Sinking of the Bismarck (1941): The Hunt for Germany's Battleship

The sinking of the Bismarck on 27 May 1941 ended one of the most dramatic naval pursuits in history. Germany’s newest and most powerful battleship had broken out into the Atlantic to attack Allied convoys and, on 24 May, sank the Royal Navy’s famous battlecruiser HMS Hood. Over the next three days the British hunted her across the ocean, crippled her with an air-launched torpedo and sank her, with the loss of most of her crew.

Background

The Bismarck was launched in 1939 and commissioned in August 1940. She displaced more than 41,000 tons in standard condition, carried eight 38-centimetre (15-inch) guns and was heavily armoured. Her captain was Ernst Lindemann.

In 1941 Britain depended on convoys across the Atlantic for food, fuel and weapons, and the Battle of the Atlantic was at a critical stage. German planners believed that powerful surface raiders could do great damage among the convoys and tie down the Royal Navy. Earlier in the year, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had sunk or captured 22 merchant ships in a single cruise.

The new operation, code-named Rheinübung (“Rhine Exercise”), sent the Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic under the fleet commander Admiral Günther Lütjens.

The breakout and the loss of the Hood

The two ships left Gotenhafen (now Gdynia) on 18 May 1941. British intelligence and Swedish reports gave warning of their movement, and on 21 May a reconnaissance Spitfire photographed them in a fjord near Bergen in Norway. Admiral John Tovey, commander of the Home Fleet, sent forces to cover the routes into the Atlantic.

On the evening of 23 May the British cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk sighted the German ships in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland and shadowed them by radar. Early on 24 May the battlecruiser HMS Hood and the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales, under Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, intercepted them.

The Battle of the Denmark Strait lasted only minutes. At about 6:00 a.m. a shell from the Bismarck caused a huge explosion in the Hood, probably in one of her magazines. The ship broke in two and sank almost at once. Of her 1,418 men, only three survived: Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn and William Dundas. The damaged Prince of Wales turned away, but not before hitting the Bismarck, causing a fuel leak.

The loss of the Hood, for twenty years the symbol of British naval power, shocked the nation. Churchill ordered that the Bismarck must be found and sunk.

The chase

Lütjens sent the Prinz Eugen off to raid alone and turned the Bismarck towards occupied France for repairs. That night Swordfish torpedo bombers from the carrier HMS Victorious scored one hit, which did little damage.

In the early hours of 25 May the Bismarck shook off her shadowing cruisers. For more than a day the British did not know where she was, partly because of a navigational plotting error aboard Tovey’s flagship. On the morning of 26 May an RAF Coastal Command Catalina flying boat found her again, heading for Brest. One of its pilots was an American, Ensign Leonard Smith, at a time when the United States was still officially neutral.

By then the Bismarck was too far ahead for the British battleships to catch. The last hope was Force H from Gibraltar, with the carrier HMS Ark Royal. That evening its Swordfish, slow fabric-covered biplanes, attacked in poor weather. One torpedo struck the Bismarck’s stern and jammed her rudders. She could no longer steer towards France.

Inside the Bismarck the crew worked through the night to free the rudders, but divers could not reach the damage in the heavy seas. Lütjens sent radio messages to Germany reporting that the ship could not manoeuvre and would fight to the last shell. U-boats in the area had used up their torpedoes or were too far away to help, and German bombers from France could not reach her in time.

During the night British destroyers under Captain Philip Vian, joined by the Polish destroyer Piorun, harried her with torpedo attacks.

The final battle

On the morning of 27 May the battleships King George V and Rodney, joined by the cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire, attacked from about 8:47 a.m. Within an hour the Bismarck’s main guns were silenced and her superstructure wrecked, with heavy loss of life. She was still afloat when the cruiser Dorsetshire fired torpedoes, and German survivors later said scuttling charges had been set. The Bismarck capsized and sank at around 10:40 a.m.

Of roughly 2,200 men aboard, including Lütjens and Lindemann, only about 114 survived, according to most accounts. Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori pulled survivors from the water but left the scene when a U-boat was reported, and hundreds of men were left behind. A few more were picked up by a German U-boat and a weather ship.

In Britain, Churchill was able to announce the sinking to the House of Commons the same day. In Germany the loss was a heavy blow to the navy’s prestige.

Key people

Günther Lütjens commanded the operation and was criticised for not returning to port after sinking the Hood. Ernst Lindemann was the ship’s captain. John Tovey directed the British pursuit from King George V, and Lancelot Holland died with the Hood.

Consequences

The sinking of the Bismarck was a major morale boost for Britain at a difficult point in the war, coming during the costly Battle of Crete. It also showed the growing importance of air power at sea: an obsolete-looking biplane had crippled the most modern battleship afloat.

Germany never again sent a battleship on an Atlantic raid. The Bismarck’s sister ship, Tirpitz, spent most of the war in Norwegian fjords, where she tied down British forces until she was sunk by RAF bombers in November 1944. The German navy relied instead on its U-boats.

Myths and facts

“The Bismarck was unsinkable.” She was very well built, but she was disabled by a single torpedo hit to her rudders and reduced to a wreck by gunfire within an hour.

“The British sank her” versus “the Germans scuttled her.” Both are partly true. Robert Ballard’s expedition found the wreck in June 1989, and later expeditions in the early 2000s fed the debate. Most historians conclude that British fire had made her loss certain, while scuttling may have hastened the end.

Remembering the dead

The wrecks of both ships are now treated as war graves. The Hood lies in the Denmark Strait at a depth of about 2,800 metres, where an expedition in 2001 located and filmed her remains; one of her bells was recovered in 2015 with the approval of the British government and is now displayed at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. Memorials in Britain and Germany commemorate the more than 3,500 men who died aboard the two ships.

Timeline

• 1941, 18 May: The Bismarck and Prinz Eugen leave Gotenhafen.
• 1941, 21 May: A British reconnaissance aircraft photographs the ships near Bergen.
• 1941, 23 May: The cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk sight them in the Denmark Strait.
• 1941, 24 May: HMS Hood is sunk in the Battle of the Denmark Strait.
• 1941, 26 May: A Catalina finds the Bismarck; a Swordfish torpedo from Ark Royal jams her rudders.
• 1941, 27 May: The Bismarck is sunk after her final battle.
• 1989, June: Robert Ballard’s expedition finds the wreck.

Why it matters

The hunt for the Bismarck marked the end of the age when single battleships could dominate the oceans. It is remembered for the loss of thousands of sailors on both sides and as a turning point in the balance between big guns and aircraft at sea.