The Lonely Sea by Alistair MacLean

the water, being mercilessly battered into extinction. But there was no thought of mercy at the time, only of revenge and destruction, and understandably so: only four days had elapsed since the Hood and fifteen hundred men had gone to their deaths—and the Stukas and U-boats might appear on the scene at any moment.
    Already, within fifteen minutes of the first shots being fired, there was a marked deterioration in the Bismarck’ s rate and accuracy of fire. Heavy shells from the two British capital ships were beginning to smash into her, and the concussive impact of the exploding missiles, the clouds of acrid smoke and the bedlam of sound mingling with the crash of their own guns had a devastating and utterly demoralizing effect on the already dazed and exhausted gun crews crouched within their turrets.
    Those few officers who still clung stubbornly to the bridge of the Bismarck could see that the gunfire from the King George V was falling off and becoming increasingly spasmodic (suffering from the same turret troubles as her sister ship the Prince of Wales, the King George V had, at one time, only two guns out of her ten capable of firing) and ordered every available gun to concentrate on the Rodney. But it was too late.
    The Rodney, close in now, had the range and had it accurately. The big 16-inch shells, each one 2,700 pounds of armour-piercing high explosive, were crashing into the vitals of the shuddering Bismarck with steadily increasing frequency. One 16-inch shell struck the fire control tower, blasting it completely over the side, and after that all semblance of concerted firing and defence ceased. Another 16-inch shell silenced both for’ard turrets at once, wrecking ‘A’ turretand blowing part of ‘B’ turret back over the bridge, killing most of the officers and men left there. Shells from both battleships were exploding deep in the heart of the Bismarck, wrecking the engine rooms, destroying the fuel tanks and adding hundreds of tons of fuel to feed the great fires now raging in the entire mid-section of the ship, the roaring flames clearly visible through the great jagged gaps torn in the ship’s side and armour-plating.
    â€˜Nightmarish’ is the only word to describe the dreadful scenes now taking place aboard that battered, holed and flaming shambles of twisted steel and broken bodies that was all that was left of the Bismarck and its crew.
    Sixteen-inch shells from the Rodney, by this time at a point-blank range of only two miles, were now hitting the Bismarck two, four, even six at a time, and groups of fear-maddened men on the upper deck were running blindly backward and forward like crazed animals seeking escape from the twin terrors of these lethal broadsides and the red-hot deck-plates beginning to twist and buckle under their very feet: most of them chose the easy way out, a leap into the shell-torn sea and death by drowning.
    In the turrets, sailors abandoned their now useless guns, mutinied and rushed for the turret doors. Some of the commanding officers of the turrets committed suicide, and others turned pistolson their own men, only to be overwhelmed: and then, the men found that the doors were warped and jammed fast, and they went down to the floor of the Atlantic locked in the iron coffin of the turret they had served so well.
    Hatches, too, jammed shut all over the Bismarck. Two hundred men, imprisoned thus in the canteen, were fighting madly to force their way out, when a shell crashed through the deck and exploded inside, all the concussive blast and murderous storm of flying shrapnel confined to that one narrow space. There were no survivors.
    But they were the lucky ones in the manner of their dying—lucky, that is, compared to the ghastly fate of the sailors trapped in magazines. Raging fires surrounded these magazines on nearly every side, and as the metal bulkheads grew steadily hotter until they began to glow dull red, the magazine temperatures