World War II Day by Day

Tromsø Fjord, Occupied Norway • November 12, 1944

On this date in Norway’s Tromsø Fjord the British Royal Air Force dropped three 13,000-pound “Tallboy” bombs to cap­size the German battle­ship Tirpitz, the Kriegs­marine’s ill-starred wan­nabe sur­face raider. Ever since Septem­ber 22, 1943, when a pair of Royal Navy mid­get sub­marines engineered a hair-raising day­light attack on this Bismarck-class battle­ship, the largest, once most power­ful war­ship in the world lay impotent at anchor awaiting her end on this November day.

Tirpitz had been in British cross­hairs long before she was com­mis­sioned into the German fleet in Febru­ary 1941. Since 1942 the 42,000-ton battle­ship rarely ven­tured from lairs deep inside Norwe­gian fjords where she took station. When she did slip out of her ice-clad for­tresses, her only success­ful ven­ture came in Septem­ber 1943 when, in con­cert with the German battle­ship Scharn­horst, Tirpitz used her eight 15‑in and twelve 5.9‑in gun bat­teries to bom­bard a British weather station on Norway’s Arctic island of Spits­bergen. Sadly for Tirpitz, the war­ship was score­less on the two occa­sions she assumed the mantle of sur­face com­merce raider inter­cepting Allied mer­chant con­voys to and from the Soviet Union. Count­less shore bat­teries and anti­aircraft guns and anti­tor­pedo nets at various anchor­ages in Norwe­gian fjords tended to pro­tect Tirpitz from the wrath of British air and naval forces. That said British midget sub­marine and air forays in 1943 and 1944 breached German defenses on five occa­sions with the intent to damage the “Lonely Queen of the North” until the RAF’s tri­umphal Novem­ber 1944 Oper­a­tion Catechism dispatched her to a watery grave.

With the demise of Tirpitz, the Kriegsmarine’s next-to-last remaining capital ship, Grand Adm. Erich Raeder’s grand folly, Plan Z, came to an expen­sive and inglo­ri­ous end. That plan envi­sioned sets of fast German sur­face com­merce raiders running amuck among the Allies’ Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific merchant­men. At the start of the Euro­pean con­flict in Septem­ber 1939, Germany’s enemy, Great Britain, needed about 55 mil­lion tons of over­seas imports per year—food, oil, cotton, wool, and other vital con­sumer and indus­trial pro­ducts—to sus­tain the fight. Raeder’s goal was to sink more ton­nage than Britain could endure or replace, thus forcing her surrender before the war poten­tially drew in new belligerents on Britain’s side.

Raeder focused primarily on his power­ful raider fleet of 10 expen­sive, “late-model” capital ships to cut Allied sea lanes—this to the detri­ment of his large under­water fleet of U-boats. In mate­rial and man­power costs alone, a Bismarck-class war­ship cost 10 times the cost of one U-boat. Leading Raeder’s armada were the new battle­ships, the heavily armed and armored Bismarck and Tirpitz, followed by battle­cruisers (actually battle­ships) Scharn­horst and Gneise­nau, “pocket battle­ships” Deutsch­land (renamed Luetzow in 1940), Admiral Graf Spee, and Admiral Scheer, and the Admiral Hipper-class cruisers, Hipper, Blucher, and Prinz Eugen.

As the war expanded in 1942 with America’s entrance, the Allies employed crypt­anal­y­sis and intro­duced avi­a­tion and marit­ime tech­no­logical advances to com­bat sur­face and under­water enemy fleets; e.g., long-range patrol air­craft and radar and sonar. Raeder’s suc­ces­sor, Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz, was grad­ually con­fronted with mounting fleet losses even as the Royal Navy’s capital ship assets were stretched to the breaking point pro­tecting Allied shipping from the poten­tial menace of German surface raiders. Total ton­nage sunk by the Adm. Raeder’s sur­face raiders was just short of 800,000, a pit­tance com­pared to the 14.1 mil­lion tons (2,779 ships) Doenitz’s U-boats sent to the ocean bottom in all theaters of the war.

Taking Out the Tirpitz

Left: Tirpitz anchored in Bogen Bay near Narvik, Northern Norway, 1943–1944. The battle­ship is protected by anti­torpedo nets, a defense against British torpedo bombers and miniature submarines. Artil­lery bat­teries and anti­air­craft guns dotted harbors and mountain­sides at multi­ple Norwe­gian anchor­ages to provide addi­tional defenses against British two-and four-engine bombers and carrier aircraft.

Right: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was obsessed with taking out Tirpitz (“the Beast” as he called the battle­ship) owing to the costs of keeping Britain’s guard up in the seas west and north of German-occupied Norway. “The greatest single act to restore the balance of naval power would be the destruc­tion or even crippling of the Tirpitz,” Churchill wrote. “No other target is com­par­able to it.” On April 3, 1944, the Royal Navy put a second down pay­ment on Tirpitz’s fatal demise later in the year when carrier air­craft dropped heavy and medium-sized bombs on the battle­ship at her anchor­age in Alten Fjord (Oper­a­tion Tung­sten) in Northern Norway (shown here), the first of five bombing raids that ended with RAF Bomber Command sinking the Tirpitz on Novem­ber 12, 1944. The April 3 Navy raid killed over 100 crew­members and wounded 300 or more but only damaged the battle­ship’s super­structure. No bombs pierced her armored deck. An attack on Tirpitz the pre­vious Septem­ber by two, possi­bly three British mid­get sub­marines (X‑craft) had rendered the battleship unfit for combat—forever it turned out.

Left: A prototype X-craft churns along during sea trials prior to Oper­a­tion Source, the Royal Navy’s Septem­ber 22, 1943, attempt to cripple or sink the Tirpitz in its berth in Kaa­fjord, Northern Norway. Six of these 51‑ft, 30‑ton, four-man midget sub­marines were spe­cif­i­cally designed to attack naval targets in strongly defended anchor­ages. In lieu of torpe­does each midget sub was fitted with two crescent-shaped detach­able explo­sive charges attached to either side of its pres­sure hull. These mines, each con­taining two tons of Ama­tex explo­sive, were to be planted in the sea­bed directly under the Tirpitz, then deto­nated with a vari­able time fuse. Three out of six X‑craft reached their target. Explo­sions under­neath the Tirpitz tossed the war­ship’s four main turrets from their roller-bearing mountings, gashed and distorted her hull, rendered all three engines inoper­able, and put the port rudder and all three pro­pel­ler shafts out of order. Out of action for at least six months Tirpitz was sunk in Tromsø Fjord on Novem­ber 12, 1944, by a British force of 32 Lan­caster bombers. Approx­i­mately 200 sea­men sur­vived, while between 950 and 1,204 perished.

Right: Tirpitz lying capsized in Tromsø Fjord attended by a sal­vage vessel. The towering battle­ship, already damaged in five raids, was finally sunk in Oper­a­tion Cate­chism, a day­light raid by two RAF squa­drons of four-engine Lan­caster bombers on Novem­ber 12, 1944. Flying through the battle­ship’s 15-inch can­non and anti-aircraft fire, the Lancs managed to drop their Tall­boy bombs, some scoring hits, others near misses. A deck fire caused the maga­zine for the “Caesar” (stern) turret to explode, and the great ship, already destab­i­lized by direct hits and close calls, slowly heeled over on her port side and capsized. Of Adm. Raeder’s 10 capital war­ships in early World War II, only the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen sur­vived the con­flict. Trans­ferred to the U.S. Navy as a war prize, the war­ship ended up in the Pacific, serving as fodder for two atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. On Decem­ber 22, 1946, Prinz Eugen capsized and sank in the Kwajalein Atoll.

Well-Done Documentary on the Career of Tirpitz, 1936–1944