“These will help,” the officer of the deck said from beside him, handing him a pair of binoculars.
“Thank you,” Eric said, turning towards the officer only to see the man go pale.
“Oh bloody hell! Look at the Hood!”
Eric turned and looked down the British line, noting as he turned that the Suffolk was heeling to Exeter’s starboard with flames shooting from her amidships and rear turret. Ignoring the heavily damaged heavy cruiser, he brought up his binoculars as he looked towards the front of the British line. In an instant, he could see why the officer of the deck had made his exclamation. The battlecruiser’s guns appeared frozen in place, and oil was visibly gushing from her amidships. As Eric watched, another salvo splashed around her, with a sudden flare and billow of smoke from her stern indicating something serious had been hit.
“Captain, the Hood is signaling a power failure!” the officer of the deck shouted. Eric turned to see the man had acquired another set of eyeglasses and was also studying the flagship.
Gordon nodded, stepping back from his captain’s sight and brought his own set of binoculars up to study the battlecruiser. Eric quickly handed his over before the OOD could react.
“It would appear that our Teutonic friends can shoot a bit better than we expected,” Gordon said grimly.
Admiral Bey would have agreed with Gordon’s assessment had he heard it, as he too was pleasantly surprised at how well his scratch fleet was performing. Unfortunately for the Germans, however, the British could shoot almost as well, their guns seemed to be doing far more damage, and they had much better fire distribution. The only British capital ships with major damage were the Hood, set ablaze and rendered powerless by the Tirpitz and Jean Bart, and Nelson due to hits from the Bismarck and Strasbourg. Among the cruisers, only the Suffolk had been hit, being thoroughly mauled by the KMS Hipper and Lutzow. In exchange, only the Jean Bart, Gneisenau, and Bismarck remained relatively unscathed among his battleline. Of the rest of his vessels, the French battlecruiser Strasbourg had been thoroughly holed by the H.M.S. Warspite’s accurate shooting, Tirpitz was noticeably down by the bows, and Scharnhorst had received at least two hits from Prince of Wales in the first ten minutes of the fight.
Bey’s escorts, consisting of the pocket battleship Lutzow and a force of German and Vichy French cruisers, had arranged themselves in an ad hoc screen to starboard. The fact that they outnumbered their British counterparts had not spared them from damage, albeit not as heavy as that suffered by the Franco-German battleline. Moreover, while Exeter’s shooting had set the lead vessel, the French heavy cruiser Colbert, ablaze and slowed her, this was more than offset by the battering the Suffolk had received from the Lutzow, Hipper, and Seydlitz. As that vessel fell backward in the British formation, the remaining cruisers split their fire between the Exeter, Norfolk, and the destroyers beginning their attack approach.
Word of the British DDs’ approach caused Bey some consternation. While it could be argued that his force was evenly matched with the British battleline, the approaching destroyers could swiftly change this equation if they got into torpedo range. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Bey ordered all vessels to make smoke and disengage. It was just after the force began their simultaneous turn that disaster struck.
The KMS Scharnhorst, like the Hood, had begun life as a battlecruiser. While both she and her sister had been upgraded during the Armistice Period with 15-inch turrets, the Kriegsmarine had made the conscious decision not to upgrade her armor. The folly of this choice became readily apparent as the Prince of Wales’ twentieth salvo placed a pair of 14-inch shells through her amidships belt. While neither shell fully detonated, their passage severed the steering controls between the light battleship’s bridge and rudder.
The Scharnhorst’s helmsman barely had time to inform the captain of this before the second half of PoW’s staggered salvo arrived, clearing the battleship’s bridge with one shell and and hitting Scharnhorst on the armored “turtle deck” right above her engineering spaces with a second. To many bystanders’ horror, a visible gout of steam spewed from the vessel’s side as all 38,000 tons of her staggered like a stunned bull. Only the fact that her 15-inch guns fired a ragged broadside back at the British line indicated that the vessel still had power, but it was obvious to all that she had been severely hurt.
One of those observers was the captain of the KMS Gneisenau, Scharnhorst’s sister ship and the next battleship in line. Confronted with the heavily wounded Scharnhorst drifting back towards him, the man ordered the helm brought back hard to starboard. In one of the horrible vagaries of warfare, the Gneisenau simultaneously masked her sister ship from the Prince of Wales’ fire and corrected the aim of her own assailant, the H.M.S. Nelson. No one would ever know how many 16-inch shells hit of the five that had been fired at the Gneisenau, as the only one that mattered was the one that found the German battleship’s forward magazine. With a massive roar, bright flash, and volcanic outpouring of flame, the Gneisenau’s bow disappeared. Scharnhorst and Jean Bart’s horrified crews were subjected to the spectacle of the Gneisenau’s stern whipping upwards, propellers still turning. The structures only glistened for a moment, as the battleship’s momentum carried her aft end into the roiling black cloud serving as a tombstone for a 40,000-ton man-of-war and the 1,700 men who manned her.
“Holy shit! Holy shit!” Eric exclaimed, his expletives lost in the general pandemonium that was Exeter’s bridge.
“Get yourselves together!” Gordon roared, waving his hands. As if to emphasize his point, there was the sound of ripping canvas, and a moment later, the Exeter found herself surrounded by large waterspouts.
“Port ten degrees!” Gordon barked, the bridge crew quickly returning to their tasks.
“Sir, Nelson is signaling that she is heaving to!”
“What in the bloody hell is the matter with her?!” Gordon muttered, a moment before Exeter’s guns roared again.
“Guns reports we are engaging and being engaged by a pocket battleship. He believes it is the…” the talker reported.
Once again there was the sound of ripping canvas, this time far louder. Eric instinctively ducked just before the Exeter shuddered simultaneously with the loud bang! just above their heads. Dimly, he saw something fall out of the corner of his eye even as there was a sound like several wasps all around him. Coming back to his feet, Eric smelled the strong aroma of explosives for the second time that day, except this time there was a man screaming like a shot rabbit to accompany it.
“Damage report!” Gordon shouted. “Someone shut that man up!”