The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 5, Issue 4, Fall 2016 | Page 18

March 1944. By then the naval war had long since been decided, and any effect the
battleship could hope to have on Allied naval strategy, directly or indirectly, was
imaginary. Nonetheless, Allied bombing raids continued to hound Tirpitz as she
was brought back to operational readiness, and in late July of that year she put to
the open sea for the last time, conducting a brief exercise off the Norwegian coast
with five destroyers. 33
By mid-September 1944, accumulated damage from British bombs more
or less permanently put the battleship out of action, so the Germans decided to
move her to shallow water near Tromsø in northern Norway for use as a floating
coastal battery. It was to be her final voyage. The battleship limped from Kåfjord
that October, anchoring off Håkøy Island after an uneventful passage. On 12
November 1944 she was hit by several massive “Tallboy” bombs dropped from
specially modified Royal Air Force Lancasters and capsized, taking 971 of her
crew with her. Rescuers eventually saved eighty-seven men trapped inside the hull
by cutting holes in her bottom as she lay protruding above the water, like some
enormous beached whale. World War II in Europe ended six months later, and
from 1948 until 1957, a Norwegian firm scrapped the wreck in situ. 34
For nearly three years, Tirpitz remained a thorn in the side of Allied naval
planners, and while lurking in Norway’s picturesque fjords represented her own
fleet-in-being. In hindsight, the Allies doubtlessly overestimated the danger of the
German warship on their naval supremacy. Prime Minister Winston Churchill
perhaps best illustrates the perceived threat Tirpitz posed to the British in a letter to
the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Hastings Ismay, in January 1942:
“The destruction or even crippling of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the
present time. No other target is comparable to it . . . the whole strategy of the war
turns at this period on this ship.” 35
Churchill’s words illustrate how paranoid the British were of the
battleship and how effective she ultimately became as fleet-in-being in Norway. It
should be kept in mind that at the same time as Churchill’s words were being put
to paper, the British were fighting tooth and nail in the Mediterranean, had just lost
two capital ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, to the Japanese, and were in
serious danger of losing Singapore, the crown jewel of their empire in the Far East.
The Prime Minister feared Tirpitz—“The Beast”—and was as obsessed with her
destruction as Hitler was obsessed with keeping her in Norway to guard against an
imaginary Allied invasion. Churchill and British naval planners saw the battleship
as a constant menace to their maritime dominance and, taking no chances, acted
accordingly. This attitude helps put the thirty-nine different direct and indirect
attacks (thirty-seven British, two Soviet) on the battleship between 1940 and 1944,
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