Operation Catechism - Sink the Tirpitz
The Tirpitz is the second most famous German battleship and sits only behind her more famous sister, Bismarck. She only saw action once but yet attracted twenty six attempts to sink her with the last one being the one that destroyed her with a massive loss of life.
But why was Tirpitz’s sinking so important to the British when she spent her time in fjords and away from action?
The two Bismarck class battleships were designed as part of Plan Z, the planned growth of the Kriegsmarine surface fleet as well as to combat the French Richleau class battleship. The Bismarck class were a formidable warship with heavy armour (13” belt armour, 14” turrets, 3.9-4.7” main deck) and eight 15” main guns but she was alone. Raeder’s plan for repeating the very successful Operation Berlin with a force consisting of Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was quickly put to bed following the loss of Bismarck and so Tirpitz was instead assigned to Norway. This meant that she was further away from the RAF bombers who had attacked her several times in port during her early career but also a threat to the British Arctic convoys and acting as “a fleet in being” to tie down a large number of British warships on the off chance that she ever put to sea. After her flak defences were augmented and heavily escorted by destroyers she began her deployment in 14th January 1942 as she left Wilhelmshaven.
What would follow was a very dull career of sitting in various fjords partially to protect such a valuable asset from loss but also due to fuel shortages. A planned sortie was abandoned in early ‘42 as Operation Cereberus was given priority for Naval fuel. The British were forced to keep battleships at sea, often at a distance to the convoys on the off chance that news of Tirpitz had put to sea and they would be able to react. This was a massive strain on British resources and tied down quite a large amount of warships when they could be used in other theatres like the Mediterranean and possibly the Far East. However as the convoy PQ 17 was heading out to Russia there was a strong belief the battleship was putting to sea with other surface units and the order to “scatter” was given. If Tirpitz had come down on a convoy she could have decimated it at a safe range without drawing any fire so scattering it meant there was a greater chance of survival but to the Luftwaffe and U-boats it was easier to catch lone vessels and what followed was a massacre with 21 of 34 ships lost.
The Royal Navy and Royal Airforce carried out several raids with torpedo bombers, heavy bombers and X-craft submarines and these are something I’ll cover in time - especially the X-craft raid. Operation Paravane (15th September 1944) saw Lancasters carrying Tallboys fly fro Russian territory and bombing the vessel with a Tallboy exploding at the bottom of Kaafjord having penetrated the deck and passing out of the keel with five killed and fifteen wounded and the battleship taking on around 900 tons of water making her unseaworthy. Other damage caused by concussion saw the fire control equipment also damaged. The Upper echelons of the Kriegsmarine decided that her warship days were at an end and that she would be nothing more than a floating battery. It was going to take nine months to repair this damage and she was moved down to Tromso on 15th October under its own steam. On 29th October 9 and 617 squadron came back as part of Operation Obviate but this raid was hampered by bad weather and there was only one near miss with a Tallboy which damaged the rudder and port propeller shaft.
The Germans knew the British would be back and so constructed a sand bank below the ship to stop her from capsizing, torpedo nets were installed, fuel was limited and power limited to the turbo-generators and guns. It was only a matter of time before the Allies came back again.
Between 3-3:30 a.m. on 12th November, thirteen Lancasters of 9 squadron took off from their forward airbase heavily laden with extra fuel and with no mid-upper gunner to save on weight and each carrying a 12,000 lb Tallboy.F/Lt Camsell (N.F. 929) and F/O Redfern (N.G. 249) were delayed in taking off and failed to make the rendez-vous point and returned to base leaving eleven aircraft of 9 Squadron to proceed with eighteen aircraft from 617 Squadron and one from 463 (RAAF) which was carrying a camera to photograph the attack and results if possible.
Once the aircraft had met at the rendezvous point they proceeded individually towards the target and made for a stretch of coastline between Mosjoen and Namsos where the RAF had discovered a gap in the German radar belt though a couple missed the window and did pass through the radar.
Once across the coast the bombers met again over Tornetrask lake where they flew circuits until 617 Squadron’s CO, W/Cmdr Tait, signalled the attack run by firing a flare. The formation turned north-west towards to Tromso climbing to 14,000 feet and over the mountains that ran along the Swedish border following a radio signal from a member of the Norwegian resistance.
We flew across the North Sea over Norway onto a lake in Sweden which was a rendezvous and then up from there up to Tromso and… It was a gin clear morning, it was absolutely beautiful. The sun was shining you could see 100 miles and i think we knew we had a great chance of disposing of her. Thomas Iveson 617 Squadron
As the Lancasters approached at 14-16000 feet in gaggles of four to six aircraft (with the 463 Squadron aircraft at 2000 ft) the Germans were aware of their presence, not just from the radar but from observation posts as well, as early as 7:40 a.m. a whole hour and a half before the raid began. It would be fair to say that their response was wholly inadequate. Originally it was believed that the bombers were flying to Russia and with their small amount of aircraft present that they would have to let them pass and there was no need to look to Tirpitz’s defence.
At 8:15 the Tirpitz was told about the Lancasters and at 8:50 the air raid siren was sounded with Kapitan Weber telling the crew at 8:57 that an attack was possible and brought them to standby. The first reports had arrived to the nearest detachment of Luftwaffe fighters at Bardufoss airfield as early as 8:00 a.m. but it was for three Lancasters passing through some twenty minutes earlier and then a little while later that another British bomber was seen flying north-east. The reports were not coming directly but from Msjoen to Fauske and then to HQ at Narvik before passing to the airfield which takes unnecessary time then to make it worse another report at 8:34 a.m. saw the Lancasters being plotted in the wrong grid reference on the map so no one passed the message to Bardufoss. It wasn’t until 9:15 a.m. that Tirpitz’s request for fighter cover arrived and the fighters scrambled three minutes later.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a squadron scramble would see pilots running from deck chairs to their aircraft and in the air in minutes like the battle of Britain but on this occasion due to delays it took fifteen minutes for the first aircraft to get airborne with the Geschwaderkommodore Major Heinrich Ehrer taking off first in his FW 190 but as he was only recently arrived to do training for the 9th Staffel, he didn’t know exactly where Tirpitz was beyond somewhere near Tromso. To make matters worse there was a routing mistake and the other pilots of 9./Jg 5 who had been on cockpit readiness for the last twenty minutes had to sit on the airfield after their Kommandeur took off as they waited for a Ju 52 to come in and land before they could go up the runway for another whole five minutes.
At 9:30 a.m. the Fw 190s were airborne but it was already too late…
As the Lancasters approached they spotted Tirpitz at a range of twenty miles with W/Cmdr Tait describing the battleship as:;
Lying squat and black among her torpedo nets like a spider in her web, silhouetted against the glittering blue and green waters of the fjord.
At 13 miles distance Tirpitz fired her main turrets at the approaching bombers sending 15” shells that had been designed for anti-aircraft fire whistling towards the bombers. They were specially fuzed with fragmentation device to throw shrapnel into the bombers.As the RAF got closer smaller calibre flak guns on ship and shore also opened up and the fire was described as heavy in the clear skies but the stream was not disrupted.
At 9:41 a.m. Tait dropped the first Tallboy and 617 squadron bombed until 9:44 a.m. before 9 Squadron began their attack run at 9:45 a.m.
In my position I didn’t see very much you could see much from the front of a Lancaster… but we looked afterwards and we saw lots of smoke, we saw other bombs going down and we knew we had pretty well got her. That was a 12 and half hour flight and we had one pilot. Once we had dropped our one bomb there was only one thing to do and that was to leave. We had been told that a Focke-Wulf squadron had been moved in recently at Bardufoss. Thomas Iveson 617 Squadron
9 Squadron’s F/Lt Lake (P.B.696) reported:
Five bombs seen to fall. No. 1 - 50 yards off bow of ship. No. 2 slightly undershot centre of ship. No. 3 - about 30 yards from stern. No. 4 - overshot centre of ship by about 150 yards. No. 5 overshot to the right by about 150 yards. In addition rear gunner saw own bomb which he considers hit the ship as big explosion and fire followed immediately.
The 9 Squadron Record stated that:
Hit was observed amidships followed by explosion and fire, and many near misses seen. One crew reported ship appeared to be listing to starboard with fire amidships….Results were difficult to observe at conclusion of attack owing to smoke but later reconnaissance showed the battleship had been sunk.
The whole raid had finished at 9:49 a.m.
From the boffin report I remember which looked at navigator’s reports and bomb plots that out of the first seven bombs there were two direct hits and two near misses… She was the biggest battleship in Europe and she just turned over. Thomas Iveson 617 Squadron
Tirpitz had been struck by two Tallboys which had penetrated the armoured deck though one had failed to detonate by the “Bruno” turret where as the other went through the Arado floatplane’s launch track and penetrated to the boiler room on the portside causing fires and flooding. The battleship quickly takes on a list with the near misses causing further under the waterline damage mostly to port as most of the bombs fell on that side of the ship. The explosions also took a heavy toll on the flak gunners in their open positions and is one of the reasons for the slackening of the anti-aircraft fire recorded by the bomber crews.
Kapitan Weber ordered the men to counter flood and hoped that the shallow depth of the fjord would mean that the ship would settle rather than capsize but the amount of water pouring into the hull could not easily be combatted especially with the controls necessary to carry this out being abandoned.
Then the “Caesar” turret’s magazine exploded.
With Tirpitz heeling over quickly and with no hope of saving the vessel Weber gave the order to abandon ship and at 9:52 a.m. the battleship rolled over trapping the majority of the surviving crew within the hull.
Eleven minutes had passed since the first bomb being dropped.
US Newsreel of the attack.
But where was the Luftwaffe?
Ehrler was inbound but found out too late that his radio was broken so he was unable to contact ground control or the rest of his fighters and was trying to figure out where to go to find the RAF raiders. At 9:42 a.m. it became obvious where he had to go as a large mushroom cloud was appeared off to his left. Erhler decided to head slightly towards the west in the hope of catching the bombers on their way out but after flying around the coast for a while and sighting nothing he returned to base. The other fighters, under the command of Oberleutnant Werner Gayko, also found nothing and returned to base.
Despite the cold and shock some 596 sailors swam to shore or rescued by swiftly dispatched rescue boats but there were still large numbers of men trapped within the hull in air pockets and time would be running out to save them.
The Germans rushed to the wreck and listened for signs of life and banging on the hull quickly painting marks of where to cut but the Acetylene torches needed were not available and the locals who had any quickly hid them and only one was acquired for the job. Only 87 men were pulled from the hull and this was in the first 24 hours, after that they cut and worked for two more days to no avail before giving up as the levels of Oxygen were deemed to have been expended. Casualty rates are a bit varied but the figures I keep seeing quoted are somewhere between 950-1204 but included Weber and all of his senior officers.
An hour after the raid a RAF Mosquito passed over the fjord and recorded the loss of the battleship confirming the Norwegian agent’s reports.
The RAF’s aircraft began landing at around 3 p.m. but one was missing. F/O D. A. Coster (L.M. 448) of 9 squadron, had suffered damage and the New Zealander decided to make for Swedish territory and land at an airfield. However when an engine gave out he carried out a belly landing near Vandnasberget and his crew were interned, briefly.
Who was to blame for the loss of the battleship?
Ehrler was one of the scapegoats for the loss and faced court martial in Oslo. He was criticised for delaying fighter take off (which he didn’t) that he left the squadron (which he couldn’t help) and he ended up before the highest court in the Reich, under Judge Dr Ernst Reuter, charged with cowardice. Although Cowardice was dropped and he was instead charged with abnormal ambition in which he was so hungry to get his 200th aerial victory that instead of coordinating the defence from the ground he had jumped into a fighter and shot off at the detriment of the Tirpitz and fighter coordination with the Operations room being left under a NCO in his absence. Ehrler would have been shot but his combat record led to his sentence of three years in prison, demotion and relieved of command. This all seems pretty harsh but with Goring’s star in decline and Donitz’s in the ascendance they needed a scapegoat but an appeal made by one of Ehrler’s subordinates to a Reichskommissar led to Ehrler being pardoned by Hitler and the reason for the loss seen to be due to a lack of communications between the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe - the fighter crews had no knowledge that Tirpitz had been moved. Ehrler would transfer to Jg 7, flying Me 262s and was killed on 4th April 1945 with his last words supposedly being:
Theo, Heinrich here. Have just shot down two bombers. No more ammunition. I’m going to ram. Auf Wiedersehen, see you in Valhalla
Would the Fw 190s have made a difference against the Lancasters?
We were very lucky, had they (the Luftwaffe) got amongst us I think there would have been very few of us left because we only had four 303 guns in the rear turret against their cannon and we were a long way off from home with a clear sky… no I don’t think we would have a very happy time. Thomas Iveson 617 Squadron
The sinking of Tirpitz by this point in the war was very much an inevitability and a question of when rather then how? The battleship was never going to be put to sea, especially after Kummetz’s defeat at Barent;s sea on 31st December 1942 which saw the idea of a surface fleet fall out of favour with Hitler who ordered their complete scrapping. The amount of damage Tirpitz had sustained in air raids through 1944 meant that even had OKM decided to put to sea she would not have been able to and the floating battery was all she was really capable of and was held in operational reserve for the forseen Allied invasion of Norway. It was a sad end for a vessel that, thankfully for the Allies, never saw combat nor showed the potential that it had been designed for.