Swordfish attack on the Bismarck.

Re 30

Pardonable error. You’re quite right. But, they are adjacent counties !

…

if the Germans can be faulted for not having enough air cover, I’m sure the same could be said for Admiral Sir Tom Phillips as commander of the Z Force.

…

I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that Philips was altogether aware that Force Z was doomed. Apparently he told his son that he wouldn’t be returning from the mission. Force Z was one of Churchill’s mistakes.

I agree with the comments earlier re the effectiveness of battleships as commerce raiders.

Regards

… ultimately a torpedo delivered by Devonshire administered the coup de grace.

HMS Dorsetshire.

I’m not sure about the ‘abortive attack’ on HMS Sheffield, my great uncle was killed during this engagement as far as the family are aware.

I don’t know if it is any consolation but your relative was most probably killed by enemy action not friendly fire. Soon after the Ark royal attack on the Bismarck HMS Sheffield approached within nine miles of the the Bismarck and came under fire at 21:45. The first salvo from the Bismarck’s 15 inch guns fell short but the second straddled the Sheffield. The Bismarck fired six salvoes in all without scoring a direct hit but splinters from the shells killed Ordinary Seaman David T. George and injured seven others. Able Seaman Ambrose Ling died on the 27th May and Able Seaman Raymond C. Taylor on the 28th from their wounds. The Sheffield’s main radar was also put out of action by a splinter hitting the main mast and there were around 40 holes in the hull above the waterline. Sheffield turned away under a smokescreen, lost visual contact with the Bismarck, and was unable to re-establish contact without radar.

The attack I’m referring to was when a Swordfish strike mistook HMS Sheffield for the Bismarck and attacked with torpedoes. Fortunately, for all concerned, the torpedoes were fitted with insufficiently tested magnetic pistols (designed to explode under the target) and these malfunctioned in spectacular fashion, detonating before they even reached HMS Sheffield. HMS Sheffield didn’t fire at the Swordfish and the mistake was realised mid-attack!

The net result was that the Swordfish returned to the carrier and re-armed with contact-fuzed torpedoes.

I wasn’t aware that there were any casualties on HMS Sheffield.

I’m not sure about the ‘abortive attack’ on HMS Sheffield, my great uncle was killed during this engagement as far as the family are aware.

Just because Bismarck was hit ‘only’ three times during the engagement in the Denmark Strait…

I wasn’t suggesting that the potential damage from these hits could be ignored, but rather that this engagement is always seen as being so one-sided.

The Royal Navy ships were trying to close the range with Bismarck so only the forward facing main armament could be brought to bear (as opposed to the German ships firing broadsides) yet three hits were still scored on Bismarck (even after some confusion as to which ship Bismarck was). Unfortunately the one telling hit on HMS Hood is all that is really remembered and is usually quite misrepresented in some documentaries.

Interesting what you say about shock-protection on Royal Navy ships. I was amazed how all the electrical / electronics cabinets in HMS Plymouth were mounted on, seemingly, rigid C-shaped steel straps; shock-protection against underwater explosions I later found out!

I stand corrected. 🙂

I think that the original operational deployment had included a carrier (HMS Hermes) but she was not available; it would have made an interesting engagement had she been there.

HMS Indomitable – and even before she ran aground in Jamaica on 2 November 1941 and had to be repaired, her original schedule had her arriving in Singapore at the end of December – some 3 weeks after POW & Repulse were sunk. She had just completed trials, commissioning on the 10th of October, and sailed a week later for the Caribbean (escorting a convoy most of the way to Halifax en-route) to work up her green air wing and new ship’s company.

The timings can be deduced from the dates in this diary – subtracting the 22-day trip to Norfolk & back for repairs, and the detour to Aden to drop off 2 squadrons, and then to Port Sudan (in the Red Sea) to pick up 50 Hurricanes and crews for Singapore (which she might have done even without the repair delay), and you still get no way that she could have been there in time to save POW & Repulse. Note that the distance from Ceylon to the Cocos Islands is almost identical to that from Ceylon to Singapore.

Royal Navy research archive: Eleven months aboard HMS INDOMITABLE

Perhaps I am being a little unfair to the 5.25 inch twin mounting; wasn’t the power cut-off to these mountings early on during the action against Force-Z?

With all such large-calibre weapons they rely on exploding ammunition and for that exact range-estimation is vital; a problem that gets much worse if you are targeting a low-level aircraft flying towards the mounting whose range is changing rapidly. Not a criticism of the 5.25 inch but of any sea-going or land-based heavy anti-aircraft gun but then, if the target is at high-altitude (or long-range) what other system is available?

I do not know when they were introduced at sea (they were available in June 1944 on land) but proximity-fuzed ammunition (for 3.7 inch and larger weapons) took the exact range-estimation problem out of the equation.

I had no idea that the 5.25 inch was ever used on land!

I’d like to see some justification of the comment about the AA ineffectiveness of the 5.25in guns. I though that they were pretty good – they were being adopted for land based AA defences as well as being the main armament of AA cruisers of the Dido class.

In all cases however, it is the direction of the guns that is more important than any intrinsic failings or advantages.

A factor may also have been to poor locating of the 4.1-in and 37mm (1.5-in) AA armament on the Bismarck. I recall one of the History Channel documentaries where a Bismarck survivor – a member of the 37mm gun crew – was interviewed. He remarked that his gun (as were several others) were positioned above and behind the 4.1-in AA mounts. When the 4.1’s opened fire on the Swordfish. the blast and smoke obscured his vision for a seemingly long time.

Regards,
…geoff

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_battleship_Bismarck for a good resume of the battle. I think it’s worth a note that Bismarck’s own guns damaged its radar as is the following quote … ‘The Swordfish then attacked; Bismarck began to turn violently while her anti-aircraft batteries engaged the bombers’. I can imagine that the AAA crews had difficulty in following the Swordfish during these turns in heavy seas and this might have contributed to their survival.

Just because Bismarck was hit ‘only’ three times during the engagement in the Denmark Strait the effect of the shock of these heavy shells shouldn’t be underestimated: lighter equipment, particularly electronic equipment could be damaged. I worked on the design of the Leanders’ machine room in the mid 1960s and I was astonished by the precautions taken to mitigate shock. A real eye-opener.

The Bismarck and HMS Prince of Wales did engage each other between their initial engagement and the final destruction of Bismarck when Bismarck turned back to allow Prince Eugen to slip away from the shadowing Royal Navy ships; in that engagement neither ship was hit.

As far as the original objective of the sortie was concerned, commerce raiding, Prince Eugen had absolutely no success whatsoever. Not a single merchant ship was even sighted and she was back in harbour (for major repairs) only a few days after Bismarck was sunk.

Bismarck gun inventory:

Eight, fifteen inch guns.
Twelve 5.9 inch
Sixteen 4.1 inch
Sixteen 1.5 inch
Twelve 0.79 inch

In the gun action in the Denmark Strait, in which Hood was sunk, the Prince of Wales scored three hits on the Bismarck. On the 25th May, the aircraft carrier Victorious mounted a strike with Swordfish aircraft. One torpedo of nine launched struck Bismarck amidships causing slight damage.

On the 26th May, acting upon information from Bletchley Park, fifteen Swordfish from Ark Royal attacked the Bismarck with torpedoes. One torpedo damaged the rudder assembly which then heralded the Bismarck’s destruction by gunfire and ultimately a torpedo delivered by Devonshire administered the coup de grace.

There were 114 survivors.

Bismarck was only hit three times in the, very brief, engagement with Hood and PoW; no major damage was done and the main armour was not penetrated (by the one round that hit it). There was no damage to the fire-control equipment but there was flooding and loss of about a thousand tons of fuel-oil; that alone would probably ended the sortie.

In return Hood was possibly only hit once by a shell that penetrated the main armour and PoW sustained about five hits without disastrous consequences.

In her final engagement, although heavily outnumbered, Bismark failed to score a single hit on any Allied warship; her main armament director was knocked-out in virtually the first salvo and all her turrets were knocked-out soon afterwards.

Wasn’t the initial torpedo hit after the engagement with Hood and PoW? I’m not sure she’d sustained major damage by then. Nor am I certain that the gunnery control had much to do with the tertiary (AA) armament.

But I know little of boats and could well be wrong.

Rob P

IIRC (and I might not) the Bismarck had been badly damaged by gunfire by the time the Swordfish attacked. The chances are that the gunnery control mechanisms had been very badly compromised and this is why the Swordfish survived.

For an overview of Bismark’s last sortie see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_battle_of_the_battleship_Bismarck

Regards

For comparison sake, what was the AAA component on the HMS Price of Wales…(built in about the same period…laid down 1937, launched 1939…as the Bismark)?

I would say it was worse than the Bismarck probably.

From memory there were 5.25 inch high-angle dual-purpose secondary armament which were singularly ineffective against the high-level bombers they were designed to protect the ship from.

The short-range weapons were even worse in comparison with Bismarck: multiple two pounder ‘pom-pom’ which used an ancient low-velocity round and which were prone to jamming.

When HMS Prince-of-Wales and HMS Repulse were lost they were, just, in range of fighter-cover from Singapore but the only signal for assistance was a request for tugs after the battleships were damaged.

I think that the original operational deployment had included a carrier (HMS Hermes) but she was not available; it would have made an interesting engagement had she been there.

if I had been a Swordfish pilot sent against the Bismark I would have become ‘uncertain of my position’ very early on.

The difference between WW2 bravery and modern day self-preservation I guess?

Some of you might remember Les “Harpy” Cox from the early days of the FAAM.
Harpy was a Walrus pilot on the Bismarck action and recalled the sense of relief among his shipmates when Bismark was lost, until , as he put it “The bloody crabs found it ( the Catalina ) and it was all on again.”
As the force closed on Bismark he recalled the shiver that ran through the ship’s company following the terse announcement “She’s firing”:
Followed, after what seemed like an age, by a resounding cheer as another ship of the line was bracketed.
I don’t think human beings have changed that much.