South Yorkshire Times 18 November 1944

Twice Taught Lesson

Royal Air Force Lancasters intervened dramatically in the inconclusive Battleships versus Bombs debate this week. The sinking of the Tirpitz was a startling demonstration of air power, perhaps even more pregnant with meaning for Great Britain than for Germany, at whose expense the lesson was driven’ home.

When the Bismarck, sister ship of the: 45,000-tons Nazi monster, was brought to bay in the Atlantic she absorbed terrific punishment and, a sitting target, remained afloat a disconcertingly long time in defiance of some of the British Navy’s most formidable units. Twenty-nine Lancasters wrote off the Tirpitz in six minutes. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and his bomber crews were no doubt superbly confident that bombs could complete this momentous task. Laymen, and even hard-headed if slightly prejudiced Naval experts, had remained sceptical.

The significance of the feat will not be lost on either the Americans or the Japanese. American aircraft carriers have already proved floating hornet’s nests in the Pacific, but they have mainly harried the Japanese ships by the us: of torpedoes. The deed so flawlessly accomplished in Tromso Fiord will surely inspire the American Super Fortress squadrons with a spirit of emulati n which bodes ill for Japan’s capital ships.

The “putting out of action” of the Tirpitz, as the Nazis euphemistically describe it, knocks the bottom right out of Hitler’s bid to put up some sort of a show against the British Navy. With what he fondly hoped would be unassailable superiority on land the Fuehrer sought also for some counter to our supremacy at sea. U-boats were a strong suit in his hand, and one which he played to the limit. A battle squadron of formidable power and high technical quality was another expedient.

With the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Lutzow, Graf Spee, and Admiral Scheer, and the necessary escort of destroyers, Germany had a fleet of fast, well-armoured and well-gunned ships which constituted. a serious menace. In a copy-book fleet to fleet clash no doubt the Royal Navy would have mastered the challenge, but through the exigencies of global war and the allied loss of global naval support, we were never in a position to keep an over-powering force assembled to exploit a numerical advantage.

Even with American reinforcements our commitments in the Atlantic were such that the use of these German ships as raiders, or potential raiders was a dangerous embarrassment.  Doggedly overcoming early handicaps, the Navy with ever growing air support, remorselessly liquidated this menace.  First the Graf Spee was disposed of, then the Bismark. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau made an audacious break from Brest, but the first escaped only to be hunted to death in the Arctic Circle, and the Gneisenau, battered by bombs, is still uselessly laid up in the Baltic, where the glorified cruisers, Lutzow and Scheer still lurk.  Capsized in an arctic fjord, the Tirpitz is also now counted out, and with the U-boats largely baffled, Germany has once again to acknowledge Britain as a mistress of the seas; an admission which now, as in 1918, spells defeat in all other theatres.