German battleship Bismarck
| File:BismarckColor.jpg | |
| Career | 
|
|---|---|
| Ordered: | 16 November 1935 |
| Laid down: | 1 July 1936 |
| Launched: | 14 February 1939 |
| Commissioned: | 20 August 1940 |
| Fate: | Sunk on 27 May 1941 |
| General Characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 41,700 t standard; 50,900 t full load |
| Length: | 241.6 m waterline 251 m overall |
| Width: | 36.0 m |
| Draft: | 8.7 m standard 10.2 m full load |
| Armament: | 8 x 380 mm (15 in) (4×2) 12 x 150 mm (5.9 in) (6×2) 16 x 105 mm (4.1 in) (4×2) 16 x 37 mm (8×2) 12 x 20 mm (12 x 1) |
| Aircraft: | 4, with 1 double-ended catapult |
| Propulsion: | 12 Wagner superheated boilers; 3 Brown-Boveri geared turbines; 3 three-blade propellers, 4.85 m diameter 150,170 hp (110 MW) = 30.1 knots (54 km/h) trials |
| Range: | 9280 nautical miles (17,200 km) @ 16 knots (30 km/h) |
| Complement: | 2,092 (103 officers, 1962 enlisted, 27 prize crew) |
The German battleship Bismarck was probably the most famous warship of the Second World War. Named after the 19th century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, her fame came from her sinking the flagship and pride of the Royal Navy, the battlecruiser HMS Hood in 1941, and for the subsequent pursuit by the Royal Navy which ended with loss just three days later.
History
Design of the ship started in 1930. The construction of the second French Dunkerque class battleship made redesign necessary, and Bismarck's displacement increased to 42,600 tons, although officially her tonnage was still only 35,000 tons in accordance with the Washington Naval Treaty. She was to be the prototype of the proposed battleships envisaged under Plan Z. She was intended primarily as a commerce-raider, having fuel stores as large as those of battleships intended for operations in the Pacific ocean, but was also capable of engaging enemy warships on at least equal terms.
Her keel was laid down at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg on 1 July 1936. She was launched on 14 February 1939 and commissioned in August 1940 with Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann in command.
Combat history
Breakout into the Atlantic
Bismarck sailed on her first and only mission, codenamed Rheinübung, on 18 May 1941, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Other German capital ships that were to have participated in the sortie were unavailable because of mechanical problems and war damage, but the mission went ahead under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens. The Germans had various objectives: compensate for their weak submarine presence in the Atlantic; divert British naval forces from the Mediterranean to reduce the risks of the planned invasion of Crete and to allow Rommel and his forces to cross to Libya.
The British Admiralty learnt of Bismarck's departure from a combination of deciphered Enigma code messages, a report from a Swedish cruiser that sighted the battleship and the Norwegian resistance. Three days later, she was photographed by a Spitfire reconnaissance aircraft while resting in a Norwegian fjord. Later, in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland, she encountered and was shadowed by the radar-equipped heavy cruisers HMS Suffolk and Norfolk, that had been patrolling the Denmark Strait in the expectation of a German breakout.
Battle of the Denmark Strait
On 24 May 1941, as the German squadron was leaving the Denmark Strait, they were engaged by a British force consisting of the battleship Prince of Wales and Hood, under the command of Rear Admiral Lancelot Holland. Prince of Wales had only recently been completed and was still being worked up (indeed, she sailed to meet Bismarck with dockyard workmen still on board completing her fitting out). Hood had been built as a fast battlecruiser and modified to give her protection more like a battleship, but still had relatively weak deck armour.
Holland ordered fire to be concentrated on the leading German ship Prinz Eugen, mistakenly believing it to be Bismarck. Fortunately for the British, the captain of Prince of Wales soon realized the error. The British charged straight towards the German ships in an attempt to get in to their "zone of immunity". Closer in, the Hood would be less vulnerable to plunging fire and the advantage of superior German gunnery control would be neutralized. The disadvantage was that, during the dash, eight of the eighteen British heavy guns could not be brought to bear and spray severely hampered accurate fire control.
When nearly inside the zone of immunity Hood was hit by Prinz Eugen, causing fire to break out. She then took one of the Bismarck's first salvos amidships. Moments later she was split in two by a huge explosion. Splinters from the explosion rained down on the Prince of Wales, half a mile away. Only three of her 1,418 crew survived this catastrophic explosion.
Prince of Wales turned toward the German ships to avoid hitting the wreckage left by the flagship and was hit a number of times. Mechanical failures left her with all but one of her main guns out of action, so she turned and escaped behind a smokescreen. Incredibly, the Germans had blown one capital ship out of the water and forced another to turn away, something almost unknown in the Royal Navy. Although Captain Lindemann wanted to chase the Prince of Wales in order to finish her off, he was overruled by Admiral Lutjens, who was ordered to avoid engaging enemy battleships.
Bismarck, however, had received three hits, one of which caused water to leak into and contaminate fuel oil in storage. From then on, she had to reduce speed to conserve fuel, and left an oil slick trail. Admiral Lütjens eventually decided to head for the French coast (the dry-dock in St Nazaire) for repairs. The British continued to shadow her, with Prince of Wales keeping in touch but out of range of the lethal German guns. At one stage Bismarck rounded briefly on her pursuers, which gave the Prinz Eugen the opportunity to detach and escape.
Chase
Determined to avenge the sinking of Hood, the British committed every possible unit to hunting down Bismarck. During the early evening of 24 May an attack was made by a small group of Swordfish biplane torpedo planes from 825 Naval Air Squadron of the aircraft carrier Victorious. One hit was scored, but caused only superficial damage to Bismarck’s armoured belt. The chase continued, with both sides beginning to be concerned about fuel, but the Germans getting ever closer to France and protective air cover and destroyer escort. Contact was lost for more than six hours but, perhaps in awe of British radar capabilities, it appears that the Germans did not realise their good fortune. For reasons still disputed, Admiral Lütjens transmitted a half-hour radio message to HQ, which was intercepted thereby giving the British time to work out roughly where he was heading. Unfortunately, a plotting error made on board King George V, which was now in pursuit of the Germans, incorrectly calculated Bismarck’s position and caused the chase to veer too far to the north. Bismarck was therefore able to make good time in her unhindered passage towards France.
The British had a major stroke of luck on 26 May when a Coastal Command Catalina reconnaissance aircraft from Number 209 Squadron, flying out of Northern Ireland, spotted Bismarck and reported her position to the Admiralty. From then on, the German ship's position was known to the British.
At dusk on 26 May and in worsening weather conditions, Swordfish from Ark Royal launched an attack. The first wave mistakenly targeted the cruiser Sheffield that was shadowing the quarry. In a subsequent attack, almost in darkness, a single torpedo hit jammed Bismarck’s rudder and steering gear. This rendered her largely unmanoeuvrable and heading towards her enemies, although she was able to make some steerage by adjusting the revolution speed of her propellers. However, the largest and most powerful warships afloat had been rendered a sitting-duck by tiny aircraft. After extensive efforts to free the jammed rudders, the fleet command finally acknowledged their by-now impossible position in several messages to Naval Headquarters.
Throughout the following night, Bismarck was the target of incessant torpedo attacks by the Tribal class destroyers Cossack, Sikh, Maori and Zulu, with the Polish Piorun, but neither side scored any hits.
The Sinking of the Bismarck
Two British battleships, King George V and Rodney, had been sailing to approach Bismarck from the west. On the morning of 27 May 1941 they neared her, with the morning sun in the background and their enemy well illuminated. Rodney steered to the north so that her gunfire would work the length of Bismarck, while King George V took the side. They opened fire just before 0900. Bismarck returned fire, but her inability to steer and her list to port severely affected her shooting capacity. Her low speed also made her an easy target and she was soon hit several times, with Norfolk and Dorsetshire adding their firepower. One salvo destroyed the forward control post, killing most of the senior officers. Within half an hour, Bismarck's guns were all but silent and she was even lower in the water. Rodney now closed to point blank range (approx 3 km) to strike the superstructure while King George V fired from further out.
Bismarck continued to fly its ensign. With no sign of surrender, despite the unequal struggle, the British were loathe to leave the Bismarck. Their fuel and shell supplies were low - a demonstration of how difficult it was for a battleship to sink a similar unit in a balanced engangement. However, when it became obvious that the Germans could not reach port, Rodney, King George V, and the destroyers were sent home. Norfolk had used its last torpedoes so Dorsetshire was ordered to finish off the enemy with a torpedo. A debate still rages as to the final sinking: was it caused by a torpedo, a scuttling, or a combination of both?
Dorsetshire and Maori stopped to rescue survivors but a U-boat alarm caused them to sail off with only 110 sailors. The next morning a U-boat and the German weathership Sachsenwald picked up 5 more. No crew from the lower engine spaces got out alive. Over 2,200 German sailors were lost.
The British then systematically hunted down and destroyed all Bismarck's support vessels. The Germans never risked their capital ships in the North Atlantic again.
Aftermath
Over the years, the ship achieved near mythological status, and popularized in the 1960 Johnny Horton hit song, Sink the Bismarck. The wreck of Bismarck was discovered on 8 June 1989 by Dr Robert Ballard, the marine archaeologist also responsible for finding the Titanic. Bismarck rests at a depth of approximately 4,700 m (15,500 ft) about 650 kilometres west of Brest, France. Analysis of the wreck showed extensive damage to the superstructure by shelling and some minor damage to the hull by torpedo hits, but also suggested that the Germans scuttled the ship to hasten its sinking, though this has never been confirmed by marine investigators (but confirmed by survivors). Ballard has kept the location of the wreck a secret to prevent other divers from taking artifacts from the ship. Ballard considers that practice, which happened to Titanic, a form of grave robbing.
A later dive on the wreck also identified the location, and brought back further images, as part of a documentary sponsored by the British Channel 4 on the Bismarck and HMS Hood
The documentary film Expedition: Bismarck (2002), directed by James Cameron, reconstructs the events leading to the sinking of Bismarck.
Controversy
The second Bismarck expedition was funded by British entities as part of a tour to the wreckage of Hood, which was found and filmed in 2001. The new research firmly centered on an otherwise insignificant issue of the Bismarck sinking under British fire versus self-scuttling to avoid capture, even though the cause of the ship's final demise was enemy action. This question of British or German national pride gained propaganda status after the Hood's extremely shredded and mangled remains were shown on TV, which many English people considered humiliating in the face of Bismarck's easily recognizable and relatively well-preserved hull.
The British crew first conducted its own sonar survey from scratch to find the Bismarck wreck site, based solely on publicly available information that it was resting at the feet of an undersea volcano, the only one located in the particular area. Then they used ROVs to film the Bismarck's hull externally and firmly concluded the ship sank due to combat damage, receiving numerous artillery and torpedo hits from British vessels.
Dr. Ballard, the original discoverer of Bismarck's wreck criticized the documentary, citing what he considered nationalistic, biased research of limited historic value due to lack of thoroughness. A new American expedition visited the site using smaller and more agile ROVs. These provided some interior shots of Bismarck for the first time, which were aired as part of a one-hour documentary film on NGC.
That survey found no underwater penetrations of the Bismarck's fully armoured citadel and only four direct hit holes on it above the waterline, all of them on one side, as delivered by the HMS Rodney's 406mm (16") guns. Each of those hits killed 150 to 200 sailors on average, but did not threaten the Bismarck's structural integrity. Huge dent marks signify that 356mm (14") projectiles, as fired by the King George V fast battleship, bounced off the Wotan type German belt armour. Interior ROV footage showed that the "terrible destruction" the British expedition reported was in fact the torpedo bulges, which were designed to absorb the energy of torpedoes and plunging shells. Underneath the torn bulge sheeting, Bismarck's 330mm (11") thick main belt armour is intact.
The American expedition's final conclusions were strikingly different from the findings of the British expedition. They determined the Bismarck still had floating capacity for at least one day when the British vessels ceased fire and could possibly have been captured by the Royal Navy. Thus the direct cause of sinking was due to self-scuttling, the sabotage of bottom valves by her crew, as claimed by German survivors. A detailed look at computer analysis of the hull's eventual impact on the seabottom explains unintuitive damage as a result of hydrodynamic impact shock inside the ship which was still girded by an uninterrupted curtain of armour. Extensive video footage of the wreck shows the hull is in excellent condition and expected to last at least 300 years.
Although no research infringes on the basic fact that the root cause of Bismarck's crippling and sinking lays in the giantic British naval efforts, the NGC channel has refrained from re-airing the critical programme since 2004, while the flawed British documentary is regularly re-run on NGC and the Discovery Channel.
Ships relevant to the history of Bismarck
Nearly a hundred ships of all kinds were deployed to operate with, against, or because of Bismarck:
- The German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen
- The German destroyers Hans Lody (Z-10), Friedrich Eckoldt (Z-16), and Z-23.
- The German submarines U-46, U-48, U-66, U-73, U-74, U-93, U-94, U-98, U-108, U-138, U-552, U-556, and U-557.
- The Italian submarines Barbarigo and Ghilieri.
- The German weather ships Sachsenwald, Lauenburg, and Freese.
- The German tankers Belchen, Egerland, Esso Hamburg, Friedrich Breme, Heide, Lohingen, Weisenburg, and Wollin.
- Boats of the German 5th Minesweeping Flotilla.
- The British battleships HMS King George V, Prince of Wales, Ramillies, Revenge, Rodney, and Nelson.
- The British battlecruisers HMS Hood, Repulse and Renown
- The British aircraft carriers Victorious (800Z and 825 Naval Air Squadrons) and Ark Royal (810, 818, and 820 Naval Air Squadrons)
- The British heavy cruisers HMS Suffolk, Norfolk, Dorsetshire, and London; and Exeter, with convoy WS-8B.
- The British light cruisers HMS Kenya, Galatea, Aurora, Neptune, Hermione, Edinburgh, Manchester, Arethusa, Birmingham, and Sheffield; and Cairo, with convoy WS-8B.
- The British destroyers HMS Achates, Antelope, Anthony, Echo, Somali, Eskimo, Nestor, Jupiter, Electra, Icarus, Active, Inglefield, Intrepid, Lance, Legion, Punjabi, Windsor, Mashona, Cossack, Sikh, Zulu, Maori, Tartar, Faulknor, Foresight, Forester, Foxhound,, Fury, Sherwood, and Hesperus.
- The British submarines H-44, P-31, Sealion, Seawolf, Tigris, Sturgeon, Severn, and Pandora.
- The Canadian destroyers HMCS Assiniboine, HMCS Saguenay, and HMCS Columbia
- The Free French submarine Minerve
- The Polish destroyer Piorun
- The Swedish seaplane cruiser Gotland
- The Spanish heavy cruiser Canarias (attempted to rescue some survivors from Bismarck)
- The US Coast Guard cutter Modoc
See also
- The sister ship Tirpitz and the second ship of the Bismarck class battleships.
References
- Ludovic Kennedy, Pursuit: The Sinking of the Bismarck
- Ulrich Elfrath and Bodo Herzog, The Battleship Bismarck: A Documentary in Words and Pictures (Schifer Publishing; Atglen, Pennsylvania; 1989) (originally published in German as Schlachtschiff Bismarck, Ein Bericht in Bildern und Dokumentation, Pldzun-Palles Vertag, Friedberg, 1975). Includes pictures of the ship under construction and interior pictures, detailed descriptions of fittings and equipment, and biographies of the principal admirals.
Further reading
- Burkhard Baron von Mullenheim-Rechberg, Battleship Bismarck, A Survivor's Story, new and expanded edition (United States Naval Institute, Annapolis, 1990), the story of the senior surviving officer of the Bismarck.
- Paul J. Kemp, Bismarck and Hood: Great Naval Adversaries (Arms and Armor Press, London, 1991)
- Siegfried Breyer, Battleships and Battlecruisers 1905-1970 (Doubleday and Company; Garden City, New York, 1973) (originally published in German as Schlachtschiffe und Schlachtkreuzer 1905-1970, J.F. Lehmanns, Verlag, Munchen, 1970). Contains various line drawings of the ship as designed and as built.
- David J. Bercuson and Holder H. Herwig The Destruction of the Bismarck (Stoddart Pulishing, Toronto, 2001). Includes personal accounts of the Battle Off Iceland and the Final Battle.
- Graham Rhys-Jones The Loss of the Bismarck: An Avoidable Disaster (Cassell & Company, London, 1999). Includes a description of the planning for Exercise Rheinubung.
- Robert D. Ballard The Discovery of the Bismarck (Madison Publishing, Toronto, 1990). Describes the search effort for the wreck of the Bismarck, and includes pictures of the wreck.