The next combined return salvo from Bismarck and a subdued Tirpitz missed Nelson completely, at that point the only British ship that had managed to so far remain completely unscathed. Nelson’s fourth salvo struck Tirpitz again, two direct hits absorbed by the superbattleship’s thick hide of hardened steel as a third tore through the superstructure and killed dozens of officers and men. Fire control and power to turret ‘Caesar’ was suddenly cut completely by the damage inflicted, leaving the battleship with just one functional main turret and placing greater strain on her overloaded remaining boilers. She began to lose power, and with just one turret operating, Lütjens had no option but to order her out of the battle line.
The second German salvo against Nelson, now from only the guns of Bismarck, again missed her completely as the British ship suddenly changed course. She altered her direction 120̊ to starboard in a battleship’s equivalent of ‘tacking’, reversing her oblique angle of approach and allowing her nine guns to bear from the other side of her bow as she again threw out her enemies’ firing solutions. One shell of the next barrage did detonate against the upper part of her smokestack, killing a number of exposed ratings with shrapnel, but that was relatively minor damage all the same.
Nelson continued to direct her increasingly successful fire upon Tirpitz as the superbattleship began to pull out of line to starboard. Contact from the mainland advised that air support was no more than fifteen minutes away, but even so it seemed to Lütjens that perhaps the unbelievable was happening… that this single surviving British battleship might potentially turn what was already a disaster into an outright, crushing defeat.
Nelson fired again, and the gunnery direction behind that salvo was inspired. It would subsequently earn the officer in control of the fire directors — a man who’d be one of the few dozen of her crew to survive the battle — a Victoria Cross for his efforts. Five armour-piercing 16-inch shells out of nine fired hit the German warship, and of those, no less than three were able to punch through her weakened and abused top armour to reach the vulnerable decks below. One of them found Tirpitz’s forward main magazines, and the combined explosion of propellant and 460mm shells literally blew the warship to pieces forward of her superstructure. As a gigantic, boiling mushroom cloud of smoke and flame rolled skyward, and debris rained over many square kilometres of sea around her, everything forward of the superbattleship’s bridge simply disintegrated. She instantly began to take on water through her shattered forward hull at a rate no damage control could ever hope to contain. Within three minutes, Tirpitz’s stern lifted into the air and she slid beneath the surface of the North Sea.
The next salvo from Bismarck found accuracy that was as much out of desperation as any quality of training, and she finally managed to bracket the oncoming Nelson properly and switched to ‘on target’. Two of Bismarck’s 460mm shells hit her then, the first of those striking her a glancing blow across her foredeck and flooding her forward compartments with seawater, while the second ripped through her superstructure, grazing the port side of the bridge before exploding against her funnel. Shrapnel and fragmentation from the second blast tore through her superstructure, killing many on the bridge including Harwood, yet still she came on as her hard-won speed began to fall off dramatically. The only man left alive on the bridge, her XO, instantly took control of the situation and ordered her onward, the fleeting opportunity that lay before them crystal clear. He changed tack once more, trying to buy some more time as Nelson came about once more to port, and she this time fired her last, defiant broadsides at the remaining enemy vesseclass="underline" Bismarck.
Three shells of Nelson’s third salvo struck the massive ship, one passing completely through her funnel to explode against the surface of the ocean, several hundred metres beyond. The second impacted against Bismarck’s superstructure, tearing apart one of the superbattleship’s triple 128mm secondary gun turrets in the process, while the third smashed through her broad, open quarterdeck at a sharp angle and destroyed the helicopter hangar below along with all five aircraft inside.
Luck seemed to remain with Nelson momentarily, as Bismarck’s next nine-gun barrage provided the only two duds of the entire engagement, both of them otherwise quite palpable hits. The first passed completely through the British ship’s starboard side at a sharp angle, exiting barely above the waterline and killing just four people unlucky enough to be directly in its path. The second scudded off the side of Nelson’s ‘X’ turret and embedded itself in the ship’s lower decks, most of its energy already spent.
Her good fortune vanished a moment later however as she was torn apart by no less than six massive explosions along the entire length of her port side.
During the course of the Realtime war, the Heinkel Model 177 Grief had entered service in 1942 as the Luftwaffe’s only true heavy bomber. A ludicrous insistence in also using the aircraft as a huge dive bomber resulted in numerous teething problems and an initial reputation of unreliability that it later found difficult to shake, regardless of some clear success in its designed role as a strategic bomber. The world of Reuter’s devising had created no such problems of ‘identity’ for the He-177, and it had entered service with the Luftwaffe in the middle of 1940 with the designation B-8B. A number of variants had been developed, including one for the expanding air arm of the Kriegsmarine (B-8E) that was proving to be an excellent long-range patrol and anti-shipping aircraft. The Grief could lift 6,000kg of ordnance into the air, and deliver it to a combat radius of over 1,500 kilometres, and the Kriegsmarine had found it perfect as a carrier aircraft for its newest and most secret weapon.
The Fiesler Fi-103 was known officially within the OKW as the SAR-2A ‘Dreizack’ (‘Trident’), and was the world’s first air-to-surface guided missile. Developed by the company that in Realtime would’ve produced the V1 ‘buzz-bomb’ (also given the designation Fi-103 in that original version of history), the Trident was eight metres long, and had moderately swept wings with a span of almost five metres. Weighing more than two tonnes each, they were far too large to be carried in the bomb bay of any aircraft, but two could be carried beneath the inner wings of the B-8E.
It could be directed onto targets up to fifty kilometres away by radar systems on the releasing aircraft, and was able to guide itself with its own active systems during the ‘terminal’ phase of the attack from ranges of approximately ten kilometres out. It drew its inspiration from a simple yet quite effective Soviet anti-ship missile of the Realtime 1950s that was known as the P-15 Termit (SS-N-2 ‘Styx’ by NATO designation), and its 500kg shaped-charge warhead could devastate all but the largest of vessels.
A battleship of Nelson’s size might well have shrugged off a single strike from one of those missiles, but the simultaneous impact of six such weapons was more than any vessel could hope to endure. No one had seen it coming: the trio of launch aircraft had remained completely out of visual range, and with an approach that was almost supersonic, the Tridents had been far too quick for anyone to spot in time to raise a warning. Nelson slowed to a halt, dead in the water and mortally wounded as another six missiles smashed into the ruined ship. The end wasn’t long in coming, and although a number of life rafts managed to get away, most of her crew ended up trapped inside her hull as the valiant old ship capsized. She turned over with incredible speed as her entire port side filled with sea water that poured in through twelve huge, jagged holes in her hull. One more Trident smashed into her exposed keel as her stern finally rose slowly into the air, and Nelson slipped slowly beneath the waves of the North Sea while another missile suddenly found itself devoid of a target and smashed itself to pieces on the water’s surface a few hundred metres beyond where Nelson had disappeared.