As the range opened, so the descending angle of Duke of York’s 14in shells became steeper. The inevitable happened at 1800 when a shell hit Scharnhorst and penetrated her armour, bursting in № 1 boiler room. Her speed was reduced, which allowed pursuing British destroyers to finally close with her.
Over the next hour, the destroyers and Trinidad and Belfast launched a total of fifty-five torpedoes at Scharnhorst. The Norwegian destroyer Stord actually closed to only 1500yds (1370m) to launch her full salvo of eight torpedoes, firing her 4.7in guns at the same time. No single battleship could hope to survive such an onslaught. Admiral Fraser, with so many torpedoes running, withdrew Duke of York to a safe distance. Hit by at least eleven torpedoes, Scharnhorst came to a stop, capsized and sank. Rawalpindi, Glorious, Acasta and Achates had been avenged. When Scharnhorst sank, Admiral Bey, Captain Hintze and 1966 of her crew were lost with her. Only thirty-six survivors were picked up by the British ships.
Her wreck was rediscovered by a Norwegian team in September 2000, and they reported that Scharnhorst lies inverted in 300m (984ft) of water. Her stern has detached and lies upright, but a large part of the bow section has detached and lies at an angle from the main part of the hull. It appears that Scharnhorst suffered a forward main magazine explosion, either on the surface or when sinking, blowing the ship in two.
TORPEDO EXPLOSION DESTROYS FORT
A strange incident involving torpedoes took place in September 1944 at Mercy, to the east of the city of Metz in northeast France. Following the German takeover of unoccupied France in 1942, the infantry fort of Mercy was being used by the Kriegsmarine to store two thousand torpedo warheads they had seized from the French naval arsenal in Toulon. The very day the Normandy landings took place, the Germans began to shift this huge store of explosives into Germany, with the aim of using the warhead explosives in their V-2 rocket construction programme.
By 19 September, they had moved some thousand warheads to the nearby railway station, and two trucks loaded with six torpedo warheads apiece were in the courtyard outside the entrance to the fort, ready for their next delivery run. At around 1745, the pilot of an American P-47 fighter-bomber flew over the fort. Spying the two loaded trucks he dived and strafed them with his eight .50cal machine guns. The trucks caught fire, the pilot zoomed upwards, banked over the fort and came back for a second run. At that moment the burning trucks exploded, the blast travelled inside the entrance, set off the stored torpedo warheads, and the entire fort erupted in a huge explosion.
The P-47’s engine cut out, but the pilot had just enough time to restart it and managed to return to his base near Nancy. Behind him, the entire fort had disappeared, along with eleven German naval personnel, and seventy Waffen SS troops returned from the Normandy front, who had bivouacked their vehicles loaded with booty in the woods around the fort. Huge blocks of concrete rained down all around, some even landing in the city of Metz. The blast travelled along the underground tunnel connecting the fort to a smaller fortification in Jury, and blew out a casemate end wall. All that is left of the infantry fort of Mercy today is a small lake which marks the crater left by the explosion, and three large crosses erected by the Germans with the names of those killed in the disaster.
CHAPTER 23
The Second World War — The Pacific
PEARL HARBOR
The Americans should never have been taken by surprise by what happened at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, if they had studied their likely antagonists in the Pacific. War between Japan and China, which became known as the First Sino-Japanese War, was formally declared on 1 August 1884. However, the first combat had taken place six days earlier, at Pungdo, when Japanese warships attacked and drove ashore the Chinese gunboat Kwang-yi, captured a second gunboat, the Tsao-kiang, and sank a British steamer, the Kow-shing, which was carrying 120 °Chinese troops to Korea. Some nine hundred of the troops died in the incident.
On 8 February 1904 Japan had issued a declaration of war against Russia. However, three hours before the declaration was received, Admiral Togo had launched what would now be termed a pre-emptive strike against the Russian fleet at anchor in Port Arthur. The tsar’s government, taken by surprise, did not declare war on Japan until eight days later. When the Russians complained at the Japanese action, the latter referred to the Russians’ own attack on Sweden in 1809 without a declaration of war. The Japanese action was mirrored by Churchill during the Great War, when on 3 November 1914 he ordered the Mediterranean Fleet to bombard the Turkish forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles, again without a formal declaration of war.
In 1941 the Japanese combined fleet was numerically inferior to that of the Americans, and to even the odds it was always possible the Japanese would resort to a preemptive strike. Despite warnings signalled by the destroyer Ward, which had fired on one of the five Japanese midget submarines trying to enter Pearl Harbor, and reports from their new radar station, the Americans were taken completely by surprise as Commander Mitsuo Fuchida ordered his radio operator to send the famous signal ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’
The Americans had assumed that their ships in Pearl Harbor were safe from torpedo attack as the water was too shallow. They had failed to appreciate the lessons of Taranto, which were not lost on the Japanese. As noted in Chapter 8, they had made special provisions for shallow torpedo drops, and had trained extensively for such an operation.
Their main targets were the battleships anchored in Battleship Row, unprotected by anti-torpedo nets. The Nevada (launched 1916, modernised 1929, 34,000 tons, ten 14in guns) was moored to dolphins on her own at the rear of the line. Next came the Arizona (launched 1916, modernised 1931, 36,500 tons, twelve 14in guns), with the repair ship Vestal moored outside her. Then came Tennessee (launched 1920, 35,190 tons, twelve 14in guns) with West Virginia (launched 1923, 33,590 tons, eight 16in guns) moored outboard, and lastly Maryland (launched 1921, 33,590 tons, eight 16in guns), with Oklahoma (launched 1916, modernised 1929, 34,000 tons, ten 14in guns) moored outboard. At the head of the line was the oiler Neosho, and moored ahead of her, some distance away, was the California (launched 1921, 35,190 tons, twelve 14in guns). The fleet flagship Pennsylvania, sister ship to the Arizona, was in dry dock and safe from torpedo attack, as were the three battleships moored inboard in Battleship Row.
A series of photos taken from Japanese aircraft show how the torpedo attacks developed.
