They were running with the wind at their back, which was always good, thought Lutjens. He studied the enemy fleet as the ships began to appear on the horizon. They must be the old WWI battleships the British have patched up and kept floating all these years. No wonder we’re closing on them so quickly. He saw the battle ensign hoisted on Bismarck’s mainmast and knew the time had come. The roar of his lead ship’s forward guns cracked like thunder and he saw the bright orange yellow fire ahead. A full salvo, he thought. Lindemann means business. Time I was back on the main bridge.
“Kapitan Adler,” he said with a proud smile. “Fight your battle!”
“Aye sir!” Adler was quick to get reports from his gun directors, and his senior artillery officer, Lutz Eisenberg called out the opening range at 28,000 meters. Bismarck had come ten points to starboard to continue closing while allowing Hindenburg an unobstructed line of fire.
“Helmsman,” said Adler. “Follow Bismarck’s wake. Fire when ready!”
Eisenberg was ready, and then the guns of the Hindenburg shook the wind with their power, the only 16 inch guns in the fleet. The waters seemed to burn red with the reflection of that blast, and the glow was soon masked by the deep brown smoke of the guns, billowing out like a pyroclastic flow from some wrathful volcano, as tall as the ship itself and many times its beam in width.
Down in Anton turret, Axel Faust was moving from one station to the next, receiving information from the gun directors and checking to see that all was well. He could also use optical sights in his turret in the event communications with the director were ever interrupted, and he had the good habit of always using them to compare his reading to the information he had from the director. Now he was watching for shell fall, and Bismarck had correctly waited for Hindenburg’s rounds to register on the distant targets before firing again. Faust smiled when he saw the rounds fall very near the enemy ships, and he could tell they were short when the upwelling of white water was superimposed on the long dark silhouettes of the ships. If the two formations had been running parallel, he might add 200 meters to his next salvo, but they were closing the range at nearly fifteen knots, and so the calculation was much more complex.
He waited until the next target data came down. “Elevation thirty,” he said in his deep throated voice. “Bearing 152. Range 26,500.” Then he took one last look in his optics and grinned. “Make it twenty-six four! Fire!” Anton was going to fire the long end of a 400 meter bracket salvo aimed at the heart of the enemy formation. Hans Hartmann in Bruno would fire the short end. They would therefore have two points of reference to adjust subsequent fire.
“Attention…” came the voice of Eisenberg over the intercom from the main gun director. “Shellfall!.. Bruno short; Anton Straddling!”
Axel grinned. That extra hundred meters had done the job. That was a good long shot for a straddle on the second salvo. Now he knew what he had to do as Eisenberg’s voice sent down the next bearing and elevation to announce his settings. “Adjust, adjust!” Faust shouted at his gunners. “Track two degrees right, and steady on elevation!” At any minute they would get the order he was waiting for: “Rapid fire!” Eisenberg’s voice called out, and Faust clenched his fist as Anton’s guns boomed again.
“Nobody hits anything at this range,” said gunners mate Albert Lowe.
“Think like that and you never will,” said Faust. “Scharnhorst hit that British aircraft carrier at this range, and we can do better!”
They did do better, but just barely. The next salvo, the third from Anton, was right near the lead capital ship they had been targeting, and the bright orange fire that Axel saw through his rangefinder was not the enemy guns returning the insult. They had scored a hit, and he knew it was his, because Bruno had fired five seconds later and he now saw both those rounds fall right after his own. He could feel it in his bones. They had beaten Scharnhorst’s record for the longest hit ever obtained by a battleship at 26,465 yards, which was 24,200 meters. HMS Invincible had also bettered that mark when it scored a telling long shot against the Italians, but no one knew these things in the heat of the action. They would only be calculated later, once the after action reports were all typed up and compiled… and by the men who survived.
Queen Elizabeth was struck forward, right near her number one turret, and the resulting damage was plain to see when a large secondary explosion blasted from the gunwale, obscuring everything forward of the conning tower with a heavy black smoke that was so thick it defied the wind.
