"Wolfgang Zenker" damaged her propellers and was restricted to a speed of . "Erich Koellner" was much more badly damaged, so the Germans planned—when she was repaired enough to move—to moor her at Tårstad in the same capacity as "Diether von Roeder", as an immobile defence battery. As the British destroyers left the Vestfjorden outside Narvik, two German submarines— and —fired torpedoes at them but German torpedoes at the time had severe problems with their magnetic detonator systems—possibly due to the high northern latitude: all of them failed and either did not detonate at all or detonated well before their targets. Both the German naval commander—"Kommodore" Friedrich Bonte (on "Wilhelm Heidkamp")—and the British commander—Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee (on "Hardy")—were killed in the battle. Warburton-Lee was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, Bonte the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. The Royal Navy considered it imperative, for morale and strategic purposes, to defeat the Germans in Narvik, so Vice Admiral William Whitworth was sent with the battleship and nine destroyers; four Tribal-class (, , "Punjabi", and ) and five others (HMS "Kimberley", , , "Forester" and "Foxhound"), accompanied by aircraft from the aircraft carrier . These forces arrived in the Ofotfjord on 13 April to find that the eight remaining German destroyers—now under the command of "Fregattenkapitän" Erich Bey—were virtually stranded due to lack of fuel and were short of ammunition. Before the battle, "Warspite" launched its catapult plane (a float-equipped Fairey Swordfish, L 9767), which bombed and sank , anchored in the Herjangsfjord near Bjerkvik. Most of the crew survived and were rescued by German mountain troops. This was the first U-boat to be sunk by an aircraft during the Second World War and the only instance where an aircraft launched from a battleship sank a U-boat. In the ensuing battle, three of the German destroyers were sunk by "Warspite" and her escorts and the other five were scuttled by their crews when they ran out of fuel and ammunition. First to go was "Erich Koellner" which tried to ambush the Allied forces but was spotted by "Warspite"s Swordfish and subsequently torpedoed and shelled by the destroyers and battleship.