I Sank The Bismarck (33 page)

Eventually the all-clear went and I stood up and dusted
myself down. I was nearly an hour late. Running to the
station, I hoped Marjorie would still be there. Of course,
sometimes the trains were very late. Sometimes they were
stopped outside London during an air-raid alert, but I had no
way of knowing. I rushed into the station and found it completely
empty. All the trains had left, no doubt because of the
raid. I went up to a porter and asked about the Glasgow train.
Oh, that had been and gone, he said, forty-five minutes ago.

I didn't know what to do. I walked to the platform where
the train should have been standing. At the far end I spotted
a figure sitting on two large cases. I rushed down the platform
and, sure enough, it was Marjorie. 'You knew I would come,
didn't you?' I asked.

'I couldn't go anywhere,' she replied. 'These cases are full of
champagne for the wedding. Go and fetch a porter's trolley.'

A few days later we were married, at a small church in
Midhurst with a guard of honour from the ratings and petty
officers at Cowdray Park. It was the best day's work I ever did
in my life. Sadly, Marjorie died six years ago, suddenly, while
we were on holiday in England. She was the most important
influence in my life. Marrying her was the one thing that I can
honestly say I have never ever regretted.

I had one other
accident in an aircraft shortly after the war
had come to an end. I was flight testing an Albacore that had
just been returned from engineering work at Lee on Solent
and I was taking off from Cowdray Park in the direction of
Midhurst. Everything seemed to be fine: lining up at the end
of the runway, the engine was running smoothly and all the
instruments looked good. I took off easily and started to
climb out to 1,000 feet to go round for a few circuits. I had
reached perhaps 600 feet when the engine, alarmingly, started
to backfire and then cut out completely. It was standard procedure
in this situation to attempt to crash straight ahead, but
for some reason I decided to attempt a landing back at
Cowdray Park.

I executed a quick turn and, sinking lower and lower,
struggled to keep the Albacore on an even keel. There is
always a point where you think that at last you have made a
fatal mistake, although a crash from 600 feet would also
probably have killed me. I managed, however, to coax the
plane over the threshold and brought it thumping in to land.

I was commended for that action, with an entry in green ink
in my logbook written and signed by my senior officer to
commemorate it. That was my last flying accident until my
crash in 2001.

Within a few months of the war ending I had said goodbye
to the navy and started life on Civvy Street, right back in a
sense to where I had been at the start of the war. I had some
anxious months worrying what my future would be, but I
eventually started work in the
hotel industry and made a
successful career out of it for the rest of my working life.

Over the years, working as a hotel manager, bringing up two
lovely daughters, there has rarely been a day in the sixty-eight
years since the events of 26 May 1941 when I have not
remembered what it felt like to fly towards that great monster
of a ship, the
Bismarck,
or what I saw the next morning as she
toppled over into the sea. I kept those thoughts mostly to
myself, and when I attended reunions of the Fleet Air Arm, or
met some of my old colleagues from 818 Squadron in
Ark
Royal
and
Formidable,
we would talk about the times we
enjoyed in Gibraltar or the wardroom, or the marvellous
hospitality we encountered in Cape Town or Mombasa. I was
very fortunate to build friendships after the war with some
of the officers from
Ark Royal.
I was to meet both Lt
Commander Stringer and Commander Traill in peacetime,
and we were able to enjoy each other's company over a
meal and a drink. We did not dwell on the past, but occasionally
we would talk about what had happened to so many of
our former friends. Sadly, many of the pilots who took part in
the
Bismarck
attack did not survive the war. It's worth observing
that most of their deaths were caused by unexplained
crashes or mechanical failures of some kind. This was a brutal
fact of life in the Fleet Air Arm; it is one of the reasons why
even operations that were apparently uneventful patrols over
the ocean could ultimately become stressful.

The story of the
sinking of the
Bismarck
eventually took on
a life of its own. A few years after the end of the war there
was a well-known feature film,
Sink the Bismarck!,
starring
Jack Hawkins, and several books and articles were published.
Most of them seemed to downplay the importance of the
Fleet
Air Arm, our fifteen Swordfish and the absolutely vital nature
of our intervention in preventing
Bismarck
from reaching
St-Nazaire.

In 1989 the man who found the
wreck of
Titanic,
Bob
Ballard, discovered the wreck of
Bismarck,
and this started a
fresh wave of interest in the German warship. Since his
discovery, several other expeditions have filmed the wreck or
tried to investigate it by using research submarines. Some of
these, and the TV documentaries that were made about them,
have attempted to argue that
Bismarck
was not sunk, but was
scuttled by her own crew.

In 2004 I heard that the wreck of
Ark Royal
had also been
discovered, and a few months later I found myself on board a
very large yacht, operating a remote underwater camera. I
was allowed to manoeuvre this camera as though I were landing
on the flight deck of
Ark Royal,
now lying 3,000 feet
below the surface of the Mediterranean. It was a remarkable
feeling – I never in all my life imagined that something like
that would be possible, never mind that I would be the one so
privileged to do it. From that same yacht I was able to look at
many other pieces of the wreck, including the wreckage of a
Swordfish aircraft that I think had fallen from the flight deck
when the
Ark
was torpedoed six months after attacking
Bismarck.

On the whole, I think knowledge of the events around the
sinking of the
Bismarck
should be kept alive, if only to
prevent anything like that happening again.

But a few years before I looked at
Ark Royal
once again,
something else was brought to my attention: a report into the
attack that was written with the assistance of the Fleet Air
Arm Museum in the Royal Naval Air Station at Yeovilton in
Somerset. This report tried to answer the question, 'Whose
torpedoes hit the
Bismarck,
and where?' I need to repeat that
there was a great deal of confusion during the attack and it
was almost impossible to tell what was happening. In the
debriefing after we had landed on we tried to be as factual as
we could, but drawing up an accurate picture was impossible.
The atrocious gale, the bad visibility,
Bismarck
herself
manoeuvring violently behind a wall of gunfire, all conspired
to prevent any one person forming an accurate picture of their
own role in the attack, let alone building up any sort of wider
vision. In the immediate aftermath we didn't believe that we
had caused any damage. It was not until reports from
Sheffield
and the reconnaissance Swordfish confirmed that
Bismarck
had radically altered her course and appeared to be
out of control that some very tentative assessments by some
of the pilots were suddenly transformed into firmer facts. I
think this was natural. Many senior pilots had had the
experience of reporting hits on warships to find that they were
later mistaken. It was, though, still unclear whose torpedoes
had actually hit the ship, let alone whose had been the one
that damaged the rudder, and at the time it was not of great
importance to us. Our main concern was getting some rest
before we had to mount another attack in the morning.

I never claimed any result from my attack. As a junior sublieutenant
in the Volunteer Reserve, I was not self-confident
enough to make any claim before the likes of Tim Coode or
the senior pilots of 810 and 820 Squadrons. But this new
document, compiled by a young American researcher, Mark
Horan, using action reports written at the time, came to the
conclusion that out of the two pilots who could possibly claim
to have dropped the torpedo that hit
Bismarck
's stern, myself
and Lieutenant Keane, I was the most probable candidate.

It is now so long after the event I think it is impossible to
say anything with any certainty. If it was my torpedo, as the
report suggests, that crippled the
Bismarck,
then I feel no
personal pleasure in this, any more than I did at the time. I
saw the result, which few others have had the misfortune to
do, and no matter how pleased I might be to remove a threat
to Britain and our convoys, I cannot take any satisfaction
from the deaths of nearly two thousand sailors. Many people
have said that we attacked
Bismarck
to seek revenge for the
loss of
Hood.
Nothing could have been further from our
minds. We did it because we were at war and it was our job.
If we thought of anything – and we did – it was the threat that
Bismarck
presented to our ships, to our merchant fleet and to
Britain's survival.

What I would say is that the forty-three crew members of
the fifteen Swordfish that attacked
Bismarck,
and I was one
of them, did what was demanded of us, and anyone in the
wardroom who saw us afterwards would know what that
effort cost us. If we hadn't decided that we could fly in such
appalling conditions, if we hadn't pressed on against the gunfire,
if we had failed, then the
Bismarck
would have escaped
to safety. That was something that the senior officers in the
navy did not want to admit. We were in the Fleet Air Arm
and, what's more, we were in Force H – a slightly irregular
operation headed by a slightly irregular officer, Admiral
Somerville, who barely six months previously had had to face
allegations that he was not sufficiently aggressive in taking on
the Italian fleet. Similarly, the investigations that purport to
show that
Bismarck
was scuttled, that she was destroyed by
her own crew, tend to write us and the whole of the Royal
Navy out of the picture.

Whether or not it was my torpedo that hit the
Bismarck
's
stern and made her uncontrollable does not really matter to
me. What is important is that I along with the rest of my
colleagues did it. Flying back to
Ark Royal,
desperate to find
the safety of the flight deck in a darkening night and a stormy
sea, no one realized it then, but after our attack the end was
inevitable. It was only a matter of time – the
Bismarck
was sunk.

I met John Moffat in February 2002 when I was producing a
series about the history of the navy. Even then, I was surprised
by his energy and his sense of humour. It hasn't diminished.
We continued to meet, and when I heard that he was being
pressed by his children to put on paper what he remembered
of his early life, I suggested to him that there might be a book
in it. He was hesitant at first, but after a few months I was
allowed to look through the initial notes he had produced,
and I managed to persuade him to continue. We met several
times, and as we talked and discussed various drafts of the
chapters, personalities and incidents arose fresh in his
memory.

The story that John has to tell is unique because he was one
of the very few pilots in the Fleet Air Arm who took part in
the attack on the
Bismarck,
an action that required a great
deal of courage, skill and luck, and which really did affect the
course of the Second World War. John's account, however, is
a deeply human one, and since I have known him he has never
tried to hide how affected he was by what he saw when the
Bismarck
sank, or how he felt when so many of his friends
were killed, or disappeared. These emotions are common to
the great majority of people who lived through the war years
of 1939–45, or indeed of those who took part in the wars that
have happened since, and I think that it is for this reason that
John's story deserves the widest possible audience. It is almost
beyond imagination now to read or hear about what ordinary
people were once called upon to do, and it should not be forgotten.

John and I checked a great deal of his story against
documents in the National Archives and other records, but
in the one or two instances where there seemed to be some
discrepancy, I decided to rely on John's memory. I take full
responsibility for this, because during my search for the wreck
of the
Ark Royal,
I learnt that sometimes personal memories,
if they are very strong, can be as accurate as the official
account.

Mike Rossiter

Where not credited, photographs were kindly supplied by
John Moffat.

Page 2/3

Argus,
c. 1928: © TopFoto; Swordfish brought up to the
deck,
Argus,
c. 1935: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS;
Skua and Swordfish on deck,
Ark Royal
: courtesy Percy
North; extra pilots standing by,
Ark Royal
: IWM A3740.

Page 4/5

Scharnhorst,
1936–9: © ullsteinbild/TopFoto; Admiral
Somerville: © Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix; bombs miss the
Ark
Royal
off Norway; view of bombing from
Ark Royal
and
bombs dropping in the Mediterranean: all courtesy Percy
North; battle of Oran, 1940: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS;
ships in Taranto harbour, 12 November 1940: ©
2003 Topham Picturepoint;
Hood,
24 May 1941: © Trinity
Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy.

Page 6/7

Hitler inspects the
Bismarck,
12 April 1941 – 2nd from left,
Admiral Günther Lutjens, 3rd from left, General Field
Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, next to Hitler, Captain Ernst
Lindemann: akg-images/ullsteinbild; the
Bismarck
seen from
the deck of the
Prinz Eugen
: © 2000 Topham Picturepoint;
the
Bismarck
firing at the
Prince of Wales,
24 May 1941;
survivors from the
Bismarck,
27 May 1941: © Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy;
Formidable
enters Sydney Harbour, spring
1945.