Sink the Bismarck! Read online

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  Sink the Bismarck!

  C. S. FORESTER, an Englishman by parentage, was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1899, the son of a British Army officer. After service in the infantry in World War I, he began his writing career. In 1937 he wrote the first Horatio Hornblower novel. This would become a series of international bestselling sea adventure novels that would make him one of the most acclaimed writers in the 20th Century. Forester was also the author of The African Queen which was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. Forester moved to the United States in 1940, becoming an American citizen. He died in 1966.

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  Originally published as The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck

  Copyright © 1959 by C. S. Forester

  Copyright © 1987 renewal by John F., George F., and Dorothy Forester.

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  ISBN: 1-59176-615-X

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  SINK THE

  BISMARCK!

  Originally published as The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck

  This is as it may have happened. The speeches are composed by the writer, who has no knowledge that those words were used; but the writer has no doubt that similar speeches were made.

  Except in a few places where the truth is not known or where the records are not open to the public, the actual course of events has been recounted; although many of the characters here represented had no actual existence, they at least had their counterparts.

  Foreword

  By

  John D. Gresham

  “Read the really good books,” is my usual answer. The question though is a bit more complex to explain.

  For over two decades, I have had the pleasure to be what is known as a “defense analyst.” Most folks only encounter such professionals while watching them as “talking heads” on the 24-hour news or documentary film channels. These appearances normally occur during one of the frequent international crises that are the hallmark of our present times. Usually we are asked a few questions by the hosts and try to provide answers that will convey some sort of useful information for the viewers. After that, we normally return to our regular jobs, trying to understand and explain how the military works, and might do better in the future.

  A few of us though, get to have a bit more fun. I’m one of those lucky few.

  In 1992, I began to write full-time, something a lifetime of reading had helped prepare me for. This is not to say that every young man or woman who spends his or her adolescence with nose stuck into books is going to become a bestselling author. I was lucky, being knowledgeable in a particular topic (the military) at just the right time (just after the end of the Cold War and Desert Storm). There also is the matter of being a good observer, listener, organizer, and of course, being able to weave what you learn and know into an interesting and accurate story. Just the same, I was very well prepared for both my careers by a lifetime of reading about military history, science, tech­nol­ogy, and politics since grade school.

  This brings us back to the answer at the beginning of this foreword, since because of the question that I am most frequently asked by people. Everyone usually asks, “How do you become a military analyst and author?” My stock answer of “read the really good books” has a lot more meaning than most of them know though.

  It goes without saying that military analysts and authors like myself are voracious readers, consuming a steady diet of e-mail, web newsgroups, and magazines with an ear and eye always cocked to keep watch on a 24-hour television news channel. It is books though, that provide us with the foundations of our knowledge and expertise. Were you to walk into my home, you would find the walls covered with shelves and stacked with books, many acquired decades ago. Some are old friends, dog-eared by continual use. Others stand ready for their days of relevance in some future project. All though, represent the strong base of knowledge that I fall back on time and time again in my work as author, analyst, and citizen.

  So what makes a “really good book” that lives on one of my bookshelves? That is another insightful question that is also somewhat difficult to answer. “Really good books” always have a timeless quality to them, even when newer volumes have covered or superceded the same subject or time period. Often they form the basis for an examination, or just represent the book interested amateurs should start with. Sometimes these books are just what you feel comfortable recommending to friends and family in the hope that what you offer in advice will not bore or swamp the reader. There is an element of, “I can tell quality when I see it” to these volumes, which brings us to the point of this book and series.

  Some months ago, following a truly wonderful experience helping ibooks put out a new edition of the classic book Zero, the idea was put forth that perhaps I could provide a list of books that had been of particular sig­nif­i­cant interest or value to me over the years.

  Such lists are quite common actually, with the major service schools and academies around the world all having their own select choices. While each institution has its own particular focus, all share a common desire to provide student readers with a broad and solid foundation of military lessons to take with them into their careers. For example, Robert Heinlein’s classic science fiction novel Starship Troopers is on every American military reading list from the Naval Academy to the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base. Starship Troopers encompasses many of the values and virtues desired for good military personnel of all levels, and is a universal favorite. It with this desire to provide civilian readers of military history with a similar background that I began to make up my own reading list for friends, family, and peers.

  Thus was born the John Gresham Military Library. This series has been designed to give readers a list of books that will allow them to better understand military history from an operational viewpoint, rather than that of grand strategists or national leaders. Battles and campaigns, the real nuts and bolts of a victorious war, are rarely won in national capitols or defense ministries. That duty and honor goes to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines actually in the theaters of
war. There is ground truth in such places, where commanding generals and admirals share the elements of personal risk with their subordinates. So expect to see books with a tactical or operational focus in forthcoming volumes.

  The subject of the first book in the series is Sink the Bismarck! by adventure writer C. S. Forester. Today its hard to remember that in the 1950s the core stories of World War II were just beginning to be told to a public hungry for tales of the conflict. Very few of the details of the Bismarck affair were contained in the Admiralty dispatches and press releases of May 1941. Even less was known of what we today call the “back story,” including the roles of American lend-lease aircraft and advisors, as well as the breaking of German codes and ciphers. Nevertheless, the story of the Bismarck and her nine days of rampage in the North Atlantic were already an obvious source of inspiration for storytellers.

  In her day, Bismarck was the largest, fastest, most powerful battleship in service. Battleships were still the public measure of seapower in 1941; icons of a dying age where long-range gunnery still determined the fates of nations. While she and her sister ship Tirpitz would be superceded by American and Japanese battleship designs later in the war, Bismarck was a sea monster of almost unthinkable destructive power in the minds of British naval and political leaders. So impressive were her spec­i­fi­ca­tions and so massive her bulk, that her crew and Germany considered Bismarck “unsinkable,” cursing her with a vio­lent and tragic destiny.

  Just months earlier, two smaller and less-well armed German battlecruisers, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, had sunk over 100,000 tons of merchant shipping on just one voyage into the North Atlantic. When Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen moved out of the Baltic in May 1941, the worst fears of the British seemed to be coming true. German U-boats and surface raiders were sinking Allied ships faster than yards could replace the losses. Rations of food and other necessities were being reduced throughout England, so heavy were the casualties at sea. Combined with heavy warship losses suffered evacuating Crete following the German airborne invasion, the potential breakout of Bismarck and Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic convoy routes was the Royal Navy’s worst nightmare.

  Stretched to the breaking point with commitments around the globe, the Royal Navy was barely able to deal with the menace of Bismarck. Unable to cover every possible route into the North Atlantic, the British Home Fleet had to wait for Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to be found by scouting cruisers before committing itself to the pursuit. What resulted was that most exciting of nautical tales: a sea chase. For over a week Bismarck was the center of the greatest such pursuit of World War II. Along the way, she became the centerpiece of a tragic legend.

  Initially intercepted in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland, Bismarck stunned the world by sinking the battlecruiser Hood and nearly wrecking the new battleship Prince of Wales. The loss of Hood was particularly galling to the English people, the living symbol of British seapower for over 20 years. Having put two British capital ships out of action and killing over 1,500 seamen in just a single engagement, the Royal Navy spared nothing to bring the German warship to bay. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his famous “sink the Bismarck,” order to the Royal Navy, it was not just an operational command. It was a demand to avenge the Hood and her lost crew.

  For days, the Bismarck eluded over three dozen British warships trying to run her down. She endured a desperate attack by carrier-based torpedo bombers, one of the first such strikes flown in the war. Then, disappearing into the vile North Atlantic weather, it looked that Bismarck would escape the Royal Navy to safe harbor on the coast of occupied France. Only the discovery of Bismarck by a Coastal Command PBY Catalina flying boat gave the Royal Navy one final chance to stop her. But the heavy battleships of the Home Fleet were far behind the Bismarck, leaving only a handful of “Stringbag” Swordfish torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal to slow her down.

  In the fading light of a late spring night, like something out of a Star Wars film, one of the Swordfish got a miraculous torpedo hit on the rudders and screws of Bismarck. Unable to maneuver away from the oncoming British fleet, Bismarck was hounded through her final night by the destroyers of Captain Phillip Vian’s flotilla, stalking her until the Home Fleet arrived the next morning. When it came, the Bismarck’s final battle was little more than a gunnery exercise for the British. Pounded into a floating mass of scrap metal by the battleships King George V and Rodney, Bismarck went down just hours short of the Luftwaffe air cover than might have spared her. Only 119 of Bismarck’s crew of over 2,000 were pulled from the sea after her sinking, one of the worst maritime losses in history. And much like other great ships thought to be “unsinkable,” Titanic and Hood among them, Bismarck slipped below the waves to enter the annals of history, legend, and controversy.

  Almost immediately following the war, Bismarck and her nine-day combat career became the subject of great interest. For example, the means of her final demise is still a matter of bitter dispute. The British claim that torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire finished Bismarck, while the Germans claim to have used scuttling charges to finish her off. However, much like the doomed ocean liner Titanic, Bismarck’s greatest enduring curiosity was her amazing nine-day combat career. The story of Bismarck’s one and only combat cruise has been enough to spawn dozens of books, and number documentary and cinematic films. Dr. Robert Ballard led a famous expedition, which located Bismarck on the ocean floor in 1989, as well as Academy Award winning producer James Cameron in 2002. Today as then, Bismarck is perhaps the most fascinating and compelling warship of World War II.

  The 1989 Ballard expedition, his second in search of the Bismarck, yielded a wealth of information about the German battleship. One of the deepest wrecks ever found and surveyed, Bismarck was found upright on the bottom, in surprisingly good shape considering how badly shot up she was by the British. Even a Nazi swastika, painted on the main deck, had survived to be found by Ballard’s remote-controlled cameras.

  The 2002 Cameron expedition was even more detailed in its examination of the wreck. Using a pair of so­phis­ti­cated Russian manned submersibles equipped with remote-controlled robotic vehicles, Cameron’s team managed to gather a great deal more information. Cameron’s cameras obtained a much better damage assessment, including the first conclusive evidence that German scuttling charges were responsible for the final sinking of Bismarck. However, the wreck of the Bismarck still has many secrets to give up, and future expeditions are probably inevitable. Like the Titanic, Bismarck calls to historians, filmmakers, and marine explorers like a siren. The call of the Bismarck likely will continue for decades to come.

  For now though, let us consider this book, Sink the Bismarck! and its author. Most readers under 40 will probably not know the name of Cecil Scott (C.S.) Forester, despite his large and impressive body of work. Prior to his untimely death in 1966, Forester had published dozens of books, along with numerous screenplays and magazine articles. The titles of those books and movies represent a solid piece of our 20th Century culture, and are names many people will know and remember. His Horatio Hornblower books are known worldwide, and continue to sell well in new editions four decades after his death. Movies like The Africa Queen and The Pride And The Passion (originally published in book form as The Gun) are considers classics in their own right. Directors including John Houston and Stanley Kramer found his books rich in storylines and characters, making some of their finest films from his fertile tales. These movies provided actors as varied as Gregory Peck, Sophia Loren, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra some of their most memorable performances. In the case of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, Forester’s The African Queen gave them coveted Academy Awards for what many consider their best work.

  In his day C.S. Forester was held in the same esteem as writers like Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler are today. Strangely, his long history of illness (including severe coronary disease) often provided Forester both inspiration and motivation
to complete his next project. His sicknesses even brought him to his adoptive home of California, when an assignment to write propaganda film screenplays came his way during World War II. Long before the term “techno-thriller” became a part of pop culture, Forester was churning out a steady stream of adventure novels and popular history books that still have value and resonance today.

  Forester had a real sense of craftsmanship when creating characters for his tales, providing readers with a genuine sense of “being there.” Sensory experiences as simple as the smells and tastes of food, or the chill of a salt-water shower were just some of the memorable techniques he used to place readers into harm’s way for his stories. Like many readers, I have only one real complaint about C.S. Forester, and that was that he ever stopped writing at all. He was working on another Horatio Hornblower book at the time of his debilitating stroke in 1964, and clearly had many more wonderful tales in him, if time and health had just allowed. It’s a status all authors would like to take to the end of their lives I’m sure.

  Interestingly, many people, myself included, consider his “little” books and short stories some of his best work. Sink the Bismarck! is one of those thin volumes, and its background is worth some consideration. When released in 1959, Sink the Bismarck! (originally published in the United Kingdom and United States respectively as The Hunt for the Bismarck and The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck) was the first popular telling of the greatest sea chase of World War II. For many people, Sink the Bis­marck! became the starting point for their first inquiries into the Bismarck affair. So great was its appeal to a public hungry for heroic stories in the depths of the Cold War, that the book spawned a popular film (Sink the Bis­marck! based on the book) and even a Top 40 song.

  Now, it needs to be said that Sink the Bismarck! is not a history book per se. Written as a historical novel rather than a true work of popular history, Sink the Bismarck! is a contrivance of Forester’s fertile mind asking a simple question.