Bismarck

1941

Germany's largest, three days after Hood Location: North Atlantic, ~300 nmi west of Brest, France · Coordinates: 48.17°N 16.33°W · Casualties: ~2,100 · Survivors: 114 · Depth: 4,790 m · Cause: naval gunfire · torpedo — Crippled by a Fairey Swordfish torpedo which jammed her rudder at 21:05 on 26 May 1941. Unable to steer, she was engaged the following morning by HMS King George V, HMS Rodney, and accompanying cruisers. After an 88-minute gun duel she was finished by torpedoes from HMS Dorsetshire and, by some accounts, scuttling charges set by her own crew. · Fate: abyssal plain · located 1989 · Type: battleship · Bismarck class · Tonnage: 50,900 tons · Crew: 2200 · Flag: Nazi Germany · Launched: 1939 Germany's largest warship, flagship of the Kriegsmarine. Sank HMS Hood on 24 May 1941 in the Denmark Strait; three days later, crippled by a Fairey Swordfish torpedo to her rudder, she was pounded into scrap by the Royal Navy. ~2,100 dead, 114 rescued. Found by Robert Ballard in 1989, four and a half kilometres down, upright on the abyssal plain. The Vessel The Bismarck was a battleship of the new Kriegsmarine, the first of two ordered under the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement and completed in Hamburg in August 1940. At 50,900 tons full load she was the largest warship Germany had ever built, 251 metres long, armed with eight 38 cm guns in four twin turrets, with a secondary battery of twelve 15 cm guns and an armour scheme that could shrug off most contemporary British fire at standard battle ranges. She carried a crew of 2,200. Her design was the product of a German naval staff still working to the last generation's doctrine: a long-range commerce raider as much as a fleet battleship, built to survive single-ship engagements at range and to break out into the Atlantic convoy routes. Her armour was concentrated amidships against flat-trajectory fire, leaving her bow, stern, and steering gear relatively lightly protected. The weakness of her stern armour would be her undoing. Admiral Erich Raeder intended her to sail in company with her sister Tirpitz and the two Scharnhorst-class battlecruisers as a four-ship squadron against the Atlantic convoy system. By the spring of 1941 only Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen were available; Tirpitz was still working up, Scharnhorst was refitting from a broken boiler tube, Gneisenau had been hit by an RAF torpedo in Brest harbour. Operation Rheinübung, her sortie into the Atlantic, was ordered against the urging of both ship captains to wait for the heavier force. The Disaster For a day and a half she ran south-east at twenty-four knots with Force H steaming up from Gibraltar and the Home Fleet closing from the north. The RAF's Coastal Command lost her in heavy weather on the afternoon of 25 May; the Royal Navy lost her too. She had turned south earlier than the British had expected, and the Home Fleet spent that night chasing empty sea. An American-built Catalina of 209 Squadron, flown by a Royal Air Force crew with an American naval officer as co-pilot, relocated her at 10:30 on 26 May, roughly 700 miles west of Brest. She was now within reach of Ark Royal's Swordfish torpedo bombers. The afternoon strike found the wrong target and attacked the British cruiser Sheffield instead; the torpedoes mercifully malfunctioned. The evening strike, launched into worsening weather at 19:10, put a Swordfish torpedo into Bismarck's rudder compartment. Her rudders were jammed twelve degrees to port. She could no longer steer. Through the night she circled into the westerly gale, unable to make for the French coast and unable to turn into the wind. Rodney and King George V closed at dawn on 27 May. The gun duel that followed lasted eighty-eight minutes; the British ships fired 2,876 shells at point-blank ranges and Bismarck was battered to a floating hulk. Rodney's heavy shells penetrated her bridge, her turrets, her boiler rooms; fires burned from end to end. Her crew scuttled her, or so they later claimed, at around 10:35. Dorsetshire's torpedoes finished the