By Mark Baker*
Eighty years ago, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and far from home, the greatest battleship ever built — and the pride of Adolf Hitler’s fleet — met an inglorious end, blown apart and capsized in the shallows of a remote Norwegian fjord near the fishing port of Tromsø. It had taken nearly five years, twenty-four perilous operations by Allied airmen and naval personnel (many of them Australians) and more than 200 deaths to end the threat to vital naval convoys posed by the presence of KMS Admiral von Tirpitz. (Inside Story).
Dozens of those airmen and sailors would be showered with honours for their heroic, ill-fated efforts — two of them receiving the Victoria Cross, the highest honour of all. But time and again the ship Winston Churchill branded “The Beast” had evaded its hunters, sometimes seriously wounded but never vanquished.
On that November day a crew of young Australian airmen suddenly found themselves at the centre of an event that would trigger jubilation across the English- speaking world. They were the first to witness and record the sinking, and the ones who brought home the news.
Bruce Buckham, a twenty-six-year-old BHP clerk from Penshurst in Sydney, was captain of a Lancaster bomber crew, all of them Australians save for their Scottish flight engineer. They had been handpicked to carry the cinecamera men who recorded the final three raids against the Tirpitz, which was sheltering in the supposed safety of the Norwegian Artic at the limits of the operating range of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. On the final raid, they flew forward with more than thirty other bombers — half from the legendary 617 “Dambusters” Squadron RAF and the rest from 9 Squadron RAF.
Codenamed Catechism, the operation had been launched just after midnight on 12 November 1944 when a reconnaissance Mosquito aircraft returned to report that while weather conditions over Tromsø were poor, they were showing signs of improvement. Two hours later the waves of Lancasters, most of them two tons overweight with extra fuel and their special 12,000-pound “Tallboy” bomb loads, lumbered into the air from several RAF stations across the far north of Scotland. Six Australian pilots had joined the raid along with another ten Australian flight crew.
Buckham and his crew were delayed almost an hour by the icing of their aircraft in the sub-zero temperatures on the ground at Lossiemouth airfield, but quickly made up time. After turning out over Moray Firth, the main force Lancasters from Lossiemouth set course northeast for the Norwegian Sea flying at 1500 feet. After several hours they turned eastwards towards the Norwegian coast, maintaining their low altitude. After crossing the coast and climbing rapidly to clear the mountains, the bombers crossed into Sweden and then headed north, hugging the border to the rendezvous point at Akkajaure, a large reservoir 150 miles south-southwest of Tromsø.
James Brian “Willie” Tait, the highly decorated commanding officer of 617 Squadron and leader of the raid, would marvel at the spectacle as they approached Tromsø. “The sun was resting on the horizon, so the snow-covered mountains were turned pink in its light,” he later recounted. “The sky was cloudless, the air calm and the aircraft rode easily without a bump to disturb the bomb aimer’s sights. We sighted the Tirpitz from a range of at least 20 miles, lying squat and black among her torpedo nets, like a spider in a web; silhouetted against the glittering blue and green waters of the fjord and surrounded by the beautiful hills. Down below everything was quite still. The whole scene — water, mountains and sky — blazed in the cold brilliance of the Arctic dawn.”
Buckham flew close to Tait’s Lancaster as they moved in on the target. “There was Håkøya Island, a large snow-covered mound in the middle of Tromsø Fjord, and there, anchored in the tranquil waters, was the huge shape of the Tirpitz,” he recalled. “We still had about fifteen minutes to fly and vast explosions were occurring in the middle of and all around our loose gaggle of aircraft. Tirpitz was firing her fifteen-inch main guns at us with short-delay fuses. As we got closer, we came under fire from the ship’s secondary armaments, as well as fire from the shore batteries and two flak ships. Things were getting hot!”
Buckham flew in at 6000 feet as Tait and the others lined up to do their individual bombing runs, but he soon found this was “too unhealthy” and so descended to about 2000 feet and shot up the German shore batteries lining the fjord and one of the flak ships. “The bombers were right overhead now,” he later recalled, “doing a perfect run with bomb doors gaping wide open and the glistening wing of the huge 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs suspended. Now they were released.”
Tait was the first to release his Tallboy. Moments later, five other Lancasters released their bombs, including the crew of one of the other Australian pilots, William “Bunny” Lee, who would report at the later operational debriefings that Tirpitz was obscured by smoke just after his bomb was released. “Our bomb went straight down into the centre of the smoke,” he said. “All bombing we saw appeared very well concentrated and firing from the ship ceased after the first bombs went down.”
Another of the bombers in that wave was also piloted by an Australian, Arthur Kell: “We bombed along the length of the ship turning to starboard and running in on the bows. Our bomb, which registered a hit or a very near miss, fell in the centre of the smoke coming up from just in front of the superstructure.” Yet another Australian, John Sayers, was the last of the 617 Squadron pilots to bomb: “We followed our bomb down nearly to the ship when it was lost in smoke. It was either a hit on the bows or a very near miss.”
As the following aircraft from 9 Squadron flew closely in the wake of the 617 Squadron Lancasters, the fate of Tirpitz was sealed. The crews could not believe their good luck — the weather had held, the smokescreen pots protecting the battleship had not been activated and, most crucially, a feared German fighter squadron based nearby had failed to scramble in time to intercept the attackers before they had bombed.
On the water, Armageddon had arrived. In a later detailed account of what unfolded, the Tirpitz’s most senior crew member to survive the attack, Alfred Fassbender, recorded that “a stick of bombs” had fallen inside the battleship’s net enclosure.
There were two direct hits on the port side, one on the aircraft catapult and one abreast of B turret. Seconds later, Tirpitz began listing to port. As the first bombs hit, damage control parties were ordered to correct the trim by flooding. Soon the list increased to 30 to 40 degrees and Robert Weber, the former executive officer who had taken over command of the ship just eight days earlier, ordered the evacuation of the lower decks. Less than five minutes later, the list increased to 60 to 70 degrees, then the 700-ton Caesar gun turret exploded and arced upwards before plunging into the water. Soon after that, Tirpitz capsized, trapping hundreds of men beneath the upturned hull.
As the last of the bombers completed their runs and headed back out of the fjord to begin the long flight home, it was still not certain to the attackers that Tirpitz was finished. Buckham’s Lancaster, now alone, held back as they continued to watch and film while the first German fighters finally were scrambled.
“We descended to 200 feet and flew over it, around it, all about it, but still she sat there,” he recalled. “After about thirty minutes we decided to call it a day and headed back out to the end of the fjord. Just then my rear gunner, Eric Giersch, called out, ‘Skipper, I think she’s turning over.’ I turned to port to take a look and, sure enough, she was listing over at an angle of 70 to 80 degrees. So back we went.”
As Buckham swept in at about fifty feet above the water he could see German ratings jumping into the water. “Then we watched with bated breath as the ship heeled over onto her side, ever so slowly and gracefully, leaving her red hull gleaming in the morning sunshine. It was the third time we’d knocked the Tirpitz about, but this time we had finished her.”
An estimated 1700 crew were aboard Tirpitz that morning, about 700 others having been transferred to shore-based work. Within two hours, 596 men had made it ashore or been rescued from the water. A desperate struggle unfolded as teams tried to free those trapped in air pockets inside the wreck, a task hampered by the lack of acetylene torches to cut through the thick steel plates. Over the next two days, just eighty-seven men were recovered before it was estimated that the last oxygen had expired.
The final death toll was reckoned to be 971, including Captain Weber and almost all of his officers, many of whom were trapped inside the armoured control room where he had gathered them to direct the defence of the ship. Captain-Lieutenant Fassbender would be awarded the German Cross in Gold for his bravery during the desperate final moments of Tirpitz.
By the time they returned home, Buckham and his crew had been flying for fourteen hours and nineteen minutes – with Buckham the sole pilot at the controls the entire time. But there would be a further drama before they were safely down. As they began their return journey, the crew had felt and heard a tremendous crash. It was only as they prepared to land that they saw their starboard main wheel hanging down, the engine nacelle panels flapping loose and a gaping hole in the wing. A later investigation would reveal that a flak shell had passed through the undercarriage bay, travelled between the Number 1 and Number 2 fuel tanks and exited through the wing, miraculously without exploding. Buckham was forced to land on one wheel.
Buckham’s crew were the last of the raiders home, but because they had lingered over the target long after the other bombers had departed Norway, they carried the first confirmation that Tirpitz had indeed finally been sunk — and the spectacular film evidence to prove it.
The Bomber Command leadership decided to delay the announcement of the sinking to allow time to review the footage of the attack before conveying the dramatic news to Churchill who, in turn, briefed King George VI. They also wanted time to maximise the impact of their stunning strike against the Germans in the newspapers and on radio, in Britain and around the world.
Buckham and rear gunner Eric Giersch were woken early the morning after the attack and ordered to head into London for a press conference at the Ministry of Information and a round of interviews with the BBC. Back in Australia, Bruce’s wife Gwen received a phone call from an uncle who worked at an air force base in Sydney. Until then, Gwen had no idea what her husband was doing in England, apart from serving as a pilot with a Bomber Command squadron. They had not spoken since he left Australia two years earlier. They wrote regularly to each other, but Bruce would not and could not talk about his day job.
“My uncle had heard on the radio that the Lancasters had bombed the Tirpitz and some of the planes were missing,” Gwen Buckham recounted. “He rang to tell me to listen to the six o’clock news. He didn’t know what Bruce was doing but just knew that he flew Lancasters. I said, ‘What’s the Tirpitz?’ I didn’t even know that! He said, ‘It’s the battleship, you nong, the German battleship.’ Then I really began to get worried.”
The entire family tuned in to the BBC world service that evening. “They announced that it was London calling from the BBC and then told about the raid on the Tirpitz,” Gwen recalled. “They didn’t mention about anybody not getting back so that was good. After they talked about what had happened, the announcer said, ‘I am now interviewing one of the pilots who took part in the raid — Flight Lieutenant Bruce Buckham.’ I nearly fell off my seat! I couldn’t believe it… That was the first time I had heard his voice since he had left for Europe.”
There was another false alarm for Gwen Buckham a short time later, when a telegram arrived at the family home in Penshurst. Often a telegram would be the first news of the death of a loved one.
“The telegram boy came down the street and my father was in the garden at the time. The boy had a telegram for me, and I just froze. Dad said, ‘Give it to me, I’ll open it.’ He stood there and read it aloud, ‘Congratulations are extended to you by the Minister for Air and the Air Board on the award of the Distinguished Service Order to your husband Flight Lieutenant B.A. Buckham in further recognition of his gallant service.’ Then a great feeling of relief and rejoicing came over us. Most of all, it again meant that he was alive.”
When the news of the Tirpitz sinking finally broke, it made headlines around the world. The dramatic pictures adorned front pages of the Fleet Street press and the newspapers back in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald of 15 November 1944 splashed with: “800 OF CREW LOST WITH TIRPITZ: Last Nazi Battleship Destroyed.” As well as providing still photographs, the 700 feet of spectacular film footage shot from Buckham’s aircraft would feature in newsreels screened in cinemas around the English-speaking world. •
