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

had done nothing to diminish Churchill’s concern about Hitler’s remaining battleship. During the second half of 1941, the PRU had kept a continuous watch on Tirpitz, flying regular reconnaissance missions over Kiel, her home port for the period. Failure to spot her, during one of her frequent excursions on sea trials, generated a flurry of alarm. Even when safely in view, she still exercised a peculiar menace. At the beginning of August, Churchill set off on board HMS Prince of Wales for his first wartime conference with President Roosevelt at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. A surveillance flight had located Tirpitz at Kiel on 6 August, much too far away to pose any threat, yet speculation persisted that she might attempt an ambush. Colonel Ian Jacob, an astute staff officer on board Prince of Wales, noted in his diary that ‘the Prime Minister did not seem to worry in the least, and he is secretly hoping the Tirpitz will come out and have a dart at him’.³

      As the summer turned to autumn, worry about the battleship’s whereabouts and intentions continued to distract the navy, tying up, as the Prime Minister noted in his memo to the Chiefs, a disproportionate number of capital ships, as well as part of the American naval task force which, from September 1941, was based in Iceland to assist the Home Fleet. The Admiralty believed that three battleships were needed on standby to overwhelm Tirpitz were she to break out. Churchill thought the caution overdone, complaining to Pound that this was an ‘excessive provision’ and ‘incomparably more lavish than anything we have been able to indulge in so far in this war’.⁴

      He was nonetheless impressed with the influence Tirpitz was able to assert. This attitude led to what can be counted as Tirpitz’s first indirect success of the war – a result that was achieved without her having to leave port. During the 1930s Churchill had paid little attention to the maritime threat posed by Japan, despite the fact that it was in the process of building a powerful fleet. He continued to underestimate the danger until early 1941when he first admitted, in a letter to Roosevelt that ‘the weight of the Japanese Navy, if thrown against us, would confront us with situations beyond the scope of our naval reserves’. As the year advanced and this dire prospect grew more likely, he considered moving a battleship of the most modern King George V [KVG] class to the East to deter Japan. The hope was that it would exercise the same mesmeric effect on the Japanese navy as Tirpitz did on the Home Fleet. ‘Tirpitz is doing to us exactly what a “KGV” in the Indian Ocean would do to the Japanese Navy,’ he wrote to Pound on 29 August 1941. ‘It exercises a vague, general fear and menaces all points at once. It appears and disappears, causing immediate reactions and perturbations on the other side.’⁵

      By October he had settled on sending the Prince of Wales and in the War Cabinet discussion of 17 October he again cited the ‘example of the battleship Tirpitz which … compelled us to keep on guard a force three times her weight in addition [to the] United States forces patrolling the Atlantic’.⁶

      Prince of Wales was duly dispatched to Singapore on 23 October, over the strong objections of the Admiralty, which feared that Tirpitz might attempt a breakout at any minute. She sailed first to Ceylon where she met up with the ageing battle cruiser Repulse. On 2 December they arrived in Singapore. Their deterrence mission was long obsolete. Five days afterwards the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and launched an invasion fleet towards Malaya. Prince of Wales and Repulse set out to intercept it. On 10 December, both ships were sunk within an hour of each other by Japanese torpedo bombers, a disaster that plunged the nation into gloom, temporarily extinguishing the hope aroused by the arrival of the United States into the war.

      Though Churchill and the admirals were not to know it, Tirpitz represented no threat at all during the second half of 1941. Having lost Bismarck, Räder was taking all care of his single greatest resource and the tests and trials to establish her sea- and battleworthiness that filled the rest of the year were rigorous even by peacetime standards. While the Home Fleet steeled itself for the battleship’s appearance she was engaged in a leisurely working-up programme cruising back and forth between Baltic ports.

      The fate of her sister ship Bismarck seems to have had surprisingly little effect on the morale of the ship’s company. Onboard routine and the spirit of the ship were described in great detail by the administration officer, Korvettenkapitän Kurt Voigt in his letters home to his wife Erika, or ‘Klösel’ as he affectionately called her. He was a member of the Prussian professional middle class who had joined the navy in 1917 and carried on as a career officer in the interwar years. Voigt comes across in his correspondence as a decent man, a loving husband and father and a considerate boss. He was now in early middle age, considerably older than the rest of the crew. He nonetheless showed a boyish pride in his association with a famous vessel. Like everyone, the first thing that struck him about Tirpitz was its immensity, after which the First World War era battleship Schlesien seemed ‘a ludicrous trawler’.⁷

      Karl Topp (left) and Kurt Voigt

      He arrived on board at the end of September, as the ship stood off the Aaland Islands, the Baltic archipelago at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia. Tirpitz was the core of a force that included the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and four light cruisers. Since June, Germany had been at war with the Soviet Union and the fleet was assembled to deter Russian warships from venturing out from Kronstadt. The Soviet ships stayed put and there is no sense at all of impending action in Voigt’s accounts of onboard life. Instead his letters are taken up with marvelling at the comfort and modernity of his surroundings. ‘My room is considerably bigger than what I’m used to,’ he wrote on 7 October after Tirpitz had returned to Gdynia. ‘[There’s] a chair with leather-type upholstery for visitors, a comfortable writing chair, a square table, lace curtains on the portholes and the sides, all in cream.’ He also had a telephone ‘that communicates with all officers and other stations. There’s an entire phone book for this little city.’

      The latter was an exaggeration but Tirpitz certainly had the facilities of a fair-sized village or small town. There was a hairdressing salon with five barbers, a bakery, a cinema well stocked with newish films, and a printing press which churned out regular editions of the onboard newspaper Der Scheinwerfer (The Searchlight). Officers took their meals in a mess that was like ‘a large and imposing restaurant with ceiling lighting’. The food was plentiful and pretty good. His first meal on board was ‘excellent’ – lentil soup followed by roast meat. During the Baltic autumn there were luxuries to supplement the staples of meat, tinned fish and potatoes and ‘now and again we get beautiful apples, tomatoes and grapes’.

      There was also plenty to drink. At his first meeting with Kapitän Karl Topp, he was offered sparkling wine then whisky. He had encountered him before and found him ‘not much changed except a bit greyer’. Topp was extremely welcoming. ‘He was friendly and spent a lot of time talking to me,’ he reported to Erika on 1 October. The following day he comments again on his friendliness and observes proudly that ‘he treats me with respect … something the others remarked on’.

      Voigt’s evident admiration for his captain appears to have been shared by most of the men on board. Karl Topp was forty-five years old when he took formal command of Tirpitz on 25 January 1941. He was born in Vörde in Prussian Westphalia, the son of a clergyman, and joined the Imperial navy when he was nineteen, serving in submarines during the First World War. At its close he was first officer of a U-boat in the Mediterranean which succeeded, through sinkings and minelaying, in forcing the temporary closure of the port of Marseilles. His captain was Martin Niemöller, then a fierce nationalist who went on to become a Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi theologian.

      Topp was one of the lucky ones who managed to stay on in the service during the harsh and chaotic Weimar years. He combined virtuoso seamanship with technical knowledge and specialized in military shipbuilding. He was stocky with a broad, meaty face and bright blue eyes. His manner was calm and methodical. He radiated authority, leavened with humour and consideration for his men. The weather was bitter on 25 February 1941, the day Tirpitz was officially commissioned. One of the engine room officers, Georg Schlegel, remembered that ‘we all went to the top deck and it was snowing and very cold. The Commander kept it short so that we didn’t have to stand in the snow so long. The flag was hoisted and that was that.’⁸ Touches like that generated affection