Narvik/Tromso

[turnipbmw]

Had a nose around these during my Arctic circle trip this year.

Very good museum in Narvik (50 krona entry) lots of Royal Navy stuff and a section on a concentration camp that I had never heard of before.

Very pleasant ride along the Fjord where RN chased and destroyed about 9 German destroyers.


In stark contrast to the no surrender/always attack attitude of our navy, the final resting place of the Tirpitz at Tromso is a sad monument to muddled leadership of the German surface fleet and the redundancy of this kind of weapon by the time of its launch.

There is a small museum based in some old bunkers along the waterfront about a mile northbound towards the bridge.

Custodian visits UK often, especially RAF reunions and donations are accepted towards upkeep.

Well worth getting one of the Tirpitz story books before hand as our many attempts to destroy it make for seat of the chair reading.

Its final destruction is typically British, RAF chaps playing rugga when Sqadron leader comes out and askes them if they fancy a jolly prang tonight.

The reality was that the ship was completely hopeless by this stage of the war due to many previous attacks but it almost seems that they just wanted to get rid of a load of Tallboy 10 ton bombs before the end of the war.

I think they dropped 40 of them in the end from about 20,000 feet.
Even a near miss would do huge damage but 2 actually went straight through the ship and exploded on the Fjord bottom causing large loss of life.

Area worth a visit due to natual beauty anyway

 

[Twotter]

Okay, I'll bite

There are two sides to the argument that Tirpitz was completely hopeless. Bomber Harris was against the idea of bombing her but he was pretty much against anything that didn't go along with his own vision of how the bomber war should be prosecuted. The flip side is that her mere presence threatened the arctic convoy routes and as such she represented a major target.

I don't quite go along with your view of RAF crews of the day. By 1944 I doubt many bomber crews would have looked on an operation as a 'jolly prang'. Let's not forget that it was crews from 9Sqn and 617Sqn who carried out the final raid and they were very experienced and very brave men.

More info here

Good old wikipedia has details of further raids where the Tallboy was used so I think it's unlikley that the Tirpitz raid was simply one of using up existing ordnance stocks.

See here

 

[turnipbmw]

I am sure you are right, the book I am loosely quoting from is a 1975 tabloid stye number.
Same as every book you read, clever dicks with hindsight.

Love the idea of wasting 1000's of gallon of fuel just to dump some bombs though.

Reminds me of working for the Gas board, the foreman had ordered about 20 starter rings for bedford HA vans by mistake.

So every service we had to strip the vans out and fit one.

or where I work now, manager loves buying spares for everything, equipment goes out of date and gets replaced.

Boxes of new spares go into skip.