German battleship Bismarck

As the range increased, the difficulty of hitting the enemy grew dramatically, with many engagements during the war seeing only single-digit hit rates when larger ships were involved.

For example, when the Bismarck met the Hood and Prince of Wales at the Battle of the And we know that one of those shells was a dud that hit the Prince of Wales because it hit the torpedo protection underwater and did not explode.

But the Bismarck fired at the Prince of Wales more than 50 times, which resulted in a hit rate of around 7.5%.

Any of those other shells that hit the water could have also been duds.

We do not know.

The third major challenge around duds is that the ship needed to survive if there was to be accurate record keeping.

To continue on the Bismarck, we have no idea how many duds were fired by the King George V or the Rodney during the final confrontation with the Bismarck.

We know they fired a lot of shells, many of them at very close range, but there are no accurate records from the Bismarck that would allow us to try and determine how many were duds.

Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.

As I was looking at the Bismarck, I saw all these 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.

The weather had deteriorated considerably and we flew off into cloud in December snow and appalling really flying conditions.

At the end of May 1941, some of the world's most powerful warships jeweled in the middle of the Atlantic.

It was to be one of the last great battles of the era of naval gunnery.

It was a series of brutal encounters, all revolving around the flagship of the German Kriegsmarine, Bismarck.

Bismarck is a quantum leap for the Germans, no question.

Bismarck is as capable as anything that the British have got.

Mm-hmm.

The first of the two German battleships was the Bismarck.

I think I've

heard of the Bismarck.

I've heard of the Bismarck.

Sink the Bismarck is what they say, I think.

Yeah.

Is there a movie called Sink the

If you're into movies, don't forget to like and subscribe.

Let's review Sink the Bismarck.

Lewis Gilbert's 1960 film Sink the Bismarck is a gripping portrayal of one of World War II's most intense naval confrontations.

The movie chronicles the British Navy's relentless pursuit of the formidable German battleship the Bismarck during the early days of the war.

The film is based on a book by C.S. Forrester and features a screenplay by Edmund H.

North known for his work on The Day the Earth Stood Still and Patton.

With a runtime of 97 minutes, the film manages to capture the tension and strategic complexity of naval warfare without resorting to melodrama or sensationalism.

At the heart of the story is Captain Jonathan Shepard, played by Kenneth Moore, the newly appointed Director of Naval Operations.

The range between the targets was less than 25,000 meters, about 16 miles, within the range where it was possible that the ships would be able to land hits on one another.

On the British side, both the Hood and the Prince of Wales would first target the Prince Eugen under the false belief that it was in fact the Bismarck that they were shooting at.

This was important because aboard the Hood, they were in a race against time, as the ship tried to close the distance with the Bismarck as quickly as possible to minimize the amount of time that the weakness of the ship, its deck armor, was most at risk of being taken advantage of by the Bismarck's plunging shellfire.

The Prince of Wales had been ordered to adhere closely to the Hood's movements, and it was under direct orders to fire on the leftmost ship in the German formation, which Admiral Holland aboard the Hood believed to be the Bismarck, even though some of the officers aboard the Prince of Wales knew that it was not the Bismarck.

Aboard the German ships, while they had been surprised by the sight of the British battleships, they had plenty of time to prepare for action before the ships came close enough for firing to begin.

It's worth noting before we start this episode that while we have exact information about the actions of the Prince of Wales, our information about the Bismarck is slightly more limited, and our information about the Hood is even more scarce.

That's why you will hear me talk about particularly the Hood, not from the perspective of its men, but instead from the perspective of the men aboard the Prince of Wales and the Bismarck.

The first salvo from the Hood was at just before 5.53 a.m., the first from the Prince of Wales, shortly thereafter, with a recorded range of 24,250 meters, which is about 15 miles.

It could be years.

capital ships took a long time to build many years even under wartime priority the time that it would take for a battleship to be built you know could be three four five years this meant that leaders of the royal navy knew that every month that the bismarck was not available to the germans and then every month that it delayed action the better the situation would be for the royal navy The King George V joined the fleet at the end of 1940, the Prince of Wales in May 1941, the Duke of York was scheduled for June, Anson by the end of the year.

Each of these ships represented a drastic increase in the ability of the Royal Navy to meet the challenge of the Bismarck, but they could not be accelerated any more than they already were.

They were going to arrive at those times, and there was nothing that could be done to change that.

And then when news arrived that the Bismarck had been spotted, what was available to be used to try and meet the Bismarck was probably the two ships that would not have been chosen, the Hood and the Prince of Wales.

And they were the best positioned.

They were available at the time, and they would have to do.

The aging Hood and the very young Prince of Wales.

In fact, she'd already held her own brush with the ship at the center of the next story.

Because Prince of Wales was one of two Royal Navy ships that engaged the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait that same May, days before Bismarck went to the bottom of the Atlantic.

And somewhere aboard Bismarck, by an account that would go on to become one of the single most famous and most disputed ship's cat story of the entire war.

There was a cat.

I really like how you use the word catastrophe for the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales.

So I just want to hear more about their influence and what they did and significant cats why is it controversial that this cat was on the bismarck was it was he why was this cat famous i know the bismarck was itself famous it was rumored to be unsinkable until of course it sunk but yes you have to let me know what's going on with this cat

May 27th, 1941.

The German battleship Bismarck.

But this is one of the last actions where you see sort of big battleships doing what big battleships are supposed to do.

Yes, and then in the aftermath, less than a year later, was the Bismarck against the Hood.

Yeah.

And it was one of the biggest disasters in French naval history when in a 17-minute battle, all of a sudden, the Hood just disappeared.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I

mean, that's a Bismarck shell that comes out.

I'll get you started.