Hello Antonio,
We need now to properly correlate what Adm Tovey wrote on his letters being occurred on the same time slot
This would actually be possible if your co-author wasn't petulantly withholding the information in those letters. Perhaps you can persuade him to change his mind?
and he signalled accordingly,
There is no evidence he did this.
but by then it was known that the Bismarck was actually steaming in the wrong direction.
Sheffield reported Bismarck steering 115T at 19:37B on the 26th but by 21:13B was reporting Bismarck steering 340T which is the origin of the famous "Larcom has joined the Reciprocal Club" observation. At 21:40 Sheffield reported Bismarck steering 000T.
Therefore the earliest Churchill can have been told about Bismarck's change of heading was 21:13B plus receipt and decoding time. At this time any specious nonsense about the "Shores of France" became obsolete, because Bismarck was not heading anywhere near there.
"We cannor Envisage" and the "Shores of France" are obvious Churchillisms and to me it is clear Pound indulged the PM with the pretence he would send such a drafted message
without actually doing so. It would be bloody silly and grossly irresponsible to order Tovey to throw his flagship, crew and own life away in a pointless chase after an uncatchable foe. The ridiculous concept of towing KG V under sustained U-boat and air attack could only have been thought up by a politician whose arrogance meant thought he knew far more about naval matters than he actually did.
By,say, 21:30B it was no longer necessary, but Pound thought he would still stick his own oar in with a little advice about reminding Tovey he could use his destroyers for a night attack. "Dooh! Gee boss, thanks, I would never have thought of that!" thought Tovey, but kept transmissions to a minimum as he was maintaining radio silence.
However, Tovey's singlemindedness to get on with the job overnight and the following day without Head Office interference, meant he did not give enough progress reports to satisfy the anxious. When, at 10:28B on the 27th the Admiralty intercepted his message to Somerville, saying Bismarck was still afloat and he was breaking off for fuel, frustration boiled over. Where was Churchill then? We know he was addressing the House of Commons when the news of the sinking came through, but was he pestering Pound senseless for news before he went in?
Was it as a result that "the Stupidest and most ill-considered signal" 11:37B was sent? Mangled wording from the draft, but never sent message from the previous night with the irrelevant "Shores of France" chopped out, and "at the scene" substituted?
So how then could Tovey remember the direct order to sail to the "Shores of France"? I believe in the heated phone call on arrival, whilst being haranged by an angry Tovey, Pound blurted out that the message could have been far stupider, and described the draft. This did nothing to cool the situation and during the continuing argy-bargy, Pound also mentioned he had been told to get CMDS underway, although I believe he had no intention of doing so. By then the situation was irredeemable and although Tovey continued in his role, his trust in Pound to protect serving commanders from ill-informed political interference never recovered. Other incidents would have reinforced this attitude, eg PQ 17.
By the time Pound applied his Standard Operating Procedure, of handling Winston's Chequers rant about wanting Leach and Wake-Walker's "butts", in his pusillanimous interim report on the Monday, the great Man/Beast had moved on to other matters, and there was no demand from anywhere for CMDS.
By the early 1950s fact and "might have been" had become completely muddled in Tovey's memory, and he was convinced he had received the draft even though it was never sent. This was the source of his outrage heading all four letters. He was convinced he had personally defeated the CMDS threat just by saying no and threatening to haul down his flag in the phone call. Interestingly this was the same day Cunningham offered his resignation as C-in-C Mediterranean, after the Crete debacle as well.
Out of this over-reliance on a single witness recollection has come the whole CMDS saga. Other matters discussed in the same phone call are shown to be inaccurate including non-existent signals, details like the expunging and the CMDS itself are not included at every retelling, and sadly authors who want the thrill of exposing an intemperate Prime Minister influence retell without investigating.
We need more detail about the Tovey-Roskill letters. Come on Alberto. Publish and damn the consequences.
All the best
wadinga