Tribute to Ted Briggs – last link with HMS Hood, sunk by Bismarck in Battle of Denmark Strait
published this on 10:16 pm, Sunday, 5th October, 2008Community News| History| defence | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
It has just been announced by the HMS Hood Association that Ted Briggs died on Saturday 4th October 2008. The Hampshireman was the last survivor of the HMS Hood when it was sunk by the Bismarck in the Battle of Denmark Strait on 24th May 1941.
Ted Briggs’ death marks the last living link with the catastrophic loss of the pride of the British navy to the accurate gunnery of the Bismarck. Of the 1,418 men on board Hood when she was struck, only three survived, including Mr Briggs. From somewhere near the bridge, Ted Briggs was first sucked under by the sinking ship, then thrown back to the surface before, with the two other survivors (see below), being picked up by HMS Electra.
Ted Briggs joined the Royal Navy on 7th March 1938, a week after bis fifteenth birthday. He did 16 months training at HMS Ganges and was immediately assigned to service in HMS Hood on 29th July 1939.
After the sknking of the Hood, he participated in the consequent enquiry into its loss and saw service in HMS Mercury, HMS Royal Arthur and HMS Hilary acting as a Combined Operatins HQ ship at Salerno and at the D-Day landings. Later he returned to HMS Mercury as a Fleetwork Instructor and was promoted progressively to Yeoman of Signals in 1943. He stayed with the Royal Navy after the war until his retirement on 2nd February 1973. He never liked to talk of his experience at the end of the Hood, resisting what he saw as the spurious title of ‘hero’ insisting that he was only a survivor.
In tribute to Mr Briggs and in memory of the Hood, here is a short video which features them both.
The ageing battlecruiser Hood had been sent, with the newly commissioned battleship Prince of Wales, to intercept the German battle ship Bismarck and her escort, the heavy cruiser, Prinz Eugen. The German ships had slipped through the Kattegat at the start of an attempted breakout into the Atlantic for a planned raiding expedition on British merchant shipping.
On 20th May 1941, it was reported that two large ships were passing through the Kattegat, with air cover and smaller escorts. The British Admiralty asked for increased air surveillance of the Norwegian coast and a Spitfire reconnaissance plane found and recognised the Bismarck in a fjord near Bergen. From then on a series of radar and air sightings enabled the British to be sure that they were onto the right ships and to get fleeting positions for them.
To stop the German ships getting out into the Atlantic, the Hood and the Prince of Wales were ordered to sail at once to intercept them. They found them on 24th May in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland.
The Hood opened the engagement just after 05.52 -- firing mistakenly on the Prinz Eugen rather than the Bismarck. She was hit on the boat deck by a shell from the Prinz Eugen. This ignited ammuniton and rockets causing a fire which quickly got out of control and threatened the ship. At 05.55 Vice Admiral Holland in Hood, realising they had engaged the wrong ship, ordered a 20 degree turn to port so that the Hood could bring all her gun turrets to bear on Bismarck.
At 06.00, as the Hood was turning, she was hit by a salvo from Bismarck at a range of almost 9 nautical miles. Almost immediately a great plume of fire shot skywards from the mainmast area, followed by a massive explosion. The ship broke in two and sank in three minutes. The entire engagement, from Hood opening fire to sinking, had lasted no more than eleven minutes. Her age, with its outdated design lacking in deck armour had left her fatally vulnerable to plunging shells.
Of the 1,418 men aboard her, there were only three survivors: Ted Briggs who has now died (2008); Robert Tilburn who died in 1995; and William Dundas who died in 1965. William Dundas lived in Argyll in Ardrishaig -- in Ardfenaig, now a residential care home. He later moved to Fife where he was killed in a road accident.
The end of the story began with Churchill ordering the British navy to sink the Bismarck at all costs to rebuild British morale, badly hit by the loss of the Hood. Bismarck detached Prinz Eugen and headed alone for the French port of Brest. By now she was running short of fuel (see note below) and had to reduce speed to be sure of making it to port. This was perhaps the key factor in her eventual loss.
The British had despatched Force H, under Admiral Somerville, north from Gibraltar: the aircraft-carrier Ark Royal, the old battlecruiser Renown and the cruiser Sheffield. At 21.05 on 26th May, almost in darkness and in one last attack, a Swordfish from Ark Royal dropped a torpedo that hit and disabled the Bismarck’s rudder and steering gear.
This was the beginning of the end. Bismarck could now only steam in a large circle which took her towards the two battleships, King George V and Rodney, that had been pursuing her from the west.
During that night, 26th -- 27th May, Bismarck was the target of constant torpedo attacks by British destroyers, Cossack, Sikh, Maori and Zulu with the Polish navy’s Piorun.
At 10.39 on the morning of 27th May 1941, three days after sinking the Hood, the crippled Bismarck went down after fighting to the end under incessant bombardment from the British battleships King George V, Rodney and the heavy cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire.
There are two interesting footnotes to the Bismarck story.
- At the start of the attempted breakout, when the Bismarck was leaving Gotenhafen (now Gdynia) on her way to the Kattegat, Captain Lindemann, in a hurry to get his ship into action as a commerce raider, left port before oiling was complete. Later, in the fjord near Bergen (where British air reconnaissance spotted the two ships) Prinz Eugen took on oil. Bismarck did not. Lindemann felt no need to fuel because the oiler, Weissenberg was already in position in the Arctic waiting to be called in for refuelling wherever Bismarck required. The loss of his ship was therefore essentially caused by simple housekeeping failures. Had Bismarck sailed with full tanks, or had she filled them at Bergen, her speed would have taken her well away from her British pursuers and the Swordfish torpedo would never have caught her rudder.
- Prinz Eugen, Bismarck’s escort for much of her short active life and known as a lucky ship, was engaged in only two naval actions and never took a single British life throughout the war. At the end of it she was in Copenhagen harbour where a British torpedo boat with a crewman on board from Furnace in Argyll -- Peter McIntyre -- sailed in to accept her surrender papers. In the share out of the booty, she went to the Americans as the USS Prinz Eugen. She was allocated to the target fleet for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. She survived two of them -- in July 1946 -- but was then too radioactive to have leaks repaired. In September that year she was towed to Kwajalein Atoll and later capsized there over Enubuj reef. She lies there still.
And here’s a contemporary curiosity. Russian squillionaire Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club, is having a £200 million megayacht -- the world’s largest, plushest and most secure (it will carry anti-missile radar) built for him -- at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg that built the Bismarck. (Abramovich’s yacht is called ‘Eclipse’, said to be because it will put all other megayachts in the shade.)
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