She began to take on more water than her watertight compartments or counter-flooding could handle and began to sink. Two more salvoes hit her again as she slowed and settled in the water, and just moments later, Renown capsized and her stern began to rise. The Dogger Bank was well-known to be quite shallow in parts, and the dying battlecruiser’s sinking bow struck the thick sandy bottom of the sea below before her upright stern had disappeared below the waves. She would remain that way for several weeks, her nose embedded in the bank and her stern still buoyant due to air trapped within, before finally coming loose once more and disappearing for the last time during a late October storm. Propaganda newsreel footage of her angled, exposed stern with damaged rudders and screws still turning would provide the Nazi press with images that would be seen around the entire globe in the aftermath of the invasion, and no more than a few hundred of her crew would survive the incident.
Just fifteen minutes after the commencement of battle, the numerical odds had shifted but remained theoretically in the Home Fleet’s favour to the tune of three ships to two, although such statistics weren’t indicative of the true situation. While the three RN battleships were now able to concentrate fire upon the two remaining enemy warships, those opponents were a pair of superbattleships that were the pride of the entire Kriegsmarine. Bismarck and Tirpitz had been designed to take punishment from guns of a similar calibre to their own — guns that threw shells almost double the weight and penetrating power of those the British could bring to bear against them. The hardened steel armour that clad their hulls, decks and turrets was in some places up to sixty centimetres thick, and although three separate warships had landed a number of hits on both vessels during the battle so far, none had been able to inflict anything more than some insignificant, superficial damage.
Responding to distress calls from first Gneisenau and then Scharnhorst, the two superbattleships next turned their attention on the rear of the British line and the two Great War veterans, Warspite and Queen Elizabeth. Shrugging off successive impacts from 15-inch shells that dented her hide but did no real damage other than neutralising some of her lighter flak guns, Tirpitz quickly gained the range of Queen Elizabeth and slammed her with salvo after salvo of increasingly accurate fire. One shell penetrated and shattered her rear X-turret, smoke pouring from every opening as its guns lay pointing uselessly at the deck. Another shell smashed into her rear superstructure, killed hundreds and started several large fires, while a third and fourth punched holes in her hull and caused massive flooding.
A fifth shell penetrated and detonated a secondary magazine aft, the explosion not enough to destroy the ship but certainly powerful enough to inflict incapacitating damage. Queen Elizabeth suddenly found herself devoid of power as her main dynamos went offline along with her boilers, and she stopped almost dead in the water, pouring smoke into the air as debris from the magazine explosion sprayed into the air in all directions. The battleship began to take on a significant list to starboard.
Bismarck ranged and went ‘on target’ on Warspite at about the same time her sister ship was firing on Queen Elizabeth. In a savage and rather one-sided, five-minute duel, the Jutland veteran lost three turrets, her main fire director and most of her electrical power, with little damage inflicted in return. She also lost a substantial number of her crew, including all of her command, and she was soon drifting out of action and burning as furiously as Queen Elizabeth. As was often the case with the unpredictable and fluid nature of battle, advantages, either real of imagined, were often fleeting, and the advantage in this particular battle that had seemed to favour the British just moments before had now suddenly and dramatically turned against the Royal Navy once more.
Harwood had been forced to assume command of the fleet the moment Hood had been obliterated, taking Sir John Tovey with her. He could clearly see that although they’d initially had some success, it was becoming increasingly obvious their firepower simply wasn’t great enough to damage the remaining enemy ships at that range. Nelson had been firing on Tirpitz throughout the engagement and hadn’t yet managed to inflict any more than minor damage, although several small fires were now burning around the enemy ship’s superstructure; nor had the added fire of Queen Elizabeth and Warspite improved the situation. Rear-Admiral Henry Harwood realised that some kind of change was needed, and that change was needed quickly.
It was Nelson that would ultimately provide the Royal Navy with its last fleeting hopes of success. Harwood’s resulting actions would earn him, among others, a posthumous Victoria Cross and would guarantee his place in history in what would eventually become known as the ‘Second Battle of The Dogger Bank’. As he watched the burning Warspite drift out of the battle line, leaving Nelson to carry on alone, Harwood immediately gave orders for the ship to turn onto a sharper angle of approach toward the enemy fleet that would nevertheless allow her to present a full ‘broadside’ due to the unique disposition of Nelson’s main armament in three forward turrets.
“England expects that every man will do his duty!” That broadcast, which Harwood then made to his crew over open radio channels for all within range to hear, was a reiteration of the words of Viscount Horatio Nelson at the opening of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and it somehow seemed singularly appropriate aboard the ship that held that great commander as her namesake. There would be many who would later privately feel the award of the VC was as much for those famous last words as for any action that followed.
The statement certainly seemed to inspire his crew as Nelson turned onto her new course and increased speed to 22 knots. The sudden change in direction ruined the firing solutions of both German warships as they abandoned fire on their shattered opponents and tried to draw a bead on her, and they wasted many minutes in adjustments to their fire control as Nelson let rip with a broadside aimed directly at the tall silhouette of Tirpitz. That salvo and the one following produced only misses, some close, as shells fell about the battleship however the third broadside was far more fortunate. Four shells from that miraculous nine-gun blast struck the battleship, and although her heavy armour was able to shrug off two of them, the other two finally managed to deal the behemoth some serious damage.
Perhaps as a result of striking areas already weakened by prior impacts, one managed to penetrate the top armour of turret ‘Anton’, and the resultant internal explosion almost tore it from its mountings, setting it askew with its trio of guns left useless and pointing randomly into the air off Tirpitz’s port bow. The second shell tore through the hull amidships, spreading chaos in her boiler rooms, and two dozen men were lost to fire caused by the explosion before preventative flooding could quell the flames, adding their names to the hundred-odd killed instantly by the hit on A-turret.