Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Sinking of the Bismarck

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Entering the second world war, Britain was still the top naval power in the world.   While the British Navy was superior in its entirety, Nazi Germany had created a ship that terrified the British. One-on-one, it could take out any ship in the British fleet.  Eventually, it was sent out into the open ocean of the North Atlantic to disrupt shipping. When the British found out, they dedicated almost all of their fleet in the North Atlantic to its destruction.  Learn more about the sinking of the Bismarck on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Search Past Episodes at fathom.fm Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Entering the Second World War, Britain was still the top naval power in the world. While the British Navy was superior in its entirety, Nazi Germany had created a ship that terrified the British. One-on-one, it could take out almost any ship in the British fleet. Eventually, it was sent out into the open ocean of the North Atlantic to disrupt shipping. When the British found out, they dedicated almost all of their fleet in the North Atlantic to its destruction. Learn more about the sinking of the Bismarck on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. During the First World War, the German Navy had developed itself to a position where it could almost rival the British Navy. in the North Atlantic. In 1916, during the Battle of Jutland, Germany faced the British in what was the largest naval battle in history in terms of the gross tonnage of the ships. The battle was inconclusive, but it showed that Germany had become a serious naval power. However, with the end of the war, the Treaty of Versailles placed serious restrictions on the size of the German Navy and the type

of ships that they could have. Given the advances in technology through the 1920s and 30s, these restrictions put Germany well behind the other great powers. When Adolf Hitler came to power, he said about re-arming the German military. In the case of the Navy, that would require developing a new type of warship that could trump anything that the British or the French had. In particular, the new Rishaloo-class battleships that the French began building in 1935. In that spirit, the Germans developed a new class of battleship, which would be one of the largest battleships in the world. This new class of battleship, and the name of the very first such ship, was named after the former German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck,

who played a huge part in the unification of Germany in the 19th century. Several interwar treaties limited the size of German battleships, in particular the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, the London Naval Treaty of 1930, and the second London Naval Treaty of 1936. This limited Germany to building ships that had a maximum displacement of 35,000 tons. The keel for the Bismarck was laid in 1936 in Hamburg, and it was launched on February 14, 1939. The Germans had built a ship that was larger than allowed by the treaty.

The Bismarck was actually 41,700 tons empty, and 50,300 tons fully equipped. Most importantly, it had some of the thickest armor ever put on a ship. The turrets had a total of 14.2 inches or 36 centimeters of armor, and the belt around the ship had 35 centimeters or 13.8 inches of armor. However, the main deck only had about four inches of armor. The ship was equipped with eight 15-inch guns. Hiller had hoped that the Bismarck would resurrect the German surface fleet. The Bismarckable.

And, no, to all aspiring shipbuilders out there, never call your ship unsinkable. However, other navies like Britain and the United States had discovered that the battleships era was ending. While Germany was focused on building the greatest battleship in the world in the 1930s, its future adversaries were focused on building aircraft carriers, and more on that in a bit. The Bismarck was finally commissioned and put in the service on August 24, 1940. It spent the next several months doing sea testing in the Baltic Sea and performing limited escorts for some ships in the region. Its first real mission, which would send it out into the Atlantic, was known as Operation Orenubung,

which began on May 19, 1941. The plan was pretty simple, and it was really just an extension of what the Germans had already been doing for years in the North Atlantic. Throughout World Wars 1 and 2, the Germans engaged in submarine warfare to disrupt allied shipping. They would send out packs of U-boats to harass and attack civilian shipping to reduce the amount of supplies being brought to Europe. As a tactic, it was quite effective. During the Second World War, the Germans managed to sink 3,500 merchant ships and 175 warships from 1939 to 1940. The plan was for the Bismarck to sail into the North Atlantic, along with the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen, eight supply ships, four U-boats, and attack Allied shipping. At first, it might seem that using submarines would be more effective. After all, you can't really see a submarine, and they would be capable of launching a torpedo and then running away.

Almost all of the Allied defensive measures were orientated towards anti-submarine warfare. Ships would travel in convoys, and the military escorts that would travel with them were designed for hunting subs. If a battleship like the Bismarck were to happen upon a convoy, it would be a disaster. They could just pound away at all the ships in the flotilla, one after the other, and there wouldn't be much that they could do about it. Smaller naval escorts couldn't do much of anything against a large battleship. The British knew about the Bismarck. Their intelligence services had gotten reports of the ship as it had been sailing around the Baltic Sea for the last several months. So when they received word that the Bismarck was heading into the North Atlantic, they took action.

One of the facts regarding naval warfare at this point in history was that once a ship was in the open ocean, it was difficult to find. There were no satellites or GPS systems. You would have to send out spotter aircraft, or have a ship get really lucky and happen upon it, or hope that they would break radio silence so you could triangulate their position. The British made taking out the Bismarck the top priority of the home fleet, which was the naval fleet that protected the British Isles. The Royal Navy sent out a small armada of ships to find the Bismarck. This included the battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS King George V, the Battlecruiser HMS Hood,

and the aircraft carrier HMS victorious. On May 24th, the British encountered the Bismarck and its support ships in the Strait of Denmark, which is the body of water between Iceland and Greenland. At 5.52 a.m., the Hood and the Prince of Wales settled right up to the German ships, and the Hood opened fire. At first, the Hood and the Prince of Wales were actually targeting the Prince Eugent, as it was in front of the Bismarck. Within a matter of minutes of opening fire, the hood was hit by the Prince Eugen, which caused a fire on the deck,

and then it was hit by the Bismarck. The shot from the Bismarck hit the magazine of the hood, which caused a tremendous explosion that broke the ship's keel and launched a column of fire 600 feet into the air. The hood sank within a matter of minutes, killing 1,414 sailors on board. There were only three survivors. The Prince of Wales also suffered severe damage. They took several hits, which did mechanical damage to the ship, and there was also a shell that hit the bridge. The British called off the attack, and the Germans sailed away, choosing not to pursue the damaged Prince of Wales. The Bismarck came away in much better condition, save for a shot that hit a fuel tank near the front of the ship.

The Bismarck began leaking fuel, which had two important implications. The first was that they couldn't just disappear back into the open ocean. They had to get repairs. going back to Germany would have been too difficult as the British would be patrolling the narrow gap off of the coast of England that they would have to sail through to get back to Hamburger Keel. The captain decided to sail to the German-occupied French port of Brest, which was the only other port that could handle repairs for a ship that size. The second implication was that they were leaking fuel, which allowed the British to follow the oil slick that the Bismarck was leaving. With the loss of the hood, the British Admiralty called in every ship in the British home fleet to join the hunt for the Bismarck. It was basically a race at this point.

The British had to find and sink the Bismarck before it could reach a point where the Luftwaffe could provide air cover from France. At 6.40 p.m., the Prince Eugent split off from the Bismarck to continue its mission of harassing shipping. At 10 p.m., the HMS victorious, despite being over 120 miles away from the Bismarck, sent out nine fairy swordfish torpedo bomb. bombers. However, they failed to do any serious damage. By the next morning, the British had lost contact with the Bismarck. The ship had stopped leaking fuel, and it managed to evade British radar. The British at this point still assumed that the Bismarck was going to be heading back to Germany via the North Sea. Just as the British lost the Bismarck, the captain of the Bismarck made his fatal mistake. Still thinking that the British were on his tail, he broke radio silence and sent

a lengthy message back to Germany. That radio transmission allowed the British to triangulate their position and figure out that the Bismarck was heading to France. On the morning of May 26th, a reconnaissance plane out of Northern Ireland spotted the Bismarck and radioed in its position. The initial ships involved in the pursuit were running low on fuel, saw the battle cruiser HMS Sheffield and the aircraft carrier HMS Royal Ark became the primary ships in the hunt. Both of them were sailing up from the south. The Royal Ark sent out two ferry swordfish torpedo bombers, which, by the way, were biplanes that were still being used in 19th. They encountered a storm in poor visibility and accidentally attacked the Sheffield,

but miraculously, the torpedoes didn't detonate. The bombers returned to reload, change the detonators on the torpedoes, and returned with 15 swordfish bombers this time. One of the torpedoes managed to hit one of the weakest points of the Bismarck near the rudder. The Bismarck lost the ability to do anything but sail in circles. At midnight, the captain of the Bismarck sent a message to the Kriegs Marine Command, saying, quote, ship unmaneuverable, we shall fight to the last shell, long live the furor.

At this point, the Bismarck was a goner, and everyone knew it. With the battleship disabled, the British could now take their time. They waited until daylight of the morning of May 27th. The British ships, including the battleship HMS Rodney and HMS King George V, began firing on the Bismarck just before 9 a.m. After an hour of shelling, they managed to disable the main guns on the Bismarck, but the ship wouldn't sink. Finally, around 10 a.m., the battleships left to avoid U-boat attacks, and several torpedoes were launched into the Bismar by a destroyer. However, that still didn't sink the ship. It wasn't until the crew of the Bismarck set off explosives to scuttle the ship that had finally sank at 10.40 a.m.

The British officers all had a sense of respect for the Bismarck, as they never surrendered and went down flying their flag. Over 2,000 men aboard the Bismarck died. 110 were picked up by the British, another 74 by a German U-boat, and two more by a German weather ship. The sinking of the Bismarck ended German surface operations in the Atlantic for the rest of the war. From then on, everything was conducted by U-boat. Bismarck's sister ship, the Tirpitz, was restricted to the coast of Norway, but it too was sunk by the British in 1944. While the British managed to sink the HMS hood, it was hardly a fair exchange given the relative sizes of the British and German navies. Also, the Bismarck and its support ships never managed to sink a single cargo ship.

The story of the sinking of the Bismarck became the basis for the 1959 novel, Last Nine Days of the Bismarck, the 1960 movie Sinked the Bismarck, and a popular song from that year by the same name. The wreck of the Bismarck was discovered in 1989 by Robert Ballard, the same guy who found the Titanic. The ship was found resting right-side up, 4,791 meters, or 15,719. feet below the surface. An analysis of the ship's hull found that it did not show evidence of an implosion which normally happens when a non-flooded ship sinks. This is consistent with the

theory that the ship was scuttled and with the stories of the survivors. In fact, only two holes were found in the ship's hull along the main belt above or below the waterline. The sinking of the Bismarck was unquestionably the biggest naval action in the Atlantic during the Second World War. The loss of the Bismarck changed Germany's entire naval strategy and thus are in entire war strategy. And it also was probably the final chapter in the long naval history of battleships. Everything Everywhere Daily is an airwave media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thorpe Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Mackey 2057 over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, excellent podcast. I'm

enjoying this podcast so much. I started at the beginning and I'm working my way through. It's great. Some things I knew a bit about, some I had never heard of or even thought about before. The topics are interesting, and it's easy to learn something new. Thank you. Well, thank you, Mackie. The show is such that it really doesn't matter where you start. You can start at the beginning and work your way forward, or you can start with the most recent show and work backwards. Or you can just jump around. Whatever suits you best. Remember, if you leave a review or just want to send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.

the biggest ship that had the biggest guns. The Bismarck was a fastest ship that never sailed the sea. On her decks were guns as big as stairs and shells as biggest trees. Out of the cold and foggy night came the British ship, the hood. And every British seaman, he knew and understood. They had to sink the Bismarck, the terror of the sea. Stop those guns as big as steers and those shells as biggest trees.