Bomb Finale

Except for their own expansive claims, which Allied reports persistently deflated, the Nazis had up to last week produced no conclusive proof of their boast that Air Power can smash Sea Power. The Allied fleet had landed troops at two main points. It took them off again. As the warships and transports steamed away, the German Air Force realized that there went its last chance, for perhaps some time, to carry out a long-standing order from Field Marshall Hermann Goring: at whatever cost, sink a battleship.

Out over the sea west of Namsos roared a wide swarm of Germany's deadliest aircraft of all; Junkers Ju.87 dive-bombers ("Stukas"), which had not been given a major workout since they pulverized prostrate Poland. These speedy, relatively small single-motored ships have stout wings to pull them out of long, steep power dives at 430 m.p.h. Their crews are specially trained to stand the pressures of such performance. They carry only one 1,100-lb. or two 500-lb. bombs. These they aim by pointing the plane's nose at the target during its screaming dive. Theory is that 100 such bombs so aimed by 100 such hell-divers could not fail to blast the toughest target.

The death rate among their pilots may be so suicidal that mass dive-bombing will be undertaken only against such targets as last week's Junkers sighted, moving westerly off Norway: a troopship convoy escorted by warships, including "a battleship of the Queen Elizabeth class ... a cruiser of the York class."

The dive-bombers, after separating so that they could descend from different angles, gunned their motors and, each in his turn, started down. From the ships below burst upwards an inverted torrent of anti-aircraft projectiles. . . . Within a few minutes, in Berlin, Hermann Goering was hurrying to tell Adolf Hitler about results which were later flashed to the world in these words:

"A British battleship . . . was ... hit between two forward turrets by a heavy caliber bomb. A half minute later a flame 500 meters [1,654 ft.] long appeared from the vessel, followed by thick smoke. When the smoke disappeared, nothing further of the vessel was seen except some floating debris."

Fuehrer Hitler promptly bestowed Knight's Crosses of the Iron Cross upon Generals Milch and Geisler and upon Major Harlinghausen, an active pilot and squadron leader, who presumably had crowned his career by leading the dive-bombers down upon the battleship. An extended version of the official German story, which was withheld for 24 hours "to see whether Churchill will have the courage to admit this terrific loss," added the following items to the alleged action:

"One heavy cruiser of the York class was hit by two bombs and set afire. The ship sank within 30 minutes following many explosions.

"Another cruiser was also hit by a bomb and parts of the ship were thrown into the air."

Two destroyers were hit and "a loaded transport ship of 12,000 tons was hit by a bomb and sunk."

Same day off Narvik "one battle cruiser got two hits and his guns were made inactive. One cruiser was set afire and a transport ship got a direct hit of a medium caliber bomb."

A Nazi spokesman continued: "We are simply amazed, ourselves, that the experiment succeeded without so much as a single loss for us. Our Air Force was determined to send wave after wave of power-divers ... to continue the assault even if at first every attacking plane was shot down. In our fondest dreams we didn't think it possible that the job could be completed in less than three minutes!

The Nazi press yowled triumphantly over this sensational finale to Germany's conquest of Norway. This yowling revealed that the dive-bombing attack, and its stunning "result," were intended for the special benefit of Italy, into whose neighborhood an Allied fleet had moved in admonition against Mussolini's entering Hitler's war. Italy is long on bombing planes, not so long on battleships.

After an interval long enough for the Allied troopship convoy to reach Great Britain, the British Admiralty tersely stated: "The German claim to have sunk a British battleship and a cruiser of the York class in operations off Namsos is untrue." Next day the Admiralty announced that no troopship had been touched, but that the "Stukas," diving wave after wave, did sink the heavy destroyer Afridi. The French Admiralty announced that their destroyer Bison was sunk in the same attack. The Poles in London verified the loss of their destroyer Grom off Narvik.

The heavy (1,870-ton) Afridi with two two-gun turrets fore and aft, might well be mistaken for the Queen Elizabeth, Warspite or Valiant, by landlubber air pilots traveling 300 m.p.h. a half-mile aloft. The big (2,436-ton) Bison, with three stacks, could less easily be mistaken for the two-stacked York.

But simple arithmetic justified the British in calling the German bombers' boast of sinking a battleship "fantastic." Greatest terminal velocity ever achieved by an air bomb of best design is 700 ft. sec. That is about half the striking speed of a 12-inch armor-piercing coast guard rifle shell at close range. But air bombs are not armor-piercing. They explode on contact. To reach a Queen Elizabeth magazine from between the forward turrets (extremely lucky hit), a bomb would have to penetrate one unarmored deck, one 2-inch armor deck, another 1 1/4-inch armor deck, another 1-inch armor deck, and then the magazine's 9-inch armor ceiling--a total of 13 1/4 inches of armor. But the bomb would explode and stop penetrating when it hit the very first deck. Alternatively, it would have to penetrate the 10-inch armor of a turret barbette; or blast in through a gunport, ignite a powder train down through an elevator to the magazine. Ever since three British capital ships were blown up at Jutland by failure of their flash screens, turret design has been perfected to render such accidents next to impossible. Clever though their story was, the Germans' "battleship bombed" screamer was to naval and air experts just another long shot that missed fire.

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