attacking anchored heavy ships with midget submarines matured in the British submarine service in 1940–1942; its chief advocate was the then Flag Officer Submarines, Admiral Max Horton, and the design was developed by a retired naval officer, Cromwell Varley. The X-craft were about 15–16 metres long and displaced just under 30 tons. The four-man crew – a commander, two junior officers, one of them a diver, and an engine room artificer – fitted into a hull in which it was impossible to stand upright. The armament consisted of two side charges strapped to the hull, each containing about two tonnes of amatol and fitted with time fuses. The craft was to slip beneath its target, drop the charges on the seabed under its hull and get away before the explosion. A special wet-and-dry compartment allowed the diver to get out and cut through nets.

Training took place in western Scotland, at HMS Varbel in Port Bannatyne on the Isle of Bute, and final preparations in the remote Loch Cairnbawn in Sutherland, where the depot ship Bonaventure lay. The midget submarines’ range was too short to reach Norway on their own. Each of the six chosen for the operation – X5, X6, X7, X8, X9 and X10 – was to be towed on a long line by an ordinary submarine; during the passage, which took over a week, it was manned by a three-man passage crew, while the operational crew travelled in the towing submarine and changed over only near the target. The plan was for X5, X6 and X7 to attack Tirpitz in Kåfjord, X9 and X10 to attack Scharnhorst in the same fjord, and X8 to attack Lützow in Langfjord. The positions of the German ships were established thanks to the Norwegian resistance and to aerial reconnaissance photographs taken from airfields in the north of the USSR.

The road to Kåfjord

The towing submarines left Loch Cairnbawn on 11 and 12 September 1943. The expedition began losing strength from the outset. On 16 September X9’s tow line parted; the craft sank with her three-man passage crew and was never found. X8 began leaking around her charges; they had to be jettisoned, and their explosions damaged the craft so badly that on 18 September she was scuttled by her own crew. The attack on Lützow was abandoned.

On the evening of 20 September the remaining four craft slipped their tows and set course for the coast. They passed through a minefield, and during the night of 21–22 September they lay hidden near the entrance to Kåfjord. Lieutenant Kenneth Hudspeth’s X10 could not reach her target because of a defective periscope and compass; in any case Scharnhorst was not at her anchorage at the time – she had gone out for gunnery practice. Hudspeth turned back and met his towing submarine, and X10 was later scuttled in a storm on the way home.

The attack of 22 September

Tirpitz’s anchorage at the head of Kåfjord was surrounded by double anti-torpedo nets, and at the entrance to the fjord lay a boom with a gate that was opened for boats and small vessels. Early on the morning of 22 September Lieutenant Donald Cameron’s X6, despite a flooded periscope, slipped through the gate close behind a German vessel and then passed through the nets around the battleship. At about seven o’clock the craft struck a rock and briefly broke surface near Tirpitz. Several minutes passed before the sentries grasped what they were seeing; then they opened fire with small arms – the heavy guns could not fire at such close range. Cameron managed to release both charges beneath the hull, near the forward turrets, then opened the valves, scuttled his craft and came to the surface with his three crewmen. A German motor boat took them aboard the battleship.

At almost the same time Lieutenant Godfrey Place’s X7, which had earlier become caught in the nets and freed herself only with difficulty, got under Tirpitz and laid her charges beneath the battleship’s bottom. While trying to get away she again became entangled in the nets. The alarm was sounded aboard the battleship. Her captain, Kapitän zur See Hans Meyer, not knowing exactly where the charges lay but suspecting that there were some, ordered the watertight doors closed and had the ship hauled sideways using her anchor cables and moorings. He managed to shift only the bow. At about 8.12 a.m. there were two tremendous explosions. The battleship lifted in the water and fell back; oil spread across the anchorage.

The shock threw X7 clear of the nets but damaged her so badly that she could no longer be steered. Place surfaced under fire and managed to get onto a floating gunnery target before his craft went to the bottom. Sub-Lieutenant Robert Aitken escaped from the sunken hull after several hours using breathing apparatus; the two other members of the crew, Sub-Lieutenant Whittam and Engine Room Artificer Whitley, were killed. Lieutenant Henty Henty-Creer’s X5, spotted outside the nets after the explosions, was sunk by gunfire and depth charges; her entire four-man crew was killed. Whether she had managed to lay her charges beforehand is still unknown; a survey of the seabed in 2006 did not confirm the hypothesis. The losses among the German crew were small compared with the extent of the damage.

The extent of the damage

Tirpitz did not sink, but the damage proved severe. Some 1,400 tonnes of water poured into her fuel tanks and double-bottom spaces, her hull was dented in several places, and bulkheads split. Almost all her turbo-generators were knocked out, and other machinery was also damaged; the after main turret, “Dora”, jumped off its roller path and could not be trained, and there was no crane in Norway capable of lifting it. Both of the ship’s floatplanes were destroyed. The battleship could not be towed to Germany – the British might catch her on the way – so she was repaired on the spot. The repair ship Neumark and hundreds of shipyard workers came to Kåfjord; the work went on until the beginning of April 1944. The American naval historians William Garzke and Robert Dulin called this repair one of the most remarkable feats of naval engineering of the war.

Prisoners and Victoria Crosses

The six survivors – the four men of X6, and Place and Aitken from X7 – were sent after interrogation to a prisoner-of-war camp for naval personnel near Bremen, where they spent the rest of the war. For a long time the British did not know exactly what had been achieved; only aerial reconnaissance and intelligence confirmed that Tirpitz was lying damaged. Once it was known that Cameron and Place were alive, both were awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry, in February 1944. Aitken and the two officers of X6 received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), and X6’s engine room artificer the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. Henty-Creer, whose fate was unknown, was only mentioned in dispatches. Counting the three men from X9, nine members of the midget submarines’ crews were killed in the operation.

Place in the war

The attack did not sink Tirpitz, but it achieved what the Admiralty wanted: for the coming months the Kriegsmarine’s most dangerous ship ceased to threaten the convoys. In November 1943 the British resumed convoys to the northern ports of the USSR, and on 26 December 1943, when Scharnhorst tried to attack one of them, she was sunk by the Home Fleet ships of Admiral Bruce Fraser in the Battle of the North Cape. Lützow returned to Germany soon afterwards. Only the damaged Tirpitz remained in the far north.

When the repairs were completed at the beginning of April 1944, the British were ready. On 3 April carrier aircraft attacked the battleship in Operation Tungsten and immobilised her again. Further raids by the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF continued throughout the summer and autumn; finally Tirpitz, moved to Tromsø as a floating battery, was capsized on 12 November 1944 by Lancaster bombers carrying Tallboy heavy bombs in Operation Catechism. Depending on the source, between about 950 and more than 1,200 sailors were killed.

Operation Source showed that a heavy ship was not safe even in the most remote and best-guarded fjord. It was also proof of the tenacity with which the British pursued, for three years, a single battleship that hardly ever went to sea yet still tied down the Home Fleet. X-craft would later serve as markers for the invasion flotillas in Normandy in June 1944 and in an attack on a Japanese cruiser at Singapore in 1945. The wreck of X7 was raised from the bottom of Kåfjord in the 1970s; part of it can be seen today at the Imperial War Museum in Britain.