could be seen as a hot glow on the sea. For a moment it seemed he would suffer the nightmare yet again, endure the fate of Gneisenau, already bludgeoned and fallen off the battle line. Then, to his astonishment, he saw the rockets execute a precision turn, angling right off his starboard beam and vectoring in on the Tirpitz! It was as if they had eyes, as if they were piloted. He found himself casting a quick upward glance at the skies, thinking he might see some aircraft being used to radio control these demons, but all was clear. Then came the roar and thunder of the rockets as they struck home, and he leaned over the gunwale, looking back to see the bright fire and explosions enveloping the forward segment of the Tirpitz.
Topp’s flagship had been hit hard, once on Anton turret, once at a point on the hull just below this, and the third hit behind Bruno at the base of the tall conning tower. He was transfixed for a moment, seeing the hot rolling smoke and fire. Then the watch shouted again and he looked to see two more ships had suddenly appeared on the horizon. He knew them at once. These were the British battlecruisers.
Hoffman had seen one close enough to duel with in the Norwegian Campaign the previous year off Lofoten Islands. Gunther Lütjens had been in command at the time, and they had come upon the battlecruiser Renown escorted by a pack of other smaller ships, which Lütjens took to be cruisers and destroyers. A brief action resulted, with both Gneisenau and Renown sustaining hits until Lütjens believed the British destroyers rushing in were much larger vessels, and broke off the engagement.
Always the reluctant Admiral, that one, thought Hoffmann. Only later did we learn that those were merely destroyers, and all that frenetic gunfire reported was well out of range. We could have stayed in that fight, but instead Lütjens ran off into the Arctic Sea. And where is he now?
In one brief moment, the situation had taken a major turn. Rodney had finally ceased firing, but now those two battlecruisers would bring another twelve 15-inch guns to the battle. How bad was the damage on Tirpitz? If those forward guns were compromised by that rocket attack… And what had caused that terrible eruption in the sea?
He soon learned that the damage looked far worse than it was. Anton turret had been temporarily put out of action, though its heavy armor had protected it from serious harm, in spite of numerous casualties there from the sheer shock of the attack. New crews were rushing to get it operational again, and fight the deck fire that resulted. The conning tower armor had also weathered the hit. The missile that struck beneath the forward guns had hit a segment of the hull above the main belt, where the armor was thinner at about 145mm. There was serious blast damage there, and yet another fire, yet none of these hits were fatal. The smaller 200kg warheads on the GB-7s did not have the punch to defeat heavy armor like this, and their effect was mainly one of heavy shock and fire.
Yet those punches had been enough to prompt Topp to turn to port. It would allow him to get his rear turrets in action, and also serve to put him on a better heading to disengage if that became necessary. Hoffmann saw the maneuver, and though he could see no signal flags on the battleship, he shouted orders to keep station and turned ten points to port. He could already see the flash of distant guns on those battlecruisers, and now he made the decision to shift fire to engage that new threat.
How long before those rockets find my ship, he thought, the memory of Graz Zeppelin still burning in his mind. My god, will we lose our whole squadron? What is that out there? He could not take his eyes from the still rising column on the horizon, mayhem and madness from another time, where two unseen warriors battled beneath the sea.
* * *
Aboard the Hindenburg, Admiral Lütjens was staring through his field glasses at what he first took to be a rapidly rising thunderhead. It had to be thirty or forty miles off, and how it could have appeared in the clear morning dawn mystified him. Yet there it was, billowing up in the distance, dwarfing the smaller columns of black smoke where he knew