Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop

and crews relied on hand signals. ‘After a while I saw Cooper waving to me,’ Stewart-Moore recalled. Cooper indicated that the set had picked up something twenty miles away to starboard. This was puzzling. The position did not seem to correspond with the last known course of the Bismarck. Nonetheless, as Stewart-Moore had been told there were no British ships in the area, ‘it had to be German’. As they swooped down through the clouds to torpedo-dropping height, keeping close together, ‘everything looked promising’.

      But as soon as they were clear of the clouds, his pilot, Lieutenant Hugh de Graff Hunter, ‘called to me down the voice pipe, “It’s the Sheffield”’. Instead of Bismarck, they had come across the cruiser Somerville had detached to shadow her. Hunter waggled his wings furiously to alert the other aircraft but it was too late. One by one, they dropped their ‘kippers’, as they called their torpedoes, while their commander ‘watched from above, horrified and praying for a miracle’.

      To his enormous relief ‘the miracle department was paying attention to incoming prayers and the miracle was provided at once. Without any apparent reason, all the torpedoes except one or two, blew up within half a minute of striking the water.’

      Back on board Ark Royal they were met with ‘profuse apologies’ for the intelligence cock-up. Plans were already in place for another strike. Stewart-Moore was anxious to alert his superiors about the premature detonation of the torpedoes. They were the standard 18-inch-diameter model, but equipped with an innovative Duplex magnetic firing pistol. When these were fitted, the torpedoes were set to run just below the target ship. The pistol was activated by the sudden change in the magnetic field surrounding the torpedo, made by the steel hull. The ship then caught the full force of the subsequent blast. The old-fashioned pistols were activated by the torpedo colliding with its target. The disadvantage was that much of the force of the explosion was vented uselessly into the atmosphere.

      Stewart-Moore guessed that the Duplex mechanisms had been disoriented by the heavy swell, causing them to go off early. The contact pistols stood a much better chance in the rough seas. He found it very hard to get anyone to listen to him, however. Eventually it was Somerville himself, a torpedo specialist in his early days, who ordered the detonators to be changed for the next attack.

      Six sub-flights of Swordfish, fifteen aircraft in all, were lined up for another attempt before night fell. The attack was led by Lieutenant Commander Tim Coode, of 818 Squadron. His wingman was a twenty-one-year-old Scotsman, Sub-Lieutenant John ‘Jock’ Moffat. He felt the full weight of the expectations pressing down on him and his comrades. ‘It was all on us now,’ he remembered. ‘It was a question of salvaging our reputations. There was serious concern that we didn’t make a mess of this again. By now we were under no illusions about how important this was to the Navy and to Churchill and we felt under enormous pressure to pull it off.’¹²

      As the Swordfish were brought up from the hangars below, the weather worsened steadily. On the flight deck ‘the wind hit you like a hammer, threatening to knock you down … the deck crews were really struggling with the aircraft, spray was coming over the side and the waves were breaking over the front of the flight deck’. The 22,000-ton Ark Royal was bucking and sliding as he took off. ‘I felt that I was being thrown into the air rather than lifting off,’ he wrote. ‘I was struggling to control the aircraft while the wheels were still on the deck, watching for a sideways gust that might push me into the bridge, praying that we would clear the tops of the mountainous waves.’

      They were helped on their way by the Deck Control Officer, Lieutenant Commander Pat Stringer, who, at well over six feet tall, had to be anchored with a harness to a stanchion to avoid being blown overboard. Stringer had an instinctive understanding of the ship’s position in relation to the sea. ‘He would signal to start the take off when he sensed that the ship was at the bottom of a big wave so that even if I thought that I was taking off downhill, the bows would swing up at the last moment and I would be flying above the big Atlantic swell rather than into it.’

      Eventually all the aircraft were airborne and after forming up together headed off. Moffat tucked in behind Coode and within a few minutes they had found – and correctly identified – Sheffield. The signal lamp winking from the deck told them that Bismarck was only twelve miles ahead. They were flying low, at 500 feet, and Coode ordered them to climb to 6,000 feet. They broke through a thick blanket of cloud into clear, freezing air. Moffat’s first concern was the ice forming on the leading edges of his wings and main struts. It was quickly overtaken by alarm at the black smoke from exploding shells mushrooming all around them. ‘We knew then that Bismarck was nearby and we assumed she had found us on her radar.’ Coode signalled them to form a line astern and they dived through the cloud. Almost immediately they lost sight of each other. When Moffat broke out of the cloud at 300 feet he found he was alone.

      In the pre-operational briefing the pilots had been given a detailed plan of attack. It followed the standard Fleet Air Arm method for firing torpedoes at ships at sea. The first three flights were to come in on the port beam from differing bearings. The second wave would do the same on the starboard side. The intention was to force the anti-aircraft gunners to divide their attentions between two targets and to bracket the ship with torpedoes, severely restricting its ability to steer out of their path.

      Any chance of this happening had now vanished. There were no other aircraft in sight. Moffat glanced around. There, about two miles away to the east, was the Bismarck. ‘Even at this distance the brute seemed enormous to me,’ he recalled. He turned to his right towards her. Almost immediately ‘there was a red glow in the clouds ahead of me about a hundred yards away as anti-aircraft shells exploded’. Then the gunners were aiming just ahead of him and their fire threw up ‘walls of water’ in his path. Two shells erupted next to and below the Swordfish, knocking it 90 degrees off course. Moffat dropped to fifty feet, just above the height where he might catch a wave and cartwheel in to the sea.

      This seemed to be below the angle at which the flak guns could operate but, in their place, cannon and machine guns were pumping out red tracer which flowed towards Moffat and his two-man crew ‘in a torrent’. As he raced towards the target he felt that ‘every gun on the ship was aiming at me’. He could not believe that he was flying straight into the hail of fire. ‘Every instinct was screaming at me to duck, turn away, do anything.’ But he suppressed his fear and pressed grimly on as the target grew larger and larger.

      His training taught him to assess the speed of the ship under attack and fire ahead, using a simple marked rod mounted horizontally along the top of the cockpit to calculate the correct distance to lay off. With Bismarck looming ahead of him, Moffat felt he could not miss. ‘I thought, I’m still flying. If I can get rid of this torpedo and get the hell out of here, we might survive.’ He was about to press the release button on the throttle when he heard his observer, Sub-Lieutenant John ‘Dusty’ Miller, shouting ‘Not yet, John, not yet!’ Moffat looked back to see Miller’s ‘backside in the air … there he was hanging over the side and his head [was] down underneath the aeroplane and he was shouting “not yet!”’ Moffat realized what was going on. ‘It dawned on me that if I dropped that torpedo and it struck the top of a wave it could go anywhere but where it’s supposed to.’ Miller was waiting for a trough. Then ‘he shouted “let her go!” and the next [moment he] was saying “John, we’ve got a runner.”’

      Relieved of the torpedo’s ton weight, the Swordfish leapt upwards and it was all Moffat could do to wrestle it down below the gunfire streaming overhead. It would have taken ninety seconds to follow the track of the torpedo to the target. Hanging around meant certain death. Moffat put the Swordfish into a ‘ski turn. I gave the engine full lick and I stood on my left rudder and I shuddered round flat.’ It was a manoeuvre that only the slow-moving Swordfish could pull off and it kept them down beneath the lowest elevation of the guns. He headed away at maximum speed, keeping low until he judged it was safe to climb into the cover of the clouds. He had no idea of whether his torpedo had found its target or not.

      There was one last hazard to face. When he reached Ark Royal the deck was still heaving. As he finally touched down ‘there was nothing more welcoming than the thump of the wheels on the deck and the clatter of the hook catching on the arrestor wire’. Clambering down from the cockpit he felt