Tirpitz

The two Bismarck-class battleships were designed in the mid-1930s as the Kriegsmarine's answer to French naval expansion, specifically the two Richelieu-class ships France had started in 1935. Tirpitz was ordered as Ersatz Schleswig-Holstein under the contract name "G", replacing an old pre-dreadnought, and the contract went to the Kriegsmarinewerft in Wilhelmshaven, where her keel was laid on 20 October 1936. Laid down after the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, she was nominally within the 35,000-long-ton ceiling the Washington regime imposed. She was not: both sisters secretly exceeded the figure by a wide margin.

Her hull was launched on 1 April 1939 and christened by Ilse von Hassell, daughter of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the old Imperial Navy whose name she carried. Adolf von Trotha, himself a former Imperial admiral, spoke at the launch, and Hitler attended. She displaced 42,900 tonnes as built and 52,600 fully loaded on a length of 251 metres. Three Brown, Boveri & Cie geared turbines took steam from twelve oil-fired Wagner superheated water-tube boilers, giving 163,023 PS and 30.8 knots on trials. British bombers hit the harbour repeatedly during construction; none struck the ship, but they slowed the work.

Her main battery was eight 38 cm SK C/34 guns in four twin turrets — Anton and Bruno superfiring forward, Caesar and Dora aft — laid from three fire-control stations whose mechanical computers plotted target range and course, each station capped by a rangefinder in a rotating cupola. Twelve 15 cm guns and sixteen 10.5 cm heavy anti-aircraft mounts backed them, and her 2 cm battery eventually grew to fifty-eight barrels. The main belt ran 320 mm thick, the turret faces 360 mm. A run of wartime modifications left her 2,000 tonnes heavier than Bismarck, the heaviest battleship a European navy ever built.

Commissioned on 25 February 1941, Tirpitz worked up in the Baltic. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union she became, briefly, flagship of a temporary Baltic Fleet assembled to stop the Soviet fleet breaking out of Leningrad — a force that also held the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer, the light cruisers Köln, Nürnberg, Leipzig and Emden, destroyers and two flotillas of minesweepers. Under Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax it patrolled off Åland from 23 to 26 September 1941, then dispersed. She practised her main and secondary guns against Hessen, an old pre-dreadnought converted into a radio-controlled target ship.

Grand Admiral Erich Raeder proposed on 13 November 1941 that she go to Norway, where she could threaten the Soviet convoys, tie down British strength and deter an invasion. Hitler, who had forbidden any Atlantic sortie after Bismarck's loss, agreed. Kapitän zur See Karl Topp declared her ready on 10 January 1942, and she sailed from Wilhelmshaven at 23:00 on 14 January for Trondheim, escorted by the destroyers Z4 Richard Beitzen, Z5 Paul Jakobi, Z8 Bruno Heinemann and Z29. British intelligence decrypted the departure, but weather grounded the RAF, and Admiral John Tovey did not learn of it until 17 January.

She settled into Fættenfjord, north-east of Trondheim, moored hard against a cliff that shielded her from the south-west. Her crew felled trees and laid them aboard as camouflage, and could hide the whole ship inside an artificial fog made from water and chlorosulfuric acid. Anti-aircraft batteries were added around the fjord, with torpedo nets and heavy booms across the entrance. She was known as the "Lonely Queen of the North" for how rarely she moved. Fuel shortages kept her behind her netting; the crew maintained the ship, manned the flak and were kept fit with organised sport.

In March 1942 Tirpitz sailed as Unternehmen Sportpalast to attack convoys PQ 12 and QP 8. Admiral Scheer, designed for 26 knots, was too slow to keep station and stayed in port. Luftwaffe reconnaissance found PQ 12 near Jan Mayen but missed the battleship Duke of York and the battlecruiser Renown escorting it. Enigma intercepts again forewarned the British, who rerouted the convoys. On 9 March twelve Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers attacked in three groups; Tirpitz evaded every torpedo, lost three men wounded and shot two aircraft down. On 30 March thirty-three Halifaxes attacked her at Trondheim, scored nothing, and lost five.

Convoy PQ 17 was the next target, under Unternehmen Rösselsprung. Tirpitz, Admiral Hipper and six destroyers sortied from Trondheim while Lützow, Admiral Scheer and six more operated from Narvik; Lützow and three destroyers struck uncharted rocks and turned back. The Soviet submarine K-21 fired at Tirpitz and missed. Swedish intelligence passed the German departures to the Admiralty, which ordered the convoy to scatter; the Germans, knowing they had been seen, aborted and handed the attack to U-boats and the Luftwaffe, which sank 21 of the 34 unescorted transports. The March operation alone burned 8,230 tonnes of fuel oil, three months' worth of replenishment.

On 6 September 1943 she left port with Scharnhorst and ten destroyers to bombard Spitzbergen, which held a British weather station and refuelling base defended by 152 Norwegian troops in exile. Approaching the island the next day, Tirpitz flew the white ensign as a ruse de guerre. She fired 52 shells from her main battery and 82 rounds from her 15 cm secondaries, an assault force wrecked the shore installations and took 74 prisoners, and by 11:00 the battleships were heading back to Norway. It was the first and only time her 38 cm guns were fired at an enemy surface target.

After bombing and a failed torpedo attack achieved nothing, the British turned to X Craft midget submarines. Operation Source sent ten towed to Norway; eight reached Kåfjord, and early on 22 September 1943 X5, X6 and X7 broke through the defences, X6 and X7 laying their two-tonne mines before X5 was destroyed 200 metres from the nets. The blasts ruptured a fuel tank, tore shell plating, buckled double-bottom bulkheads and let in some 1,430 tonnes of water. Turret Dora was thrown off its bearings, and no crane in Norway could lift it back. The repair ship Neumark's work, historians William Garzke and Robert Dulin wrote, was "one of the most notable feats of naval engineering during the Second World War".

Repairs finished on 2 April 1944, and full-speed trials were set for the next day. Enigma decrypts revealed the timing, and Operation Tungsten was brought forward to 3 April: 40 Barracuda dive-bombers with armour-piercing bombs and 40 fighters, flown from Victorious, Furious and the escort carriers Emperor, Fencer, Pursuer and Searcher, struck in two waves for fifteen direct hits and two near misses. Nothing penetrated the main armour, but the superstructure was wrecked, two 15 cm turrets destroyed and both floatplanes lost. Casualty figures differ: 122 dead and 316 wounded, or 132 and 270, among them the ship's captain, Hans Meyer.

A summer of carrier strikes — Planet, Brawn, Tiger Claw, Mascot, then the Goodwood series in August — cost aircraft and achieved two hits of little consequence, one of them a 1,600-pound bomb whose damaged fuze left it lying unexploded in a switchboard room. The job passed to the RAF's No. 5 Group and its Tallboys. Operation Paravane, flown on 15 September 1944 from a forward base at Yagodnik in Russia, put one bomb through her bow and out through the keel; 800 to 1,000 tonnes of water followed, and she was left unseaworthy and limited to 8 to 10 knots. On 15 October she steamed the 200 nautical miles to Tromsø, the last voyage of her career.

Reduced to a floating gun battery, with fuel enough only for her generators and her crew cut from around 2,600 to 1,600, she lay off Håkøya Island behind torpedo nets and a sandbank built to stop her rolling over. Operation Catechism came on 12 November 1944: 32 Lancasters of Nos. 9 and 617 Squadrons dropped 29 Tallboys for two direct hits and a near miss. Others fell inside the net barrier and cratered the seabed, taking away much of the sandbank. The amidships hit blew a very large hole in her side and bottom and destroyed the belt armour abreast of it.

Flooding drove the port list to between 15 and 20 degrees, then to 30 or 40 within ten minutes, and the captain ordered her abandoned. By 09:50 she lay at 60 degrees. Eight minutes later a large explosion tore through turret Caesar, throwing the roof and part of the rotating structure 25 metres into the air and down onto men swimming for the shore. She rolled over and drove her superstructure into the sea floor. Eighty-two men trapped in the upturned hull were cut free through the exposed bottom; the dead numbered somewhere between roughly 950 and 1,204.

The Luftwaffe's failure to intercept the bombers was blamed on Major Heinrich Ehrler, commander of III./Jagdgeschwader 5, who was court-martialled in Oslo, threatened with death, sentenced to three years and released after a month, demoted. Later investigation exonerated him: communication between navy and air force had broken down so badly that the aircrews had not been told the ship had moved off Håkøya two weeks earlier. A joint German-Norwegian company broke up the wreck between 1948 and 1957. Ludovic Kennedy, writing her history, judged that she "lived an invalid's life and died a cripple's death".