Tovey also had another old battlecruiser in hand, the HMS Repulse, two years older than Hood, and carrying 15 inch guns, but only six of them, paired in three turrets. Among the fastest ships in the world when she launched, Repulse could still easily run out to 28 knots, and then some if needed, though her engines and plants were showing their age.
The ships that followed these venerable battlecruisers into service had been powerfully built and well armored battleships, the Rodney and Nelson. Their design was unlike anything else in the fleet, with nine heavy 16 inch guns, all mounted in three forward turrets. The unusual arrangement allowed her to present enormous firepower as she approached a target, but she could only run out to 21 knots. If these ships had been built to chase down enemy battleships, their sluggish speed made them completely unsuited to the task.
So it was that the Royal Navy decided to fill the need for a truly modernized battleship with the newer King George V class. The designers wanted the speed to catch anything they set their sights on, the power to hurt and sink it, and the armor to stand with the best the enemy could throw back at them. King George V was not a perfect design, but she answered those three requirements well enough. Her guns were slightly smaller than Hood, just 14 inchers, but she carried ten of them in an unusual configuration. One turret with four guns each was placed at her bow and another at her stern. Then a second, smaller turret with two barrels was mounted above and behind the forward guns. This gave her six barrels in her forward arc of fire, four aft, and a broadside of ten. Her armor was better than either Hood or Repulse, approaching 15 inches in thickness at the belt, with deck armor up to 5.4 inches, twice the thickness of Hood. And she could run out to 28 knots in speed, giving her a potent combination of firepower, protection, and vital speed.
In making his deployments Tovey had paired two capital ships in each task force. Hood was stronger than Repulse, so Admiral Holland made his flag there and sailed with the latest addition to the fleet, another KGV class ship, the Prince of Wales. This ship was inexperienced, still beset with mechanical problems, and put to sea with repair crews aboard to work the bugs out of her firing turrets. In setting these two ships off together, Tovey hoped the experience of Hood would augment the youth and rawness of Prince of Wales, and together they could turn 18 big guns on any enemy they did battle with.
For himself, he set his flag here aboard King George V and would order the battlecruiser Repulse, now at anchor in the Clyde, to join him once he put to sea. Each ship had experienced crews, though they had slightly less firepower together than Holland had, being two guns short on Repulse.
Still, it was a sound deployment, thought Tovey. Bismarck had only eight 15 inch guns, even if she was fast and very well armored. He still reasoned that either of his heavy task forces would outgun her, and the lighter 8 inch gun cruiser Prince Eugen would not be a significant threat if they could get some early hits on the larger battleship.
So it was that he put to sea just after midnight as the 21st of May slipped away to a new day. It would be a momentous time, he thought. He could feel it in his bones, smell it on the cold night mist over the Flow. One task force or another was going to find and confront the German behemoth, and the outcome would decide the course of the war in the North Atlantic for some time to come.
But which would it be, Tovey wondered? Would Bismarck make for the more distant, yet narrow passage of the Denmark Strait, or the closer and more direct passage between Iceland and the Faeroes? That choice would determine who fought her, and hundreds of miles away, Admiral Lütjens was considering that very question aboard the most powerful ship in the German Navy.
Chapter 14
Coming to Bergen was a mistake, thought Ernst Lindemann, Kapitan of the Bismarck, but Admiral Lütjens must have had some reason to delay here. Was it only to provide time for the new paint? The deck crews had been busy the whole day, painting over the dazzle ship camo scheme and covering up the prominent swastikas on the decks with canvass. The ship would get a new coat of “battleship gray,” which was much more suitable given the steel gray sky and waters of the Norwegian Sea.
Perhaps it was Prince Eugen, he decided. The smaller ship had been ordered to take on fuel from the tanker Wollin, but we could have just as easily steamed directly to the Weissenburg, another tanker on station in the Arctic Sea. It did not surprise him when a lone RAF Spitfire overflew the harbor at 1100 hours that morning, photographing Bismarck riding boldly at anchor right under the curious and astonished noses of the local sheep farmers.
Strange that the Admiral seemed to feel no need to refuel Bismarck. True, she had much greater range than the cruiser, but the ship was already 200 tons light due to a faulty refueling hose, and they had already burned that much again just to reach this place.
The Admiral came in to the ward room, and Lindemann gave him a brisk salute.
“It’s good to be underway again,” he said. “I trust you are ready for some exciting days ahead, captain.”
“To put it lightly, Admiral. Have you given further thought to our course?” The decision as to which passage they would take was crucial now, but Lütjens pursed his lips, as though the matter was still troublesome in his mind.
Günther Lütjens was a tall, aristocratic seaman, a career officer with a long and distinguished record. The navy had often insulated itself against the encroaching ideology of the Nazi party, and Lütjens was a perfect example of that. He was definitely not a party man, and believed the appalling treatment meted out to the Jews was a stain on German honor. He provided aid to certain Jewish associates, and also refused to dismiss any valuable staff member simply because there was a suspicion of Jewish blood in their genealogy. More than this, he went so far as to make a formal written statement protesting the atrocities of Kristallnacht against the Jews, and when Hitler had come to tour the Bismarck just before its launch, the Admiral boldly greeted him with a standard navy salute, and not the stiff armed salute of the Nazi Party.
With nearly 30 years in naval service, he had early experience on fast torpedo boats before landing his first command on the Karlsruhe in 1934. After that he commanded many of the newest German raiders, including both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the recent Norwegian campaign, as well as the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper the previous year. Now he set his flag on the Bismarck for operation Rheinübung, or “Exercise Rhine” as it was to be called. His mission was to break out and strike the convoy system, and this time the presence of a single battleship as escort for the slow fat prey would not give him pause.