PM Winston Churchill pursued the mighty ship's destruction relentlessly throughout the war. Bishop writes:
As long as Tirpitz was afloat she cast a shadow over British
naval planning, mesmerizing the Home Fleet and forcing its
most powerful ships to keep a constant watch against a
breakout into the Atlantic... page xxv, prologue
[Aboard Tirpitz, "life was good for the crew": Ship's Bierstube]
Below are a few excerpts related to the sinking of the Tirpitz.
The End, Not Far Off
Tirpitz was, of course, to be feared.*
But to those on board it seemed that they had
exchanged a dangerous situation for a fatal one.
Smoke generators were set up on shore though
it would be a while before they were working.
The feeling settled on the ship that the end, not
just of Tirpitz but of Germany, could not be far off.
Just across the water on Tromso (Norway),
the citizens saw the anxiety on the faces
of their conquerors and inwardly exulted.
But the presence of the big grey ship
across the bay was ominous. Their town
had been dragged onto the front line.
Whenever the skies cleared they braced
themselves for the appearance of the bombers.**
*page 369
**pages347-48
["Tirpitz in a snug and secure fjord in northern Norway"]
Like a Rifle Bullet
A red light went on.
Then the automatic release mechanism tripped.
The Tallboy slid away, and, suddenly freed from its
five-ton burden, the Lancaster leaped thankfully upward.
The bomb went into an aerodynamically perfect descent,
spinning like a rifle bullet. Thirty seconds later it hit.
Willy Tait 'turned and dived hard to port to see what
was happening. The ship was almost hidden by smoke.
A jet of white steam was gushing out
and amidships she blazed fiercely.'
The sequence was captured by the
film unit Lancaster's three cine cameras.
When it first comes into view, Tirpitz looks
tiny and exposed 'like a Dinky Toy',
as some of the crews were to say later, lying
broadside-on close to the flat shore of Haakoy.
Bright lights flicker out of the monochrome
as the flak teams frantically work their guns.
Then, out of nowhere, a great white mushroom
envelops the front of the ship. There is a
brief stutter of anti-aircraft fire from aft.
A bomb splashes down close to the stern
on the starboard side. Almost simultaneously
an eruption three hundred yards away on the
shore of Haakoy flings debris high and wide.
It is followed by another white blossoming amidships.
Two more bombs crash between ship and shore.
After that it becomes impossible to follow the
bombardment as the ship diappears under
rolling banks of smoke, steam and fire.
page 355
["Photo of Tirpitz's death by woodcutter, Tromso, Norway, 1944"]
There was Nothing Else
The transformation was astonishingly quick.
In seven minutes the great ship had toppled onto her side.
'Everything seemed to happen so quickly.
The hellish roar of the flak set in but the detonations
of the English bombs overwhelmed all other noise.
Huge geysers of fire, water and debris covered every-
thing and we had thrown ourselves on the beach to
escape the shell splinters. Suddenly, it was quiet -
no guns, no detonations. A chorus of screams
reached all the way to the shore.'
When the smoke cleared 'we could not believe
our eyes. Tirpitz had gone. The hull stuck out of
the water like a giant whale. There was nothing else.'
It had taken eleven minutes for the ship to turn turtle.*
But even now you can still find, amid the rocks and
seaweed of the peaceful shoreline, a hunk of steel,
flaking and rusted through, a small memento
of the folly and waste of war.**
*page 360-61
**page 372
Link to WW2 Ten Poignant Stories 7b
Photos from TARGET TIRPITZ by GH
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