HMS Belfast - WW2

Written by Godfrey Dykes

©RN Communications Branch Museum/Library

WW2 - HMS BELFAST - on Arctic duties. These included the protection of Russian bound convoys, and the harassment of German ships [war and merchantmen] there in support of the battleship Tirpitz hemmed in at the end of a long Norwegian fjord, which was famous in the prosecution and subsequent destruction of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, sister ship to the Gneisenau.

The total destruction of the Scharnhorst, with only a few survivors on Boxing Day 1943, was conducted during the Battle of North Cape off the northern tip of Norway, by Admiral Fraser, putting a block on the British squadrons Christmas festivities, such as they were, given the circumstances.

HMS BELFAST COVERED IN ICE 1943

Admiral Fraser wanted all to know that the fight, put up by the Scharnhorst was of the highest possible level and that he was proud of the German captain. For such a massive death of personnel at Christmas time was humbling and disturbing which all regretted. War was war and to hell with it!

Gneisenau' fate was less bloody than that of the Scharnhorst although jut as total, she being bombed to near total destruction in harbour by the splendid RAF [Royal Air Force] with the loss of approximately 115 lives, resulting in her main armament of 14" guns being stripped and taken ashore for use as a shore-battery. She never again went to sea as a heavy destruction weapon which resulted in a very furious Adolf Hitler. His air force had let him down destroyed by the RAF; his surface fleet was no more, utterly destroyed by the British; his armies would fail in North Africa and on the Eastern front destroyed by the British and the Russians, and only his UBoat fleet was still a potent enemy. They too would be destroyed eventually, and the Kriegsmarine would be no more, as was his foul warlike country, the cause of incalculable grief and suffering throughout the first half of the 20th century.

One of my heroes was Ludovic Kennedy and his brave father Captain Edward Kennedy RN Rtd, of whom Ludovic spoke volumes with such pride and loving over tones. Everything Ludovic produced before his death in 2009 I have read over and over, the best being his book "Sink the Bismarck". He also wrote good tales of the destruction of her sister ship the Tirpitz but more of that in a moment. Edward Kennedy was 60 at the beginning of WW2 and was back at sea this time driving an ex passenger liner converted to an armed cruiser called HMS Rawalpindi. Whilst on duty up in the Iceland-Faroe Gap escorting/defending a convoy, he saw smoke on the horizon and closed to investigate. To his surprise and consternation he met up with, face to face, two enormous German battlecruisers conducting a search of the Gap, namely the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst. He immediately reported their position to the Admiralty, and was told to heave to and be prepared to accept a boarding party. Aware of the odds and his intractable position and the inevitable fate of being captured as a man-of-war masquerading as a civilian mercantile vessel, he refused and opened fire. He kept on firing inflicting small and insignificant splinter damage to the Scharnhorst' superstructure, and it wasn't long before his ship was sunk claiming the lives of many including that of his own. He was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery.

Ludovic Kennedy called the Tirpitz the ship that lived an invalids life and suffered the death of a cripple.

Of all German ships to serve in, being in the Tirpitz could be a bad, nay a terrible choice, and I say could, because her crew did rotate to replace those killed in action in several attacks, and towards her end, the crew was much reduced as she became more and more disabled. Imagine being stationed for long long periods of inactivity high up in the Arctic Circle only to die a horrible death without ever seeing home, and home, Germany, wasn't that far away, 1200 miles Alta to Berlin - doesn't bear thinking about! She withstood so much damage and lost so many men at various attacks against her, which were all British attacks, that losses of personnel and materiel damage on both sides were such that virtually every other ship fighting in WW2 would have long ago lowered her battle ensign and capitulated. She was attacked regularly by the fleet air arm flying fighters and bombers from carriers [light and fleet] off the Norwegian coast on several separate occasions; two-men human torpedoes; midget submarines, and finally the RAF using six ton Tallboy armour piercing shells. Engineering-wise, people were astounded on seeing how such a badly damaged ship could be repaired in-situ when normally it would require a dry-dock and a massive work force in a long time period. When serviceable [or nearly so] she regularly experienced fuel starvation and often had to wait a month or so before she could acquire enough fuel before venturing out to sea again for another sortie. After being attacked and severely damaged on a couple of occasions being repaired enough for her to use her own engines to get around and to defend herself against surface attacks, Hitler decided that she was no longer a super- fortress battleship which could protect herself against air attack and so ordered a reduction in her role, necessitating a rearrangement of her main armament to enable her to be a floating bombardment platform, which led to a large reduction of crew down to approximately to 1300 officers and men in total from a war complement of 2500. It also meant a move from her self-chosen 'prison' at the end of a fjord where all her attackers had aimed for, to a position where she could bombard shipping running up and down the Norwegian Sea coast-line, hoping for support from the Luftwaffe which never materialised in any meaningful way. In her new position she was severely limited to a fuel ration, just enough to run her turbines to provide power for ships service and armaments. She was repaired just enough to enable her to get to Troms?? further south, specifically to her new war station off H??k??ya and that she made under her own power. It was to be her very last journey. Just like her sister the Bismarck, the Tirpitz had seen very little of the shooting-match from beginning to end, and despite the dreadful loss of the Hood, both could be considered as 'white elephants'. Bismarck's demise came suddenly and until that point she had seen only successes during her maiden voyage with none of the hell suffered for long periods by Tirpitz. Her 'execution' was horrific and gruesome but swift, with her death total not vastly greater that the dead of Tirpitz overall.

Now just a few maps to orientate you to the geographical area being talked about.

First, to ALTA and its fjord leading to the Norwegian Sea. Alta was an established area purged and taken over by the Nazis. The inlet shows where the fortified base of the Tirpitz was. The town of Hammerfest is almost the most northerly town of habitation in Norway. Just a little further north is another famous R.N., location, North Cape, where the battleship Scharnhorst was destroyed.

This [see picture below] became her new home after being relegated from battleship status to floating bombardment ship. It was further south than Altafjord, near to Tromso which is on the island of Tromsoya, the northern most city in the world, 220 miles inside the Arctic Circle. She was beached, almost, close to and behind the associated mountainous island of Hakoya. Apart from having no fuel for her engines, she also had no sea-room, no ability to manoeuvre, in short, a 'sitting duck'! Her anti-capsize man-made support of a sand and gravel corset also served as a stability support to counter the recoil if and when she fired her main armament, and to allow her to do that she was beam-on to the west, where, like all heavy gun bombardments, the recoil travels across the ship [thwartships] instead of through the ship [fore and aft line].

A short animation [no audio] of the relative distance between Alta and Tromso using my mouse pointer. Today [Nov 2015] you can drive from Alta direct into Tromso at a steady 80kmh/50mph in just 4 hours along the E6/E8, the road distance being 305km. The Tirpitz followed a very similar sea route to that of the land route covering a distance of 370km. To do that meant taking the island-hopping route away from the danger of the open sea route, which would have had a bearing on her speed through passable channels but with a speed restriction.

This image shows the road route explained above, with the islands Tirpitz would have navigated through, and beyond them to the West, top as you view the picture, the open dangerous sea.

An excellent charting of the Tirpitz' position vis-a-vis the city of Tromso, with copyright shown.

The RAF made more than one attempt to destroy this threat to our Arctic Convoys in support of Russia, which of course part lead to Russia defeating the German's on the Eastern Front, so convoy's always in our favour ultimately.

Eventually, our bombers, a massive group of Lancasters with the dam busters [617 Squadron] taking a leading part but with other Squadrons too, lest we forget, which had to fly high to avoid the mountainous terrain and the flack being put up by the German ship which made their bomb aiming extremely difficult and unpredictable, got to their target and there dropped no fewer than twenty nine Tallboy bombs on the Tirpitz scoring two direct hits and a very near miss. That was enough to blow a whole dockyard to smithereens let alone one ship however big and powerful. The result was sheer carnage. Bit by bit various chain reaction explosions occurred killing everybody in the vicinity including those swimming for their lives towards shore who were struck and killed outright or drowned, rendered unconscious, by parts of the ship which had been blow sky-high raining back down onto the sea. Over a thousand sailors were killed in those brief moments and the armour-piercing shells had done their business. Additionally, the near miss Tallboy had exploded below sea level and had undermined the sand and gravel corset placed around the ship to stop it from capsizing. When the corset collapsed and was washed away, the ship turned turtle and rolled over. Less than 230 were saved, some being cut free from the lower hull of the ship, but it is not known how many of the 250 survived the severe burns suffered by everything that got in the way of a Tallboy blast followed by the ships magazine blowing skyward. Overall, from all the attacks made on the Tirpitz over the years [and this final one was made towards the end of the war in November 1944] a number approaching the death rate suffered by the Bismarck was assessed as being realistic, namely those of 1500 men.

Ludovic Kennedy's words were never truer. She was kept as an invalid by the persistent bravery of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force who injured her and her crew time after time, until she was crippled by their actions forcing her move to the Tromso area. There she died by the sword as she had attempted to live by the sword, but hers was a hapless case almost from the day she was launched. We can all imagine the sheer pride the Germans felt and shared back in the late 30's when these two super battleships were considered to be impregnable and as such all that was necessary [just the two of them] to win the oncoming war. How naive and pompous, because in their rejoicing and self-praise, they over-looked the will, skill, fortitude and rampant bravery of the British, where, along with Eric Coates' creation of the 'Dambusters March' and James Thomas-words/Thomas Arne music 'Rule Britannia', we fulfilled our aspiration of winning, no matter what the sacrifice. At the German wash-up [oh, how I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall!] into the Tirpitz' destruction, the officer responsible for not giving Luftwaffe support to the much attacked vessel, was arrested, jailed, threatened with the death penalty, but subsequently released back to flying duties, simply, as it is thought, because Goering himself was under direct threat of his life by Hitler, unless he could prove that his air force were as brave and as competent as he had always and often boasted. I wonder what he was thinking when he swallowed that pill?

Just before 1960 dawned, some of the salvage workers were still on site nearly sixteen years after the event, tidying up the remaining mess left by years of cutting, burning and demolishment work on the once mighty Tirpitz.