I Sank The Bismarck by John Moffat Page B

starts shrieking as it rushes through
the struts and wires. At this stage it's quite possible for the airspeed
indicator to show 200 knots: you are falling fast, the
needle of the altimeter going from 8,000 feet to 7,000 feet like
the second hand of a clock, but you are still able to keep
perfect control of the aircraft. Plummeting down, it is
possible to wait until the frightening height of just 200 feet
is reached before pulling back on the stick and levelling out.
During our training I avoided diving to such a low height, but
I did it later and can vouch that it can be done.
    There were complicated patrol patterns to learn, depending
on whether we were meant to be locating a surface vessel,
hunting a submarine that had been detected by a merchant
ship or mounting an anti-submarine patrol along the line of
advance of a convoy or fleet of warships. Finally, of course,
there was the torpedo practice, where we launched a dummy
torpedo at our target ship. She was an elderly destroyer but
still capable of the rapid manoeuvres that any self-respecting
warship would carry out to avoid a torpedo in the water. Of
course, she was not carrying guns that were directing their fire
at the crew of the attacking aircraft. But the key was learning
to judge the speed of the ship by the size of the bow wave, and
then to calculate the required deflection for a torpedo that
would be launched from a distance of 1,000 or so yards and
would travel at a speed of 29 knots to its (one hoped unsuspecting)
target. It sounded simple, but the truth was that
so far in the war torpedo attacks on moving warships had
never been successful, despite several attempts.
    One such attack had taken place while I was still at
Eastleigh with 759 Squadron. The French government's
surrender in June 1940 meant that the French fleet in the
Mediterranean might be absorbed by the German navy,
boosting its strength overnight and threatening our fleet,
which was based in Alexandria in Egypt. The main base for
the French warships was Toulon on the French mainland,
but they also had ships with our fleet in Alexandria, as
well as a big base in Oran in Algeria. It was these ships
that the Admiralty felt they should do something about.
    Theoperation against the French ships in Oran was to
prove important, because it was the start of a battle that I was
eventually to join and it formed a big part of my war service.
The incident was given great publicity – it was all over the
newspapers – but what I later discovered had taken place
caused several people I served with, including the commanding
officer of a squadron I joined, 818, to make some crucial
decisions about the attack on Bismarck. Apart from that, it's
important to realize that while I was deciding about what
aircraft I would fly in the Fleet Air Arm and embarking on
various training courses, others were putting into practice
what I was being taught and were finding that there was a big
difference between peacetime exercises and what was possible
when the shells were exploding, with your aircraft as a target.
    In July 1940 HMS Ark Royal, our most famous aircraft
carrier, was sent down to the Mediterranean base in Gibraltar
to be part of a small unit calledForce H. This was a very
powerful force when it was first created. As well as the Ark there wasHMS Hood, probably the most famous warship in
the Royal Navy, a battlecruiser, though most of us thought of
her as a battleship. The only real difference was that she was
slightly less armoured than a battleship and so was a bit faster,
but she had extremely large guns and was, we thought, quite
formidable. There were also the real battleships HMS Valiant and Resolution, each with big, 15in-calibre guns, accompanied
by several cruisers and nineteen destroyers. This may
appear to be a big fleet, but it wasn't that large compared to
either the Italian or French navies.
    Force H had been assembled with the immediate aim of
making sure that the French fleet in Oran didn't become