THE bane of convoys to North Russia from the moment that she was moved from the Baltic to Norway in January 1942, the battleship Tirpitz tied down for nearly three years precious naval units, including aircraft carriers and battleships that could have been used to swing the balance of power at sea in many other theatres of the war. The mere suggestion that she might be at sea led to tragedy in the summer of 1942 when the convoy PQ17 was ordered to scatter, and in consequence suffered grievous losses of ships and men.
Small wonder that the destruction of this powerful German battleship became well nigh an obsession with both naval and air force staffs.
By the summer of 1944 more than a dozen attacks had been made on her in Norway from high and low level, as well as from beneath the sea: by Bomber Command, the Fleet Air Arm and midget X-craft submarines. In some of these, she had suffered considerable damage. The Navy’s X-craft had detonated charges under her hull, and badly damaged her turbines. The Fleet Air Arm’s Barracudas and Hellcat fighters had killed and wounded 400 of her crew and wreaked havoc on her superstructure. But the Barracudas’ 2,000lb bombs had nevertheless failed to penetrate her armour. Thus, September 1944 opened with Tirpitz still lurking securely in her heavily defended lair, the Kaa inlet off Altenfjord — as big a threat to the British convoy lifeline to Russia as ever.
By autumn 1944 a weapon at least capable of inflicting fatal damage on the heavily armoured battleship was at hand. This was the 12,000lb Tallboy, a penetration bomb designed by Barnes Wallis, of Dambusters fame. It had already achieved striking successes (dropped by 617 Squadron no less), obliterating the concrete E-boat pens at Le Havre and the supposedly impregnable bunkers in the Pas de Calais that housed the batteries of the long-range V3 — Hitler’s “ supergun” — which had been intended to pour death and destruction upon London.
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But in Altenfjord, high inside the Arctic Circle, Tirpitz was beyond the range even of the magnificent Lancaster bomber when carrying such a heavy load as the Tallboy from Lossiemouth, the RAF’s most northerly heavy-bomber base. With the Soviet Union’s permission, it was resolved therefore to attack her from Russia. Two squadrons of Lancasters, 617 and 9, would fly to Yagodnik, an airfield on an island in the Dvina river 20 miles north west of Archangel.
Air reconnaissance would be vital in a mountainous area so prone to violent changes in weather. Therefore, the experienced Mosquito pilot Squadron Leader George Watson, at that time luxuriating in the September sun on the grass at RAF Benson, Oxfordshire, was the man chosen to fly to Yagodnik to provide the Tirpitz strike force with the up-to-date weather information without which it could not hope to succeed.
After the long flight from Lossiemouth, Watson and the Lancaster crews arrived dog-tired at Yagodnik, whose ramshackle facilities, its billets crawling with bugs, were to be their home for the next five days. The weather, fair when they had set out, closed in, and torrential rain turned their surroundings into a sea of mud. Vodka was on tap in plenty from their friendly Russian hosts, who tried desperately to amuse the British airmen. As the man who had to make the daily, and dangerous, reconnaissance flights over the fjord whatever the weather, at the same time as escaping detection by the German flak defences, Watson eschewed the tumblers of the crystal clear fluid that were proferred on every occasion.
Finally on September 15 Watson found a break in the cloud over Altenfjord, and made the snap decision that an attack was feasible. Problems with the Russian transmitters made a radio message impossible, so he headed back for Yagodnik with his Mosquito at full throttle, diving low over the airfield as the prearranged signal to the bomber crews that the operation was on, before landing to make a full report. Within minutes the 27 Lancasters of 9 and 617 Squadrons were rolling over the bumpy grass and lifting off with their heavy bomb loads.
As the Lancasters approached Altenfjord, Tirpitz lay, as Watson had forecast, clearly visible in bright sunlight. But the Kaa inlet was ringed with a belt of scores of smoke pots which could completely obscure it in eight minutes. The bombers were still two minutes from their release point as the veils of smoke smothered their target. Only Tirpitz’s topmast was visible through the veil as the leading bomber reached its aiming point. The remainder were forced to bomb on gunflashes occasionally seen through the smoke. In spite of valiant attempts from pilots and bomb aimers, no hits could be confirmed.
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The Lancaster crews returned, bitterly disappointed, to Yagodnik, to confront their Russian hosts who were just as gloomy at the failure.
Meanwhile, Watson was dispatched back to Altenfjord to assess the damage. But by that time the weather had closed down again. Although he found a hole in the cloud and dived low over the ship through intense fire from more than 45 guns round the fjord, as well as from Tirpitz’s own anti-aircraft armament, the poor visibility made it impossible to take any meaningful pictures. He and the Lancaster crews returned to England in dejection.
It was only much later, after 9 and 617 Squadrons had finally sunk the Tirpitz in Tromsø fjord, further south, that Watson and the bomber crews learnt that their September 15 attack had in fact been a complete success. One of the Tallboys dropped by 617 had smashed through Tirpitz’s foredeck, wrecking her turrets and damaging her beyond repair. The Germans had had to tow her to Tromsö, where she was anchored in shallow water merely as a token floating fortress. The September 15 raid had ended her career as a fighting ship, and the DFC awarded to Watson on that occasion was richly deserved.
George Watson was born in Alford, Lincolnshire. He had always wanted to fly, and in 1936 joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Learning to fly at Woodley, near Reading, he was a flying instructor at Waltham, Lincolnshire, before the war and for the first two years of it. He subsequently flew meteorological reconnaissance Spitfires before being posted to 540 Squadron. This was a Coastal Command photo reconnaissance unit at Benson, and his performance with it led to his role in the destruction of the Tirpitz.
Demobilised in December 1945 he went to live in Derby, where he was offered a job as a flying club instructor. As the money was not very good he chose to work for a London-based manufacturing company, and later for Kennings Motor Group in Derby, until he retired.
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His wife, Peggy, died in 2003. He is survived by a son and daughter.
Squadron Leader George Watson, DFC, wartime reconnaissance pilot, was born on March 9, 1911. He died on August 24, 2006, aged 95.