Kent was still firing back with her rear turrets as the ship came about, but was receiving a savage battering in return as the three British light cruisers turned away to the north under orders and attempted to break from the battle, trailing a thick smokescreen in their wakes. With all three heavy cruisers damaged and out of effective combat, they’d be seriously outnumbered and stood little chance even of survival, let alone success. Their German counterparts continued the chase, and the cruiser skirmish quickly moved off to the east.
Taking counsel from Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann commanding Bismarck, Lütjens initially gave orders for the aircraft of Graf Zeppelin to hold off, thinking that superior German radar-directed gunnery should be able to deal with the fleet on its own. Based on the evidence at hand, it certainly seemed a likely possibility: only one of the approaching British ships — Nelson — was armed with 16-inch guns, while the rest mounted the superbly-accurate but smaller 15-inch gun that had become the standard RN capital ship main armament from World War One onward. Although radar surveillance had originally detected seven large warships in the British fleet, continued monitoring had revealed two of those ships had dropped behind the main formation in the last hour or so. Lütjens knew that at least two Type-X U-boats were patrolling the area through which the enemy fleet had travelled, and that there’d been several unconfirmed attack reports from the submarine service so far. It therefore seemed reasonable to deduce that torpedo damage was behind the delay of those two lagging vessels. That left five capital ships against their four, but Lütjens was still confident his fleet would get the better of their English opponents, and taking into consideration the line of ships behind him, that belief was understandable.
At the rear of the formation, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were easily the equal of the battlecruisers Hood and Renown, each armed with three twin turrets of 15-inch guns that were accompanied by the most modern fire directors and radar assistance in the world. Although the Kriegsmarine classified the vessels as a schlactkreuzer (battlecruiser), at 40,000 tonnes full-load, they were easily large enough to be considered battleships in their own right. The ships had originally been designed to mount three triple turrets of the same 11-inch guns now arming Admiral Graf Spee, but this had been revised to their current, heavier armament prior to completion.
Ahead of them, Bismarck and Tirpitz were something else again. At 71,000 tonnes, the superbattleships were, save for the carrier based on the same hull layout, the largest warships to ever sail the seas. Along with their two completed sister ships, Von der Tann and Derrflinger, their construction had been maintained under the heaviest veil of secrecy and misinformation, and two further ships — Rheinland and Westfalen — were yet to be completed. The ships also carried the heaviest armament ever put to sea on a warship: nine huge guns of 18.1-inch calibre (460mm), mounted in three gigantic turrets that could fire armour piercing shells weighing almost 1,500 kilograms out to ranges of over forty kilometres. They were also backed up by a morass of secondary turrets and flak guns that surrounded the vessel’s towering central superstructure in multiple layers of 128mm, 37mm and 23mm weapons. Although yet to be ‘blooded’ in actual combat, their crews’ training and morale was high, and they were ready for their baptism of fire. For that reason — morale as much as superiority — Lütjens decided to hold back their carrier air wing and give the men of his warships a real victory in battle.
That decision would eventually cost the Kriegsmarine far more dearly than they expected on a number of counts. Only as a rather unexpected, low-level mass of aircraft appeared suddenly on their search radars did the German fleet realise that at least one of the capital ships that’d fallen behind the enemy formation was actually an aircraft carrier, rather than a damaged battleship. At that point, the order for launch of Graf Zeppelin’s air group was given, but this time with a new target — the enemy carrier. The Swordfish and Skua attack aircraft of the British Fleet Air Arm were well known in Wehrmacht circles to be obsolete, however their presence still needed to be taken seriously, particularly as the enemy had gotten the ‘jump’ on TG186 by launching first. Defence was first priority of the day, and J-4Bs of the carrier’s fighter gruppe were the first to lift from the flight deck.
On the other side of the ‘battlefield’, the squadrons launched from Ark Royal were under no such illusions as to the composition of the forces they too could see quite clearly on radar. Reports of the morning’s attacks on RAF bomber bases had been enough to indicate that a carrier force was definitely operating somewhere in the North Sea, and armed with that extra information, it needed no great leap of logic to identify the large contact some miles behind the main enemy force and designate it as a prime target.
Ark Royal carried five squadrons within her hangars — two of Blackburn Skua fighter-bombers and three of the Fairey Swordfish — and all five of those squadrons had launched, heading off in two separate waves that’d taken a clear detour to the west of the enemy battleships to avoid AA fire. The Skuas of 800 and 803 Sqns were in the lead — twenty-four planes in all — a single 227kg (500lb) bomb recessed beneath each aircraft’s belly. There were just a handful of Graf Zeppelin’s J-4Bs in the air and on combat patrol as the Skua’s headed in for their final approach, several blown from the sky in moments as the German fighters engaged, but the majority made it through the fighter screen and fell upon the huge carrier from high altitude.
Clouds of heavy flak began to burst about the Skuas as twenty of them came out of the grey sky in staggered pairs, long streams of tracer from the ship’s 37mm and 23mm automatic cannon joining in as they drew closer. Although eager and well-trained however, Graf Zeppelin’s gun crews had never fired on an enemy aircraft in combat until that moment, and they found, initially at least, that the diving Skuas were far more difficult to hit than the gunnery targets they’d become used to in training.
The pilots of 800 and 803 Squadrons, by contrast, knew exactly what they were doing. As well-trained as their opponents, the airmen of the Fleet Air Arm also had actual combat experience; something that counted for a great deal as the first attack wave came out of the clouds toward the carrier below. Even from a height of several thousand metres, the clustered aircraft gathered on the long flight deck were clearly visible preparing for take off, and the attacking pilots instantly recognised their importance: those aircraft could inflict serious damage to both the Home Fleet and, more importantly, Ark Royal herself. The fact that the British fighter-bombers had gained a momentary advantage of initiative was something they couldn’t afford to squander, and the flights’ commanding officer gave a few radioed words of instruction and encouragement before pointing his Skua even closer to vertical and darting through the clouds of flak, bombsights centred on the enemy carrier’s flight deck near the bow.