Bismarck’s shells ripped through the battle cruiser’s deck and hit close to the main tower. As Hood continued to close in and fire, Bismarck Captain Ernst Lindemann finally took charge of his superior and ordered the battleship’s guns to return the salvos.īismarck and Hood traded thundering blows for four minutes until the Germans finally found their target. Aboard Bismarck, Admiral Gunther Lutjens, commander in chief of the German Fleet, froze with indecision. Saltwater geysers erupted around Bismarck as the shells that screamed overhead at 1,000 miles per hour narrowly missed their marks. From 14 miles away, Hood fired the first shots. Launched in 1918, Hood was Britain’s largest battle cruiser and perhaps the most famous warship afloat.Ī view of the German battleship Bismarck firing on a merchant ship in the north Atlantic.Īt dawn on May 24, the tandem of British ships approached at full speed toward the enemy inside the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. Among those in pursuit were the recently commissioned battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Hood.
Having received reports that Bismarck was loose in the Atlantic Ocean stalking its prey, the British dispatched a fleet to track down the Nazis’ daunting battleship. Nazi leaders hoped that their “unsinkable” state-of-the-art battleship would sever the Allied lifeline and starve the British into submission. An ocean-bound castle, the thickly armored Bismarck was the first full-scale battleship constructed by the German navy since World War I.Īccompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the largest warship afloat broke out into the frigid, open waters of the North Atlantic on a top-secret mission, codenamed Operation Rheinubung, to attack the Allied convoys crossing the ocean between the United States and Great Britain with oil, food and other supplies. Under the cover of darkness in the early morning hours of May 19, 1941, the most formidable battleship to have ever been built slipped into the Baltic Sea on its maiden voyage.
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