Patrick Bishop - Target Tirpitz - X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship

Völsing took Zuba aside ‘and said to me in a low voice, “It’s no use. We can’t get out. We’ve been searching everywhere.”’ For the benefit of the others though, the sub-lieutenant put on a brave face, announcing loudly: ‘“We’ll find some way out. I won’t abandon this fight.”’ Now Zuba took over the search. He and his team found their way into the A Deck radio room where there were more survivors whom he led back to join the others. During their search they had found another lamp, and some dry clothes. Zuba stripped off his uniform and put on white underpants, green trousers and a blue mechanic’s jacket, which made him look ‘like a comic actor’. They had also found bread, coffee, cognac, sweets and a large box of cigarettes.

For a while their fear lifted and their spirits rose. ‘Suddenly someone said, “Good Lord, today is my birthday.” We all congratulated him.’ It seemed to Zuba, though, that many were thinking ‘let us hope your birthday is not your death day as well’. The ‘birthday boy was allowed to take the first big swig. Then it was the turn of the others.’

They sat, warmed by the cognac, chewing coffee beans. One of the wireless operators, ‘a regular brick, calmness itself’, gave an optimistic assessment of their situation. He was sure that everything was being done to save them – they would have to be patient until the cutting gear arrived. The ship was 118 feet wide and the water she lay in was shallow. Now that she had turned turtle, ‘there is always going to be a bit sticking out of the water’.

Soon afterwards the wireless operator’s prediction seemed about to come true. Zuba heard ‘a knocking somewhere – bang, bang, bang’. Someone seized a fire extinguisher and began knocking back, but the noises got weaker and faded away. Their spirits slumped again. They sat in the cold metal box, each alone with his thoughts. Zuba worried how his mother would take the news of his death. His brother had been killed a year and three days before on the Eastern Front. What would the effect be on his fiancée Ruth who, when he had told her that he was being posted to Tirpitz, ‘was glad because she thought that being on a battleship was safer’?

Someone blurted out, ‘“If I get out of here I will get married at once.” Now they all start saying what they intend to do if they get out.’ While the others gabbled, though, hope was ebbing from Zuba. He could hear the rush of water. Then one of the radio operators noticed it, too. He began asking ‘again and again, “is the water rising?”’ The others told him to shut up. They sat sunk in silence. Then, over the sinister gurgling, they heard men calling out.

They shouted back together, ‘where are you?’. A chorus of voices came back but the reply was indistinct. The yelling continued. Finally they understood what they were saying. Their unseen comrades were trapped in Switch Room 3. Zuba and his companions shouted back that they were in the forward mess, but there was no answering call. They sank back into silence.

Then, someone thought they heard other voices, and a sharp hissing noise. It sounded, he said, like gas from an oxyacetylene torch. To Zuba, though, it seemed more likely to be the rustle of invading water. Others, though, seized on this rope end of hope. A leading seaman took the fire extinguisher and smashed through the compartment wall nearest to where the noise was coming from, only to be faced with a slab of thick steel. Zuba could hear the hissing more clearly now. It was stopping and starting. He began to think that ‘it could come from cutting apparatus … again there is hissing, crackling and banging’.

They started yelling again, ‘shouting “hurry up, the water is rising”’. Their room was still dry but they could see the compartment below them filling up. Zuba felt they were ‘in a running race with death’. The torch noises were getting closer, though. Someone ‘puts his hand on the steel wall. It is quite warm. “Hurry!” we shout.’

Then, a molten red spot appeared on the wall, followed by a shower of sparks. They shouted with joy ‘like little boys’, as the glowing line crept along the wall. They were ‘staring at it, drinking in every centimetre of its growth’, when ‘suddenly the hissing stopped. We heard voices moving away. There was a deathly silence around us.’

The last berth

The captives shouted in dismay. They screamed and banged on the cold steel walls of their prison, but ‘there is no answer, only the echo of our desperate shouting’. In the darkness below they could make out a ‘mirror of black gleaming water’ rising towards them.

Just as despair settled over him, Zuba heard more banging and sparks sprayed from the wall. A molten spot reappeared and slowly traced a glowing rectangle. There was a clang of falling metal and faces appeared in the hole. Their saviours looked ‘as if they had come from another world’. The hole was only sixteen inches wide. Each man had to be pushed and pulled through it. They emerged into another space with a ladder leading upwards. When Zuba reached the top he saw a square in the metal above him and, through it, the sky. It was evening. The stars ‘were twinkling, a sight I will never forget.’ He climbed up, and out into freezing night, ‘standing free and saved and sucking … air into my lungs’.

He was standing on a vast expanse of red-leaded metal. It took him a moment to realize it was the hull of the ship. As he was led away a soldier told him why the rescue had been broken off. Working in the cramped space between the hull and the lower deck, the welders had started to pass out from lack of oxygen. The twenty survivors were put on a launch and taken off to another ship, where they were fed and bathed and clothed. Zuba was anxious to know the fate of the men he was with when the ship began to topple. Leutnant Mettegang was still missing, believed trapped with twenty-four men. Next day, when Zuba asked again for news, he was told they were dead. According to the story that went around, the rescue team had been able to hear the trapped men but not to reach them. They had been singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles’ before they suffocated. 1

*See Ranks of the Kriegsmarine, p. xix, for equivalent British rank.

Chapter 2 Wilhelmshaven, Saturday, 1 April 1939

Adolf Hitler descended from a Mercedes limousine and strode along the dockside beneath the slipway supporting the gigantic hull. His face wore an expression of childish delight as he looked up at the soaring flank of his new battleship, then turned to salute the crowds packed in thousands in orderly squares alongside. They had been brought in from all over Germany’s ever-expanding territories to provide the numbers needed for a theatrical display of might and played their part enthusiastically, cheering, waving swastika pennants, pressing forward for a glimpse of the leader as he strode past.

He skipped up the steps to a high platform raised before the bow. It was a bright, sunny day but a cold wind whipping in from Jade Bay snapped at the flags and bunting and rattled the still-bare branches of the trees. Surrounding him on the platform was a cluster of admirals and generals. Among them, wearing a cloche hat and a fur stole, stood a lone woman. Frau Ilse von Hassell was there to name the ship in honour of her father, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the Imperial German navy. She was a reluctant participant. Her husband Ulrich, a diplomat, had watched the ascent of the Nazis with dismay. The head of the modern German fleet, Admiral Erich Räder, had first asked Tirpitz’s seventy-eight-year-old widow Marie to perform the ceremony but she claimed to be too old and infirm to attend. He turned next to Ilse and her younger sister Margot but they too declined. Ilse recalled that he then ‘sent a second appeal, urgently demanding my presence. It was practically an order. I need not explain … what such an order meant in those times in Germany.’ 1