German battleship Bismarck

• 1. Introduction

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  Bismarck was a battleship that lived for only eight months, conducted exactly one offensive operation, and spent just eight days at sea on a combat mission. Yet the name has endured for decades, attached to one of the most intense naval pursuits in the history of warfare. What could drive the entire Royal Navy, dozens of warships and six battleships among them, to drop everything and chase a single ship across the Atlantic? And what finally stopped her? The answers involve a catastrophic explosion in the Denmark Strait, a torpedo that jammed a rudder at the worst possible moment, and a debate that continues today about whether Bismarck was ultimately sunk by the British or by her own crew.

• 2. Built for Battle

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  Keel number IX at the Blohm and Voss shipyard in Hamburg was laid on the 1st of July 1936, ordered under the placeholder name Ersatz Hannover, a replacement for an old pre-dreadnought. The real name came from Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and it was his granddaughter, Dorothee von Löwenfeld, who christened the ship at the launch ceremony on the 14th of February 1939. Adolf Hitler delivered the christening speech himself.

  When completed and commissioned on the 24th of August 1940, Bismarck was the largest warship Germany had ever built, displacing 41,700 tonnes as built and over 50,300 tonnes when fully loaded. Her overall length reached 251 metres, with a beam of 36 metres. Three Blohm and Voss geared steam turbines drove three propellers, and twelve oil-fired boilers pushed the propulsion system to a rated 138,000 PS. On speed trials she beat that figure, reaching 150,170 PS and a top speed of 30.01 knots. She could carry 6,400 tonnes of oil, giving her a cruising range of 8,870 nautical miles at 19 knots.

  Her armament was formidable. Eight 38 cm SK C/34 guns sat in four twin turrets named Anton, Bruno, Caesar, and Dora. Sixteen 10.5 cm guns provided heavy anti-aircraft defence, backed by sixteen 3.7 cm guns and an array of 2 cm weapons. The main armoured belt was 320 mm thick, and the faces of the 38 cm turrets were protected by 360 mm of steel. Hull construction used 90 percent welding to save weight, divided into 22 watertight compartments with a double bottom running for 83 percent of the ship's length.

  The ship's design carried a flaw discovered during sea trials in the Gulf of Danzig. When engineers tried to steer Bismarck by adjusting propeller revolutions alone, the ship proved nearly impossible to keep on course. Even with the outboard screws running at full power in opposite directions, the turning ability was slight. That hidden vulnerability, buried in the engineering of the hull, would matter enormously eight months later.

• 3. Operation Rheinübung

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  On the 5th of May 1941, Hitler and Wehrmacht High Command Chief Wilhelm Keitel arrived in Gotenhafen to tour Bismarck and her sister ship Tirpitz. Two weeks later, on the evening of the 19th of May, Bismarck departed Gotenhafen at 02:00, bound for the Atlantic. Joining her was the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. By that point, Bismarck's crew had grown to 2,221 officers and enlisted men, including an admiral's staff of nearly 65 and a prize crew of 80 sailors who could man any merchant vessels captured during the raid.

  Admiral Günther Lütjens, the Flottenchef of the Kriegsmarine, commanded the operation. He had wanted to delay it until Tirpitz or the battleship Scharnhorst was ready, but the Naval High Command, under Admiral Erich Raeder, ordered him to proceed with only Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. The plan called for eighteen supply ships positioned in the Atlantic to support the raiders, and four U-boats placed along convoy routes between Halifax and Britain to scout ahead.

  By the 20th of May, the operation's secrecy was already slipping. A group of ten or twelve Swedish aircraft spotted the German force and reported its composition and heading. The Swedish cruiser Gotland then shadowed the Germans for two hours in the Kattegat and transmitted a detailed report describing two large ships, three destroyers, five escort vessels, and ten to twelve aircraft. That report reached Captain Henry Denham, the British naval attaché to Sweden, who passed it to the Admiralty. Code-breakers at Bletchley Park had also decrypted German signals confirming that an Atlantic raid was imminent.

  Flying Officer Michael Suckling made the situation worse for the Germans when he flew his Spitfire directly over the German flotilla at a height of 8,000 metres and photographed the ships while they anchored in Norway. On receiving his photos, Admiral John Tovey ordered reinforcements to the Denmark Strait. The stage was set. By 04:00 on the 23rd of May, Lütjens ordered both ships to increase speed to 27 knots to dash through the Strait.

• 4. The Battle of the Denmark Strait

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  At 05:45 on the 24th of May 1941, German lookouts spotted smoke on the horizon. It came from HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales, under Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland. By 05:52, the range had closed to 26,000 metres and Hood opened fire, followed by Prince of Wales a minute later. Hood engaged Prinz Eugen, apparently mistaking her for Bismarck, while Prince of Wales fired on the German battleship.

  Aboard Bismarck, the first gunnery officer Adalbert Schneider twice requested permission to return fire. Lütjens hesitated. Captain Ernst Lindemann intervened, saying he would not let his ship be shot out from under him. He demanded permission to fire, and at 05:55 Lütjens relented. Within minutes, Prinz Eugen scored a hit on Hood with a high-explosive shell that ignited ammunition and started a fire. Schneider found the range to Hood after three four-gun salvoes and ordered rapid-fire from Bismarck's eight 38 cm guns.

  At 06:00, Bismarck's fifth salvo struck Hood. At least one 38 cm armour-piercing shell penetrated her thin deck armour and reached the rear ammunition magazine, detonating 112 tonnes of cordite propellant. The explosion broke Hood's back between the main mast and the rear funnel. The bow rose steeply into the air; the stern rose as water rushed in. Schneider exclaimed "He is sinking!" over the ship's loudspeakers. In eight minutes of firing, Hood had vanished. Of her crew of 1,419 men, only three survived.

  Bismarck then turned her guns on Prince of Wales. One of Bismarck's shells struck the bridge of the British battleship without exploding; it passed straight through and killed everyone in the ship's command centre except Captain John Leach and one other person. Prince of Wales nonetheless scored three hits on Bismarck. The first allowed waves to enter the hull through the forecastle. The second exploded on the torpedo bulkhead, completely flooding a turbo-generator room. A 9-degree list to port and a 3-degree bow trim resulted from the combined flooding. At 06:13, Leach ordered a retreat. Bismarck had fired 93 armour-piercing shells in the engagement and taken three hits. The raiding mission was now effectively over.

• 5. The Chase Across the Atlantic

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  Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered every available warship into the pursuit. At its peak, six battleships and battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, thirteen cruisers, and twenty-one destroyers were committed to finding and stopping Bismarck. She had broken into the open Atlantic damaged, leaking oil, and heading for the French port of Saint-Nazaire.

  Lütjens attempted several manoeuvres to shake off his pursuers. He detached Prinz Eugen for independent commerce raiding on the 24th of May. He tried to lure the British shadowing ships into a U-boat ambush. Shortly after 03:00 on the 25th of May, when Bismarck briefly slipped out of radar range during the British ships' zigzag pattern, he ordered a course change that successfully broke contact. Suffolk's captain assumed Bismarck had turned west and searched in the wrong direction. Lütjens had circled back behind his pursuers.

  The British search widened, but long radio messages Lütjens transmitted to Naval Group West in Paris were intercepted. The bearings were wrongly plotted aboard King George V, leading Tovey to believe Bismarck was heading back to Germany through the Iceland-Faeroe gap. That error kept his fleet on the wrong course for seven hours. Meanwhile, British code-breakers deciphered German signals confirming Bismarck was heading for Brest. Jane Fawcett decrypted the relevant order on the 25th of May 1941.

  At 10:30 on the 26th of May, a Catalina flying boat co-piloted by Ensign Leonard B. Smith of the US Navy located Bismarck some 690 nautical miles northwest of Brest. At her current speed, she was less than a day from U-boat and Luftwaffe protection. The only British force with any chance of slowing her was the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, sailing north from Gibraltar with Force H under Admiral James Somerville. Fifteen Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers were armed and readied for attack.

• 6. The Crippling Blow

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  The first Swordfish strike against Bismarck on the 26th of May went badly wrong. The torpedo bombers, armed with magnetic detonators, accidentally attacked HMS Sheffield, a British cruiser Somerville had sent ahead to shadow Bismarck. The magnetic detonators failed to work properly and Sheffield survived unharmed.

  For the second strike, the fifteen Swordfish were loaded with contact detonators instead. Launched at 19:10, the aircraft made contact with Sheffield first, which pointed them toward Bismarck. At 20:47, the torpedo bombers began their attack descent. Bismarck fired her main battery to throw up water columns in the paths of the incoming aircraft and her anti-aircraft guns engaged continuously. One torpedo hit amidships on the port side but caused only minor damage. The crew's frantic evasive manoeuvres had already caused serious problems by loosening collision mats and increasing flooding through the forward shell hole, ultimately forcing abandonment of one of the port boiler rooms.

  The second torpedo was the one that changed everything. It struck Bismarck in her stern on the port side, near the port rudder shaft. The coupling on the port rudder assembly was badly damaged, locking the rudder in a 12-degree turn to port. Lütjens considered severing the port rudder with explosives but dismissed the idea, fearing damage to the propellers would leave the ship entirely helpless. At 21:15, Lütjens reported that the ship was unmanoeuvrable.

  At 21:40, Lütjens signalled headquarters: "Ship unmanoeuvrable. We will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer." Bismarck was now steaming in a large circle, unable to escape. Messages from naval command arrived aboard the stricken ship, meant to boost morale but serving only to highlight the desperate reality. Tovey's battleships King George V and Rodney were converging.

• 7. The Final Battle

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  At 08:43 on the 27th of May 1941, lookouts on King George V spotted Bismarck some 23,000 metres away. Four minutes later, Rodney opened fire with six 16-inch guns. King George V's 14-inch guns followed. Bismarck returned fire at 08:50; with her second salvo, she straddled Rodney. But with her rudder jammed, Bismarck moved erratically in the heavy seas, depriving Schneider of the stable course he needed for accurate range calculations.

  At 09:02, a 16-inch shell from Rodney struck Bismarck's forward superstructure, killing hundreds of men and severely damaging the two forward turrets. Survivors reported that this salvo probably killed both Lindemann and Lütjens along with the rest of the bridge staff, though other survivors said they saw Lindemann on the deck as the ship sank. Lieutenant Müllenheim-Rechberg, at the rear control station, took over firing control for the rear turrets, managing three salvoes before his equipment was also destroyed. By 09:31, all four main battery turrets were silent.

  The executive officer, Fregattenkapitän Hans Oels, took command from the Damage Control Central. Around 09:30, with the ship unable to fight back and listing heavily, he ordered the men below decks to abandon ship and instructed engine room crews to open watertight doors and prepare scuttling charges. Chief engineering officer Gerhard Junack set demolition charges with a 9-minute fuse. The messenger he sent to confirm the order never returned, so Junack primed the charges and ordered his men out. As they climbed through the ship's levels, they heard the charges detonate. Around 10:05 to 10:10, a shell from King George V killed Oels on the gun deck along with roughly a hundred others.

  By 10:00, Tovey's battleships had fired over 700 main battery shells; overall, the four British ships fired more than 2,800 shells and scored more than 400 hits. None of that gunfire sank Bismarck. The heavy superstructure damage caused massive casualties but contributed little to the ship's eventual foundering. Rodney closed to 2,700 metres, point-blank range, and continued firing. Rodney also fired two torpedoes from her port-side tube and claimed one hit, which historian Ludovic Kennedy noted would be the only instance in history of one battleship torpedoing another, if true. The scuttling charges detonated around 10:20. Bismarck capsized slowly and disappeared beneath the surface at 10:40.

• 8. After the Sinking

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  Around 800 to 1,000 men were in the water when Bismarck went down. Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori lowered ropes and began pulling survivors aboard. At 11:40, Dorsetshire's captain halted the rescue after lookouts reported what they believed was a U-boat periscope. Dorsetshire had rescued 85 men; Maori had pulled out 25. That evening, the U-boat U-74, which had watched the action from a distance, rescued three men from a rubber dinghy at 19:30. The following day, a German trawler rescued two more from a raft at 22:45. One of the men recovered by the British died of his wounds. Out of a crew of more than 2,200 men, only 114 survived.

  On the 8th of June 1989, oceanographer Robert Ballard, the same researcher who had located the wreck of the Titanic, found Bismarck resting on her keel at a depth of approximately 4,791 metres, about 650 kilometres west of Brest. The wreck had struck an extinct underwater volcano rising some 1,000 metres above the surrounding abyssal plain, triggering a landslide approximately 2 kilometres long. The ship slid down the mountain and came to rest about two-thirds of the way down. Ballard kept the exact location secret, concerned that other divers would remove artefacts from what he considered a war grave.

  Ballard's survey found no underwater penetrations of the main armoured citadel and observed eight holes in the hull, all above the waterline. He noted that Bismarck had not imploded, suggesting her compartments were already flooded when she sank, supporting the scuttling account given by German survivors.

  Subsequent expeditions complicated the picture. In 2001, Deep Ocean Expeditions, working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Russian-built mini-submarines, found no penetrations in the main armoured belt. A separate Anglo-American expedition that same year, funded by a British television channel, reached the opposite conclusion. The 2002 documentary Expedition: Bismarck, directed by James Cameron and filmed using smaller Mir submersibles, provided the first interior footage and found that the most extensive damage to the hull, including large gashes, resulted from the impact with the ocean floor rather than from battle damage. Cameron's team noted that British gunnery accuracy was roughly 10 percent for medium-calibre shells, describing the firing conditions as miserable. The Cameron report concluded that scuttling had hastened Bismarck's end but that the ship would have sunk from uncontrolled flooding regardless; in David Mearns' subsequent book Hood and Bismarck, he conceded that scuttling may have hastened the inevitable by only a matter of minutes.