Churchill's Magnificent Obsession

The shortest memorandum in the vast output of instructions, queries and exhortations generated by Winston Churchill during the Second World War is only three words long: ‘Where is TIRPITZ?’ he demanded of the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, on December 14th, 1942. The answer was that she was tucked up safely in a fjord near Trondheim as her crew hung bunting in the messes in preparation for another Christmas of inactivity.

Of all Hitler’s capital ships Tirpitz cost most and did least. Yet her existence seemed to haunt Churchill’s imagination and his desire to see the ‘Beast’, as he tellingly called her, sunk or at least disabled bordered on the obsessive. As long as she was afloat the prime minister bombarded admirals and air marshals with demands for action, emphasising that he was prepared to pay a high price to achieve her destruction. ‘The crippling of this ship would alter the entire face of the naval war and … the loss of 100 machines or 500 airmen would be well compensated for,’ he declared in another missive to Pound.

This was quite a claim. Could one battleship – a lonely singleton in the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet after the sinking of her sister ship Bismarck – really exercise such influence on Allied naval strategy? The answer is that she could and did. Whether she should have been allowed to do so is another matter.

The quest to destroy Tirpitz lasted four years, soaking up a colossal amount of energy and resources and costing many lives. Between October 1940 and November 1944 she was the target of 24 major air and sea attacks. They ranged from conventional heavy bombing raids to highly innovative operations, notably the penetration of her defences by X-Craft midget submarines as she lay in Kaafjord in the far north of Norway in September 1943. One of the major commando actions of the war – the raid on St Nazaire in March 1942 – was launched on the mere chance that at some future date she might use the port as a base from which to sally out against the Atlantic convoys. Even when all information available (and there was much thanks to Ultra code-breakers and the efforts of the Norwegian resistance) suggested she would never put to sea again, a series of carrier-borne attacks were launched which occupied a large chunk of the British fleet throughout the busy summer of 1944.

Underlying all this effort was the belief that Tirpitz posed a particular menace to Britain’s maritime security. The fear was that were she to break out into the Atlantic she could – at least temporarily – cut the life-sustaining sea lanes linking Britain to the Americas. After Tirpitz moved to Norway early in 1942 the concern was that she would close down the pipeline gushing tanks, aircraft and supplies to the Soviet Union – a lesser evil, but undesirable nonetheless for both political and practical reasons.

Fear of her destructive potential led to one of the most notorious episodes of the war at sea. In July 1942 the belief that the battleship was at large – mistaken as it turned out – was enough for Pound to order British and American naval escorts to abandon the Russia-bound convoy PQ.17 and the merchantmen to scatter. The result was that 24 of the 35 ships were sunk, not by Tirpitz but by U-boats and aircraft.

As it was, Tirpitz never sank anything. In her lifetime her huge 15-inch guns were hardly ever fired in anger and then not at enemy ships. They were used – ineffectively – against attacking aircraft and once at the shacks and slag heaps of Barentsburg during a morale-raising mission to Spitzbergen in the summer of 1943.

Despite her inglorious history Tirpitz contrib-uted much to the German war effort, far more than she would have done had she ever made an extended sortie on the high seas. Her most valuable achievement was to exercise the function of a ‘fleet in being’. The theory ran that by merely sitting in port a powerful ship could force an enemy to keep an equal force tied up, guarding against a breakout. For the stratagem to work the other side had to believe the price of deterrence was worth paying. The Admiralty did, even though it meant that two of the latest King George V class battleships had to be maintained passively in Scapa Flow for long periods of the war when they could have been put to much more effective use in the Mediterranean or the Far East. Churchill grumbled but did not overrule this judgement and his persistent demands for action were a recognition that Tirpitz would continue to exercise this disproportionate influence as long as she was afloat.

Tirpitz was faster, better armoured and carried bigger guns than her British counterparts. Even so the caution seems excessive. How much damage could she have done? It is unlikely that she would have been able to reach the Atlantic without being spotted. After all in May 1941 Bismarck had been picked up on her first attempt to break out, slipping through the Denmark Strait under cover of a snowstorm. The ensuing battle had started well for the Germans, with HMS Hood being sunk in spectacular fashion in the space of a few minutes. In the end, however, the combined efforts of the fleet overcame Bismarck’s technical superiority. Precedent, then, suggested that Tirpitz was unlikely to get through undetected. If she did make it to safety in a Biscay port the destruction she could wreak on the Atlantic convoys was limited; by 1942 it was clear that the biggest threat to the Atlantic life-line was not surface raiders but U-boats and aircraft.

Hitler and the chief of the Kriesgmarine Gross-admiral Erich Raeder recognised this when in February 1942 they ordered all large surface ships in French ports back to northern waters. A cool assessment might have concluded that once there they were unlikely to return. A foray by Tirpitz would seem particularly improbable. Why would Hitler risk his last remaining battleship in an operation that, no matter how glorious, would achieve limited results, when she was rendering such effective service merely by sitting idle? Yet right until the end, when Tirpitz lay a crippled hulk in the shallow waters off the Norwegian port of Tromsø, the operational orders for the last raids by Bomber Command continued to insist that she presented a threat to British sea communications.

The spell that Tirpitz cast is difficult to comprehend at this distance in time. Perhaps the outlooks of Churchill and Pound and his successor as First Sea Lord, Andrew Cunningham, were refracted by Edwardian concepts of the paramountcy of monster ships. All of them had grown up in the Dreadnought era of ever bigger guns and heavier armour. In their minds the battleship retained its place as the supreme symbol of maritime power and a navy was not a navy without a full complement of them. It was a view that was shared by Raeder, the architect of the wartime German navy, who had intended to have 10 battleships at the heart of his fleet before the premature outbreak of war scuppered his long-term plans.

Britain in any case needed her battleships. Her position in the world derived from control of the seas and in the interwar years both Britain and the other big maritime powers – France, Japan, Italy and the United States – believed this came with possession of a large surface fleet.

This doctrine, though, sat uncomfortably with the lessons learned during the First World War. Events seemed to show that the battleship era was waning. Small was deadly and the future lay with submarines and aircraft and the vessels that carried them. Even before the conflict, seers like the US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss were predicting that the invention of powered flight spelled extinction for big warships. The conflict ended too soon for this prophecy to be realised but the technological advances of the interwar years brought that day ever nearer.

Some of this was well understood at the Admiralty. Britain was the first nation to develop aircraft carriers. Churchill had been an early enthusiast of aviation, taking flying lessons himself and encouraging the imaginative combination of aircraft and ships. The effect that aircraft could have on battleships was eventually demonstrated to terrible effect with the sinking of the Prince of Wales along with the battlecruiser Repulse by Japanese bombers in December 1941.

For much of the war, though, Britain lacked the means to doom Tirpitz to a similar fate. British naval aviation was badly neglected during the interwar years. After the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service that gave birth to the RAF in April, 1918 it was military aviation that dominated. Resources were poured into bombers and fighters and little attention was paid to dive bombers and torpedo planes. By the time the navy regained control of its own aircraft in mid-1939 it was too late. The Fleet Air Arm started the war with the Fairey Swordfish, whose First World War-era struts and wires earned it the nickname the ‘Stringbag.’ The aircraft improved in time but the ordnance did not. There was nothing available until late 1944 that was capable of  piercing Tirpitz’s thickly-armoured hull. On several heartbreaking occasions RAF and Fleet Air Arm crews made it through the wall of flak flung up by Tirpitz’s guns and onshore batteries only for their bombs to bounce off or inflict damage that was soon repaired.

The heaviest blow to the ship was landed by midget submarines in Operation Source, an attack of extraordinary boldness, which took place in September 1943, requiring what to modern eyes seem like near-suicidal risks. A flotilla of X-Craft was towed by conventional submarines from northern Scotland to a casting off point inside the Arctic Circle. From there they made their way through minefields and anti-submarine and torpedo nets to Tirpitz’s berth, inside Kaafjord. The side charges dropped beneath her hull did her serious damage, later compounded by a Fleet Air Arm strike the following spring. All available intelligence, from signal intercepts supplemented by a busy team of Norwegian agents on shore, suggested that she would need a major repair programme in a German yard before she was fully operational again. The voyage home would be extremely hazardous, with the navy dogging her all the way. If she made it to port she could be kept there by repeated bombing raids. It was reasonable to conclude at this point that Tirpitz was effectively hors de combat.

Yet for five months of the spring and summer of 1944, while the Allies were going ashore in Normandy,  a series of operations involving large numbers of ships and aircraft was planned to finish her off. Most were thwarted by the weather. The rest were ineffective. In the end the navy was forced to admit defeat and the job was handed to the RAF’s Bomber Command. According to the highly embroidered account of Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Command’s pugnacious chief, he assured the senior service that his boys would sink Tirpitz ‘in their spare time’. Thus it was that a combination of 617 Squadron – the Dambusters – and 9 Squadron, armed with the Barnes Wallis Tallboy bomb, finally put the ‘Beast’ out of its misery.

Once again the operations involved high risks that seem scarcely justified and a diversion of major resources: the attacking bombers flew without escorts and were extremely vulnerable to fighters based in the area. By now Hitler had long accepted that Tirpitz would never again go to sea and she had been downgraded to a floating battery to defend Norway against the Allied attack that he persisted in believing was imminent.

The quest to sink Tirpitz produced many extraordinary displays of courage, ingenuity and skill. It was magnificent, but was it war? A contemporary judgement might conclude that the initial effort was worth it but that after the X-Craft attacks further operations were a waste of resources and lives. Wartime, though, creates its own dynamic. The great enterprise had acquired a momentum that was hard to stop. The sinking was a cause of universal celebration. Footage of the explosions of the Tallboys bursting in great outpourings of smoke and flame on the target were shown in cinemas all over the free world and the victorious crews’ accounts broadcast on the BBC. Churchill was at the British embassy in Paris when the news came through and just about to go out for the evening. He paused to send a telegram to Stalin: ‘Let us rejoice together!’ he exulted. In a message to Roosevelt he declared that: ‘It is a great relief to us to get this brute where we have long wanted her.’

In truth the significance of the achievement was more theatrical than practical. Tirpitz had come to symbolise the hubris of a terrible regime. Her fate and that of Hitler seemed intertwined. Catharsis and deliverance demanded that both should die.

Patrick Bishop is the author of Target Tirpitz: The Epic Quest to Sink Hitler’s Greatest Battleship (HarperCollins, 2012).