Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we're devoting the first of two episodes to the epic tale of the German

battleship Turpitz, which was finally sunk by R.A.F. Bombers on the 12th of November

1944, 80 years ago. Patrick covered all of this in his brilliant book, Target Turpits,

X-Craft, agents and dambusters, the epic quest to destroy Hitler's mightiest warship. Patrick, I don't know if you

remember, but I reviewed the book in the Daily Telegraph. And my first paragraph, I'm just going to

read out, because I think it sets the scene quite nicely, and it goes something like this.

Where is Terpitz wrote a jittery Winston Churchill to his first sea lord in December

1942? It was not a lone inquiry,

and the exact whereabouts of Hitler's mightiest warship were to remain a constant

preoccupation for the Prime Minister for much of the war. So dangerous did he consider the

turpets that in January 1942 he had told his naval chief that the, and I quote,

the crippling of this ship would alter the

entire face of the naval war and the loss of 100 machines and 500 airmen would be well

compensated for. So you can see clearly there that Churchill all the way through this extraordinary

story is very concerned as to what Terpitz can do to the British War effect.

So to set the scene, Patrick, give us a little bit of a sense of Turpitz scale when the ship

was launched and why it was considered such a threat by Churchill and others.

Yes, interesting, isn't it? I think this is a kind of indication of Churchill's sort of Edwardian

mindset when the big battleship was, you know, the mightiest

beast in the military arsenals of the world. And of course, Britain had a big lead, having

the biggest Navy. So, of course, Churchill had been first Lord of the Admiralty, so the political

...