Free The Lonely Sea by Alistair MacLean Page A

enemy, the fatal mistake in identification that led to her firing on the Prinz Eugen instead of the Bismarck, or of the fact that the standard of her gunnery was so poor that she failed to register even one hit throughout the entire engagement. Perhaps it was as well that these things were not known at the time.
    The reasons that were advanced at the time—and the source of inspiration of these reasons is not far to seek—were that the Hood, of course, had been no battleship but only a lightly-protected battle cruiser, and, even so, that the 15-inch shell that had found her magazine had been one chance in a million. These explanations were utter nonsense.
    True, the Hood was technically classed as a battle cruiser, but it was just that, a technicality and no more: the fact is that with her 12-inch iron and steel sheathing extending over 560 feet on either side and with her total weight of protective metal reaching a fantastic 14,000 tons, she was one of the most heavily armoured ships in the world. As for the one chance in a million shell, senior naval architects had been pointing out for twenty years that the Hood ’s magazines were wide open toshells approaching from a certain angle, a danger that could easily have been obviated by extra armour plating. The Hood’ s design was defective, badly defective, and the Admiralty was well aware of this.
    No such thoughts as these, it is safe to assume, was in the mind of Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales as the smoke and the dust of the awesome explosion cleared away and the Hood was seen to be gone. The Prince of Wales was fighting for her life now, and her captain knew it. Both the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen had swung their guns on him as soon as the Hood had blown up and already the deadly accuracy of their heavy and concentrated fire was beginning to have its effect. Captain Leach summed up the situation, made his assessments and didn’t hesitate. He ordered the wheel to be put hard over, broke off the engagement and retired under a heavy smokescreen.
    â€˜The ship that ran away’. That was what the Prince of Wales was called then, the coward battleship that turned and fled: it is an open secret that ship, officers and men, during the remainder of the Prince of Wales’ s short life, were henceforward treated with aversion and cold contempt by the rest of the Navy and this opprobium ended only with the death of the ship and the gallant Captain Leach a bare seven months later under a savage Japanese aerial attack off the coast of Malaya. The opprobrium was more than unjust—it wasgrotesquely and bitterly unfair. Once again, the Admiralty must shoulder much of the blame.
    In fairness, it was completely unintentional on their part. The trouble arose from their official communiqué on the action, which was no better and no worse than the typical wartime communiqué, in that it tended to exaggerate the damage sustained by the enemy while minimizing our own.
    Two statements in the communiqué caused the grievous misunderstanding: ‘The Bismarck was at one time seen to be on fire’ and ‘The Prince of Wales sustained slight damage’. Why in all the world then, people asked, hadn’t the ship which had received only slight damage closed with the one on fire and destroyed it. What possible excuse for running away?
    Excuse enough. The fire on the Bismarck, while demonstrable testimony to the occasional liveliness of official imaginations, had, in actual fact, consisted of no more than soot shaken loose from her funnel. As for the Prince of Wales ’s ‘slight damage’, she had been struck by no fewer than three 8-inch shells and four of the Bismarck ’s great 15-inch shells, one of which had completely wrecked the bridge, killing everyone there except Leach and his chief yeoman of signals. Furthermore, one of the Prince of Wales’ s big guns was completely out of action, repeated breakdowns in the others led