On the morning of 12 November 1944 some thirty Lancaster bombers of Nos. 9 and 617 Squadrons RAF attacked the German battleship Tirpitz where she lay off the island of Håkøya near Tromsø, in northern Norway. In a raid code-named Operation Catechism, two or three of their 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs struck home and near misses did the rest. Within minutes the heaviest warship ever built by a European navy rolled over and capsized, killing about a thousand of her crew. The Royal Navy's long fear of the ship that had haunted the Arctic convoys was over.
A ship that tied down a navy
Tirpitz, the sister of Bismarck, was by the RAF Museum's description the heaviest warship any European navy had built, at about 52,600 tons fully loaded. From her bases in Norway she threatened the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union, and she did harm simply by existing. In July 1942 the news that she might be at sea led the Admiralty to scatter convoy PQ 17, and the museum notes that only 11 of its 35 merchant ships reached Russian ports.1
The RAF and the Fleet Air Arm had been attacking her since 1940, and midget submarines and human torpedoes had tried too. Mark Baker, writing in Inside Story, counts twenty-four operations over nearly five years and more than 200 Allied deaths in the hunt. Carrier aircraft caught her in Kaafjord on 3 April 1944, the raid told on our page for 3 April, and in September 1944 a Tallboy from 617 Squadron's commander, Wing Commander J. B. “Willie” Tait, penetrated her deck and did extensive internal damage.2
Within range from Scotland
That September attack, Operation Paravane, had been flown on 15 September 1944 from Yagodnik, a Soviet naval air station, because Tirpitz's anchorage in the far north was beyond reach from Britain. The RAF Museum notes that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was then told it would take nine months to make her fully operational again, something British naval intelligence did not know.3
After that damage the Germans moved Tirpitz south to Håkøya to serve as a floating battery against an Allied landing. The RAF Museum notes that British naval intelligence believed she had gone there for repairs, and that the new berth brought her within range of Lancasters flying from Scotland, stripped of weight and loaded with extra fuel. A first attempt on 29 October was foiled by cloud.4
On 12 November the weather held. The bombers took off in the small hours from bases in northern Scotland and flew for hours to Norway, carrying 12,000-pound Tallboys designed by Barnes Wallis. They found the battleship clear in the Arctic dawn, and the German fighters based nearby did not come up in time. According to the RAF Museum, 28 Tallboys fell in a minute and a half.5
She rolled over
Two, possibly three, bombs hit, and the shock of near misses did further damage. The ship's senior surviving officer, quoted by Baker, recorded hits on the port side; she listed rapidly, her 700-ton Caesar turret was blown into the air, and she capsized, trapping hundreds of men inside the upturned hull. Rescuers cutting through the bottom freed 87 men over the next two days. The RAF Museum puts the dead at about a thousand, and Baker gives a final toll of 971, including the captain, Robert Weber, and most of his officers. John Sweetman quotes the German signal the British intercepted that day: “Our Tirpitz sunk”.6
An Australian crew in a camera aircraft lingered over the fjord and filmed her final roll, bringing home the first proof of the sinking. The story of the war at sea is gathered in our guide to the greatest naval battles.7
