Dan Snow's History Hit - Sinking the Bismarck

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

In May 1941 Nazi Germany's most powerful warship and pride of the Kriegsmarine the Bismarck slipped out of harbour and made its way to hunt Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic. Operation Rheinubung would be its first and last mission. Alerted to her presence and desperate to protect its Atlantic trade routes, the admiralty of the Royal Navy sent her best battleships, including the mighty HMS Hood to intercept the German sortie and sink Bismarck. This fateful encounter would lead to the obliteration of HMS Hood just minutes after engaging the Bismarck when a shell detonated one of her magazines. The rapid destruction of HMS Hood, which had been the pride of the Royal Navy, and mauling of the accompanying HMS Prince of Wales sealed Bismarck's fate. The Royal Navy launched an all-out effort to sink the mighty battleship at almost any cost. In this episode of the podcast, Dan with the help of archive interviews from veterans of the battle tells the story of this titanic clash of arms in the Atlantic.If you would like more content on the story of the Bismarck then watch History Hit's dramatic new documentary Hunt the Bismarck.

We were coming towards them at about a 45 degree angle with the hood on the right. We were on the left side, slightly astern of the hood. And I looked down at this range pointer and just as it was dropping down to about 15,000 yards, and just as it was dropping down to about 15,000 yards, we then altered course to port, the left, and then were beginning to run in the same direction as the Bismarck. And I thought, my goodness, in a minute we will be getting out our cutlasses and going aboard that German and giving him a good old taste of the Nelsons and the Drakes. But no, as I was looking at the Bismarck,

I saw all these little, just like you see in the night time sometimes, all little winking lights, and I thought, oh, isn't that pretty? And all of a sudden I realised that what I thought was pretty was death and destruction in the form of about eight tonnes of metal coming my way. Thank goodness she's gone, but she was the finest ship that I ever saw. She was a marvellous looking ship. And a wonderful fighting ship, there's no doubt about it. Those were the voices of John Gaynor, who was aboard HMS Prince of Wales,

80 years ago this May, and William Crawford, who was on HMS Rodney. They're describing two moments in the running battle that took place in May 1941 against the super battleship Bismarck, the pride of Adolf Hitler's German Kriegsmarine. In this very special episode of Dan's Notes History, I'm going to be talking you through the hunt for the Bismarck and the battle to destroy one of the single greatest threats to Britain's command of the Atlantic Ocean during the Second World War. You'll be hearing from some of the sailors who were interviewed by the Imperial War Museum about their experiences. And they are the people that appear in our recently released documentary on HistoryHittv, all about this clash in the Atlantic.

If you want to head over to historyhit.tv and watch the documentary, please do so. If you use the code BISMARK, you get 50% off your first three months. So head over to historyhit.tv, use the code BISMARK, and watch that and all the other documentaries that we've made. I think this is the best documentary I've made for History Hit TV. I'm extremely proud of it. I'd love to know what you think about it. In the meantime, here's the pod. Enjoy. The fascinating thing I think about the battle against Bismarck is how it's actually one of the last engagements of big gunned battleships firing each other in the history of naval warfare. One of the last great jewels of naval gunnery.

As submarines, aircraft carriers, planes were changing the maritime battlefield, here we have an example of some of the world's most powerful warships firing gigantic high explosive shells weighing nearly a ton at supersonic speeds over dozens of kilometers. And yet this is also a story where these other newer weapons platforms do play a decisive part. It's a fascinating story. In May 1941 Bismarck entered service. She was probably the most powerful battleship ever commissioned. She terrified naval strategists in Britain. She weighed 50,000 tonnes, she had a top speed of 30 knots, eight gigantic 15-inch guns.

Now let loose on Britain's vulnerable supply lines across the Atlantic, she could do great damage to the convoys, the ships carrying the food, the war material on which Britain depended. There's a memoir left by an adjutant officer on board Bismarck. He's called Burkhard von Mulheim-Rechberg and he arrives on the ship and he just says, I had supreme confidence in this ship. How could it be otherwise? Interestingly, one person who did see the vulnerabilities of Bismarck was Adolf Hitler. He was given a tour of the ship and he rather upset the ship's officers by commenting that it was obviously a magnificent achievement of German engineering and industrial might. But aren't these great powerful battleships now vulnerable to

flimsy little torpedo bombers and the crew and ship officers sort of brush that aside? In fact, it would prove fairly prescient on Hitler's part, as we will see. Germany hadn't been allowed to build battleships according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. So even the existence of Bismarck was tied to Germany's sense of undoing the injustices of Versailles to becoming a great power once again, a source of enormous national pride. And in spring 1941, Bismarck was ready for sea. Now the German naval high command knew that the invasion of the Soviet Union was coming up and they wanted to get a victory in the can to remind Hitler, to remind the leadership of Germany that they shouldn't just put all their chips on the army. They wanted to

point out there could still be a naval strategy here, that resources and attention should be paid to Germany's navy. So as soon as Bismarck was ready, Bismarck was sent to sea by Grand Admiral Raeder. He sent Bismarck to sea with a cruiser escort, Prince Eugen, and some smaller vessels. And they were supposed to carry out a raid on Britain's arteries across the Atlantic. Ships carried grain from the North American prairies. Four oil tankers a day were coming from Venezuela and the Caribbean. There was rubber from Southeast Asia and, of course, the industrial output of America's factories. Submarines had been preying on these convoys, but a surface ship like Bismarck would be capable of sinking potentially dozens of ships in one sweep

through the Atlantic. Winston Churchill said later that the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boat menace to Britain's imports, was really the only thing that kept him up, that made him hugely nervous during the Second World War. He'd written in 1939 that Britain needed to get a new generation of big battleships to see, King George V, the Prince of Wales. If they failed to get them to see before Bismarck, Churchill said, it would be disastrous in the highest degree, as Bismarck can neither be caught nor killed, and would therefore range freely throughout the oceans rupturing all communications. So the story really begins on the 19th of May 1941. In the dead of night the world's most powerful commissioned battleship slid out of a naval base on Germany's

Baltic coast and headed into the Atlantic. On the 21st, she was spotted by the Swedish Navy, and news was sent to London. This electrified the Royal Navy. The British Home Fleet was notified, and planners waited for confirmation via aerial reconnaissance that Bismarck was truly on the loose. Bismarck was spotted at anchor in the Norwegian fjords by a reconnaissance spitfire,

and the Royal Navy swung into action. Out in the North Atlantic, British ships waited. There were sort of Arctic sentinels waiting exactly for this kind of circumstance. They were on station, but they were reinforced. It was a terrible posting, by the way. One account I've read just says, a ship was scarcely a ship. It was trapped and hounded in this howling wilderness. The seasickness, the cold, it was just unbelievably brutal. But as I say, they were waiting for a breakout from a big German capital ship. And ships were now sent from Scarpa Flow in Orkney, the British home fleet. Ships were attached to reinforce these pickets,

to keep an eye on the various points at which bismarck might enter the atlantic either between greenland and iceland or between iceland and the pharaohs it was the start of what would be the largest single naval operation by the royal navy to this point in the second world war the heavy cruisers norfolk and suffolk were covering the denmark strait between greenland and ic, they were to be reinforced by a group led by Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland aboard HMS Hood. He had with him the brand new battleship Prince of Wales and he was to sit south of Iceland and head either east or west depending on which way the Bismarck entered the Atlantic. Meanwhile the British home fleet stood by, the new battleship King George V,

with an aircraft carrier Victorious and 11 other cruisers and destroyers ready to deploy. HMS Hood was probably the most famous battleship in the world. For 20 years, she'd been the symbol of the Royal Navy, of Britain's maritime dominance. A dominance that was being eroded by other powers, but slowly. Bob Tilburn summed up just how confident Hood's crew were feeling. We were all right on the Hood because, I mean, it was the finest ship in the world and we were safe. No bother.

That was our personal feeling on board the ship did you think it was unsinkable more or less yes more or less uh we could take on anything the germans could send and we'd come off best there would be casualties obviously but uh it wasn't going to be me it was going to be someone else everybody thinks thinks that. Bob Tilburn may have been feeling confident on the Hood, but the fact is, Hood's reputation definitely was a couple of years out of date. For decades, she'd probably been the most powerful warship on Earth. She had eight 15-inch guns. She could do 32 knots through the water.

Her reputation was second to none. She was known as the Mighty Hood. But Bismarck had overtaken Hood on weight, firepower, armour, and Hood had been scheduled for a major rebuild which had been cancelled by the outbreak of war. Her deck armour, for example, was far too thin to deal with the kind of shells that Bismarck could throw at her. But few in the British flagship had any doubt over their superiority, and there was confidence as they waited for Bismarck in the North Atlantic. In the evening of the 23rd of May, just off Greenland, two ships were spotted by an able seaman aboard HMS Suffolk coming in and out of snow flurries

around seven miles away. It was Bismarck and Prince Eugen. The Royal Navy had finally got eyes on their enemy. A few hours later, Suffolk's accompanying ship, Norfolk, popped out of some clouds and found itself six miles away from the German ships. And for the first time in anger, Bismarck opened fire. Norfolk, very sensibly, fled. The shells from Bismarck landed so close they sprayed the ship's superstructure with razor-sharp shards of steel. Norfolk had a lucky escape. The battle against Bismarck had begun. Norfolk and Suffolk radioed in Bismarck's position, both to the nearby squadron, HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales, but also to the UK, where Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not sleep a wink

that night. Now that the enemy seemed nearby, Admiral Holland had to think about how he was going to take on the Bismarck. He knew that the designers of his ship had sacrificed deck armour to maximise speed. Given the accuracy of guns when Hood was built, basically during the First World War, this was an acceptable compromise. But now new sights and rangefinders meant that ships were much more accurate at extreme range. And that meant you fired at very high elevation and the shells would land more vertically down onto the decks and that increased the risk to her dramatically. She only had three inches of deck armour. Holland's plan was to close aggressively with Bismarck, head straight for her, get in close then swing his ship round and unleash his full broadside against Bismarck. And Holland put that

plan into effect in the early hours of the 24th of May, when the weather opened up to beautiful dawn. There were some gaps in the clouds, the weather had cleared up a bit, and the sun was flashing through onto the water. A sick birth attends on HMS Prince of Wales remembers, the reflection of dawn light danced upon the surface of the sea and stretched from our bows out towards the German warships. The ruffled surface of the sea seemed to constantly change from brilliant white diamond sparkles to dazzling ice blue, to flashing green and then to deep awesome red, and it seemed as though our ships were forging ahead through a garden of sparkling jewels. Sailors on both sides were convinced this dramatic scene portended events of equal magnitude.

They just didn't know how they were going to turn out. When Admiral Holland saw the German ships on the horizon at dawn, he had to make a quick decision. Would he fight or would he shadow them and wait for reinforcements from the British home fleet? Being a British adm Admiral, of course, he chose to fight. It was 5.37am. Aboard the Prince of Wales, the chaplain read out a prayer on the public address system. O Lord, thou knowest how busy we shall be today. If we forget thee, do not forget us. Do not forget us.

Hoods, massive guns, open fire at 5.53am at an astonishing range of 24km. Not all Hood's guns, of course. Remember, Admiral Holland was desperate to close the gap, which meant the big guns at the back of his ship, at the stern, could not track round enough to fire on the target. The battle that followed was known as the Battle of Denmark Strait. It was one of the shortest battles between great capital ships in British history. I'll let Bob Tilburn, who fought aboard the Hood, take up the story. And we sighted the two ships.

We immediately closed. We'd been at action station from 10 o'clock the previous night, the whole trip. We immediately started to close the range, and then approximately 6 o'clock, we opened fire with A and B turrets. The Prince of Wales followed, and then we had return fire from the Bismarck and Prince of Oregon. The first shells were over but in our wake.

I think they fired two or three. The third shell hit us on the upper deck and started a fire near one of the open ammunition ammunition stores where you had ready use ammunition stores most of the upper deck guns crews thinking back to what had happened at Iran had been ordered to go forward Most of the upper deck guns crews, thinking back to what had happened at Iran,

had been ordered to go forward into a space below the bridge where the dentist chapel and everything was. The next shell that hit us prior to that, sorry as soon as the ammunition started to explode the radio's ammunition the gunner's mate, Mr Bishop came and said to three of us who were not, who hadn't gone for it to put the fire out

and we said wait until the ammunition stopped exploding he said I'll go in and tell the officer the quarters and he went in the space and the next shell came in right in there and at the same time blew the aloft director away

at this time the three of us were laying down next to a... a UP. It's a... It was a funny thing that fired rockets and it had an anti-blast shield around it which was semi-circular because the...

half of it was at the sea. And then we were hit. And the whole ship... There was a terrific explosion, and the whole ship suddenly did silence. I've never heard nothing at all before like this. I don't know whether maybe I've been deafened. But apparently the blast, I was near the UP,

the blast must have come round, missed me. He killed the petty officer and the AB line next to him had his side cut open, looked as if a butcher had got in when all his innards were coming out and I thought, oh I'm going to be sick and I got up and went to the ship's side and noticed that the water

was much closer than it was and the bows were coming out of the water I went to the forward end of the boat deck dropped onto the fo'c'sle I realised the ship was sinking obviously, she was rolling over and the bows coming out. And stripped off my tin hat, dandy flash gear, overcoats. By then, the sea had reached

me and I was in the water. I was wearing a belt, a leather belt, which was very tight, and it was restricting me from breathing as I was swimming. I took my knife, which I wear around my waist on a lanyard, and cut the belt off, and then looked around and saw the ship was rolling over on top of me. So I started to swim away, but where the masthead had been hit, the director tower, the yards were broken, and all the wireless aerials were all curled up, and it hit me across the back of the legs,

and tangled with my sea boots, and as she rolled over, it was dragging me down, so I still had my knife open in my hand, and I cut my sea boots off and shot to the surface like a cock out of a bottle, the expression I used. And

she was just there, as a bow was up in the water, and down she went. And I was left all on my own. That was Bob Tilburn's quite remarkable account of the death of Hood. There were only two other survivors.

Over 1,400 men were lost in the Atlantic. One of the other survivors was Ted Briggs. These are his memories of the last minutes of the Hood. And the Admiral ordered both ships to alter course to bring the after guns into action. Just as we were altering course, the next salvo hit us. And that virtually penetrated down into X and Y magazines, the two after magazines. I personally didn't hear any explosion at all.

Again, the ship shuddered and we were all thrown off our feet and all I saw was a gigantic sheet of flame which shot round the front of the compass platform. I got to my feet and the ship had started listing to starboard and she had gone about 10 degrees I, when she righted herself and started going over to port, and she carried on going over. At the same time, I heard the quartermaster report at the voiceback, steering gear gone, sir,

and the captain ordered changeover to emergency conning, and by that time she was going over, and we realised that she just wasn't coming back. There was no order given to abandon ship, it wasn't necessary. She'd gone I suppose about 45 degrees when we just realised that she just wasn't coming back, and we started to make our way out. Now I went over to the starboard door of the compass platform, and it was as I got to that door, the gunnery officer was going out just in front of me, and the navigating officer stood to one side to let me go through and follow behind me. And I was about halfway down the ladder to the Admiral's Bridge, the next bridge down, when I was dragged into the water.

I realised that there was a deckhead above me, and I had to get clear of this. I kicked out away from it as fast as I could. And at the same time, I felt myself being dragged down. And again, you can get to such a stage that you just can't do any more. And I could feel myself being dragged down and down and down. And I just couldn't do any more. And I felt quite a feeling of peace, actually.

And that sounds ridiculous, but you're just like peace and calm type thing and then I suddenly seemed to shoot to the surface and I came up and I looked around and the ship was vertical with the water

and B turret was just going under so the two ford turrets and the hull of the bow were about vertical with the water and B turret was just going under so the two forred turrets and the hole of the bow were about vertical with the water and about 50 yards away from me I panicked I turned and swam as fast as I could away from her

there were lots of little 3 foot square Fakali rafts floating around I managed to get on one of these and the water again was about four inches thick with oil and again I looked around and she'd gone but there was a fire on the water where she'd been

and with the oil around again I panicked and I turned and swam away again as fast as I could and when I again looked around the fire had gone out. And over on the other side were the other two. We swam towards each other. They again were on the same three-foot-square carly rafts. The midshipman had managed to sit up on his.

Bob Tilburn, the able seaman, and myself, we were just sprawled chest down on ours. We managed to hold on to one another's rafts for a while. Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland had made no attempt to escape. He'd sat in his Admiral's chair, utterly still, the Captain beside him, clinging to the chair to stay upright. The news of the loss of Hood sparked consternation, not just people who witnessed it, but people all over the world. Dennis Packham was pregnant at the battle, he was on HMS Suffolk. This is his response to the news that Hood was gone. And into our dismay, at about ten past six, the Captain came on and said,

And then to our dismay at about ten past six the captain came on and said, and I remember his words, hoods blown up, broken into and sunk. Now the hood was a legend in the Navy as most people would know. It was we thought the most powerful battle cruiser in the world. But of course it was 20 years old, the Bismarck was brand new and obviously she was in one of her ammunition and she just blew up. Now I was in the showroom. What was your reaction to that news and what was the reaction of those around you? A stone disbelief. We could not believe that the hood had been sunk. We thought that somebody made a mistake. In fact, the people on watch who were quoting afterwards who actually saw what happened,

cheered when they saw it because they thought it was the bismarck that was going up, because they were a little bit far off then, I was about 12 miles away then. They thought it was the bismarck that was going up, but no, it wasn't, it was the hood. away then. They thought it was Bismarck that was going up, but no it wasn't, it was the hood. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in

Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Meanwhile the fighting continued Prince of Wales had to veer away

to avoid colliding with the wreckage of Hood It now faced the two German ships alone and in four minutes seven shells smashed into the Prince of Wales One shell sheared straight through the bridge. Nearly everybody was killed or wounded, horrifically, apart from the captain, oddly. Captain Leach survived.

Another shell came very close to obliterating Prince of Wales just seconds after the hood. One of Bismarck's shells ended up punching through the Prince of Wales Armoured Protection and ended up next to a magazine where it failed to explode. It was discovered when the ship was put into dry dock in Rosyth a week later. So a double catastrophe was narrowly avoided. Meanwhile Prince of Wales was experiencing technical problems. It was a brand new ship. There were still civilian contractors on board trying to get everything

working, doing the snagging. At one point, only three of her 10 big guns could be fired. So her captain decided, minutes after the hood disappeared, that he risked losing his ship for no particular purpose. And he ordered a smoke screen to be laid down, and he turned his rudder hard to port and disappeared into the white cloud. The Prince of Wales had been lucky to escape. Back in Britain, Churchill was staying at Chequers with an emissary from US President Roosevelt. Remember, Churchill was focused at the moment on trying to get the USA to join the war against Hitler. So this drama was playing out against a much bigger story,

a huge strategic decision being made in the USA. Churchill was desperate to prove that Britain was an ally worth backing. In his nightshirt, he shook his guest awake at 7am. He was in a deep gloom, apparently, we're told, and he just said simply, the Hood is sunk. Hell of a battle. And he later said the days that followed were the darkest days of the war for him so far. The British Admiralty released a very terse communique. They said during the action, HMS Hood received an unlucky hit in a magazine and blew up. In Germany, as you can imagine, it was a very different story. Hitler's propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, went to

town. There was euphoria. Germany had had no maritime victory to celebrate. She now had this one to cheer alongside her remarkable run of conquests on the European mainland. Aboard Bismarck, however, the mood was slightly more measured. The Prince of Wales had scored a hit. It did not prove terminal, but its importance would grow as the days went past. One of her shells had not exploded, but had sliced through Bismarck's bow, where it caused flooding and severed a fuel line. Admiral Lutyens had been told under no circumstances to lose Bismarck. The German navy wanted it back, this was not a suicide mission and so against the advice of his captain who wanted to go and continue the mission and destroy

convoys, Lutyens decided to return to a friendly port in order to get Bismarck repaired. Norway was closer but the British home fleet lay in Bismarck's path. So the decision was made to go to the coast of occupied France. But they did have a problem. Bismarck was wounded. 2,000 tonnes of seawater had flooded into the ship and 1,000 tonnes of fuel in a forward tank was now cut off. Bismarck was now moving through the water only at 28 knots

and it had a slight list. Sounds like me, it was my slight lisp. And worst of all perhaps, Bismarck was leaking fuel, so behind her now a long perfect ribbon of oil was stretching in her wake, shimmering in rainbow colours. Not great if you're trying to keep a low profile when I dash back across the Atlantic. The British were determined to restore their honour, restore their reputation as the world's finest naval power. They sent every ship available into action. They would ultimately deploy six battleships, three battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, 16 cruisers, 33 destroyers and eight submarines, as well as patrol aircraft.

It was the largest naval force assigned to a single operation to that point in the Second World War. The old battleships Ramelies and Rodney were detached from their convoys to join the hunt for Bismarck. HMS Rodney was a reasonably old battleship. She was heading to North America for a major refit, but she did have nine 16-inch guns on her, which the Admiralty decided might prove decisive against Bismarck, even with her heavy armour. Another force entered the theatre, Force H, stationed at Gibraltar, a group consisting of the battlecruiser Renown, a light cruiser Sheffield and an aircraft carrier Ark Royal. The British threw everything they had at the hunt. The aircraft carrier HMS Victorious launched a swarm of torpedo bombers and a new phase of the battle began. Not one of dueling

battleships but of tiny aircraft now attempting to torpedo Bismarck. In terrible weather, the inexperienced crews flew 120 miles, managed to find Bismarck, flew through savage anti-aircraft fire, and just flying 100 feet above the wave tops, they dropped their torpedoes. Bismarck twisted and turned, but one torpedo did hit the ship, but in an area of particularly thick armour, and there was no significant damage. Amazingly, all the aircraft managed to make it back to their aircraft carrier. One witness remembers it was a night of sleet and rain, came down endless torrents, conditions were atrocious, seas mountainous. It was a miserable night, fit only for howling banshees.

Partly because it was such a miserable night, Bismarck was able to give the Royal Navy the slip, and by dawn she had disappeared. For the next day or so, the Navy hunted in vain for Bismarck, and in the mid-morning of the 26th of May, the British had a stroke of luck. A Catalina flying boat was patrolling the western approaches, taken off from Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, boat was patrolling the western approaches, taken off from Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, and its American pilot, Leonard Smith, spotted a multi-coloured slick of leaking oil. He followed it and found Bismarck itself, only 700 miles from Brest. By the end of the day, Bismarck would be under the protective shield of ground-based Luftwaffe fighters operating from France,

but for the next few hours, Bismarck was alone and without air cover. The news was electrifying. The British home fleet turned round, put on full speed despite mountainous seas, and headed to intercept. They had no chance of catching Bismarck unless something was able to slow her down. That meant the only chance the Royal Navy had now was the aircraft aboard the carrier Ark Royal. I've been lucky enough to meet Jock Moffat, now sadly passed away, a veteran of this action, and I'll never forget him describing to me how in the early afternoon in a howling gale, with the flight deck pitching violently up and down over 50-foot waves,

the planes, small canvas and string biplanes, the swordfish, hauled across the flight deck by their incredibly brave ground crews, managed to take off from the deck. And after an hour, they found a ship and launched an attack. Now, sadly, that ship was the British ship Sheffield. The torpedoes were launched, which very luckily either missed or exploded upon contact with the water because of a faulty fuse. One aircraft even sprayed Sheffield with machine gun fire before they realised it was a British ship. They made it back to Ark Royal, feeling fairly embarrassed about it,

but they did at least realise they needed to change the type of torpedo they were using, which would prove quite important. Their only hope now was to refuel, rearm, and go back and strike the Bismarck a second time. This time the weather was even worse. A biscay storm had whipped the sea into mountainous waves. It was way outside the envelope of air operations, in anything other than the most dire emergency.

But this was one of those. At 7pm, the Saltfish aircraft lumbered into the sky and headed 40 miles downwind to find Bismarck. It was probably the most important airstrike in the history of the Royal Navy. At this point I'll let Ken Patterson, one of the pilots, give his extraordinary account of the raid. The weather had deteriorated considerably and we flew off into cloud and climbed up eight to nine000 feet in cloud, in snow, and appalling, really, flying conditions.

Godfrey Fawcett, who was leading the flight, my flight, he got lost from the squadron of the 15 aircraft, and he had got ASV, anti-surface vessel radar and he was actually flying my aircraft I was flying the CO's aircraft the CO wasn't it wasn't Leading's anyway during our run-up to the ship in the cloud at 9,000 feet, I was in flak and I was actually hit by the flak from the Bismarck. So she must have had some form of radar. scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And we turned and started our dive, came out at about 800 feet above water and there was the Bismarck, a mile or so on our starboard beam. We turned in, the two of us. Tony Beale, who was flying number three in our flight, he got detached and was lost from the formation. So there was just Godfrey Fawcett and myself, and I was on his starboard

side, and I was on the beam of the Bismarck. He was a little astern of me, about a mile ahead. We turned in and made our attack down to 90 knots, 90 feet, and we reckoned that she was doing about 20 knots. I aimed well off over the bow, dropped the fish, turned hard downwind, and jinked all over the sky. And, of course, the ship itself, you could see all the guns firing at you in the tracer in green red orange white all coming towards you and as we turned away my observer he looked over the side of the aircraft astern and saw our torpedo actually running you could see the wake of it in the sea. And ahead of me, jinking around, suddenly there were great eruptions of spray going up in the air and we

realized that she was firing her main armament at us in the hope that, you know, they'd drop a shell somewhere near and we'd be swamped by the spray. Then we joined up and returned to the ship and landed on just at dusk with a 50-foot rise and fall on the flight deck. But, of course, then we had barriers and we had deck landing control officers that waved us off if the ship was pitching too badly. And there's always a pause between the pitching, then she'll settle down, and then he'd bring us on.

All the aircraft landed on safely. That was Ken Patterson. And Bismarck was hit in the rudder. The steering gear was jammed. It was the Achilles heel of the mighty battleship. Without a rudder, you can't steer. If you can't steer, you can't get towards Brest, where you want to go. You're almost helpless. Bismarck had been wounded, perhaps mortally. Now, the wonderful historian Ian Ballantyne has just published a fantastic book in which he's done painstaking work. He conducted an interview just before he died with the Canadian Terry Goddard, a colleague of Ken Patterson. Terry told Ian Ballantyne that he saw Swordfish 2A flown by Ken Patterson drop the torpedo that hit Bismarck in the rudder. And Ian Ballantyne, who is the world's great authority on these things, believes that is conclusive. The IWM actually asked Ken Patterson whether he thought it had

been his torpedo that hit Bismarck. Yes, I do, because I was in the most favoured position to do the attack and I knew that I'd aimed off for her speed and it was either Godfrey Fawcett's or mine. And as I was in the better position to do the attack, I'm quite sure it was my torpedo. And I know my torpedo was running. Despite frantic efforts to fix Bismarck's rudder, with divers showing extraordinary courage in the dark Atlantic, it was clear that she could not repair her steering. And that evening, Admiral Lutyens,

the German admiral, signalled his headquarters, ship incapable of manoeuvre, we shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Fuhrer men were allowed to take whatever they wanted from the stores they gorged themselves on tinned ham chunks of pineapple and brandy Bismarck was harassed all night by a very brave squadron of destroyers who would nip in and out trying to torpedo Bismarck keeping her crew awake keeping her crew on edge. And at dawn, Bismarck was unable to steer. Her crew were exhausted and depressed. And dawn also brought clear skies and what one witness called the big boys.

The British battleships of the home fleet, King George V and Rodney, were now at hand. King George V was brand new, but Rodney had these gigantic guns I mentioned, 16-inch guns, and she also had very heavy armor which the Admiral hoped would make up for a lack of speed. At 8.47 they opened fire. Bismarck astonishingly fought back with enormous spirit. Despite the fact the crew had been awake for days their ship was disabled their captain and admiral told them death was certain the crew

stood by their action stations. This is one of the more significant naval battles of the Second World War in the Atlantic, but strangely it has no name. Bismarck fought like a wounded animal, with hopeless desperation. One of its first salvos straddled Rodney, huge shells landing either side of the battleship. Very lucky not to receive a direct hit. The captain of Rodney said on the public address system, Bismarck has given us the honour of choosing us as its

first target. Rodney's old engines were driven to the point of failure, driven so hard so that the ship could get close enough to land killer blows on Bismarck. The two British battleships opened fire, sending shells crashing into Bismarck's superstructure. Despite Bismarck's early accuracy, her inability to steer and damage sustained from the British ships soon meant that the battle was hopelessly one-sided. Minutes after the beginning of the fighting, Rodney sent a shell smashing straight into Bismarck's bridge, killing or disabling nearly everyone in a senior command position on Bismarck. Its fire control was terribly impaired. The German ship was now unable to manoeuvre, and it was effectively firing blind.

Like jackals surrounding a wounded beast, the British ships came closer and closer, pummeling Bismarck from what became point-blank range. William Crawford was on Rodney and gave an interview to the Imperial War Museum about the last moments of Bismarck. Bismarck opened fire on us think, after we opened fire. And her third salvo was extremely accurate and straddled us, and a certain number of pieces came on board, splinters from, I think the shells went off absolutely on impact with water. And there was a few splinters which went through a high-angle director, which was up above me in the rattle of bits on my control tower.

But after that, she never came near us. but after that she never came near us I think we'd by that time after that I think we'd knocked her control about a bit and her firing was never really at all accurate

after that certainly we knocked out her two foreign turrets quite early but her after turrets went on firing, and we closed the range, and we came in from 27,000 yards finally to about 4,000 yards and were pumping stuff into her pretty hard. And at that time, even at close range,

I certainly remember on one occasion one of her turrets was firing because through my binoculars at very short range, where you've got a flat trajectory, you can see your own shell going out away from you. And I saw three shells from Rodney going towards the Bismarck, and I saw two shells from Bismarck coming towards us and passing in mid-air.

It was a sort of eerie sight, these things going at whatever it was, 2,000 foot per second, and looking as if the Bismarck shell were going straight down the barrel of each binocular that they plunged into the sea a long way short. And she kept up a desultory fire for a long time, a very, very brave action, because although we failed to sink her, we certainly knocked her about,

and she was on fire in many places, a lot of smoke, and you could see the shells crumping against her side. and you could see the shells crumping against her side. Eventually, it was rather a bloody business. One had to go on to sink the ship, but there were people occasionally, I saw a few of them, running aft and jumping over the side while we were still engaging her.

In fact, I think while some of her turrets were still firing. In just over half an hour, all Bismarck's main guns were silenced. Rodney had closed within two miles. Now the heaviest guns on earth were sending shells at twice the speed of sound into the German hulk. Very unusually, on board Rodney, the chaplain stepped up to the captain and begged him to stop. He was sent below and told to mind his own business. The killing went on. The scenes on board the Bismarck were horrifying. They defy description. Twisted metal, fires, dismembered men, screaming in the darkness, a ship heeling over,

water pouring in, almost impossible to escape. If ever there was a vision of hell on earth, it was Bismarck at 9.45 in the morning of the 27th of May, 1941. One Bismarck survivor recounts that the blood trickled down sticky and slow, through hatches and gangways onto the tween decks, where it gathered in colourful puddles, the blood of the dead, the dying, the maimed, the amputated. One lieutenant on board Rodney described it as a slaughter, as ruthless, without mercy, but also a brutal, necessary killing. I remember calling out, oh God, why don't they stop? Eventually, at 10.20, the guns of the battleships did fall silent, their job was done, but running low on fuel and worried about the possibility of German U-boats, they immediately turned for port. It was left to the smaller

cruiser Dorsetshire to dispatch Bismarck, firing torpedoes from point-blank range into both starboard and port sides. Within 10 minutes, Bismarck capsized and slipped beneath the waves. Its first and only wartime operation had lasted less than 10 days. Of 2,200 people on board, only 100 were pulled out of the Atlantic. Bismarck was gone. The German Kriegsmarine's gamble to persuade the Fuhrer to invest in the surface fleet and bring the British to their knees had failed. And although German submarines would continue to prey on British shipping and Allied shipping for years to come,

Bismarck was the last major attempt by surface ship to break into the Atlantic. Britain had defeated what was probably Germany's most dangerous attempt to seize control of the Battle of the Atlantic, but had been closer than many in Britain wanted to admit. Thank you very much for listening to this 80th anniversary episode of the podcast, broadcast first 80 years to the day since Bismarck slipped beneath the waves. Remember you can go and watch both episodes of our Bismarck show at History Hit, our new history channel. If you use the code BISMARCK, you get 50% off your subscription for the first three months. Depressingly, that takes through to autumn now. Anyway, the offer ends soon.

Use the code BISMARCK at History Hit TV. Thanks for listening, everyone. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much.

Now sleep well. you