German battleship Bismarck in August 1940, bow view
Yet Bismarck's final undoing came at the hands of an embarrassingly obsolete weapon, one that no one could have predicted in advance would play the telling role that it did: the carrier-based Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber. This was a biplane aircraft that looked more like Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel WWI fighter plane than a sleek modern attack aircraft. Wobbling unsteadily towards the Bismarck at barely 100 MPH, the Swordfish flew so slowly that the Bismarck’s modern, sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons could not track their motion slowly enough to get an accurate bead on them and shoot them down. The Swordfish was too slow for the Bismarck to hit them accurately. Amazing.
And like Achilles and his vulnerable heel, so too was the Bismarck critically unprotected: Its rudder, which controlled its steering—was exposed and easy to damage. A Swordfish-launched torpedo struck the Bismarck in the rudder, leaving her impossible to steer. So ended her dash for safety and the British fleet caught her the next day and finished her off.
Neither the Bismarck nor the Tirpitz ever sank even a single merchant ship, which was their primary mission. The Bismarck’s ocean-going fighting career lasted eight days. The Tirpitz’ career was effectively zero days.
For the same amount of raw materials and factory bandwidth that went into making these seven large ships (all of which were manufactured in the 1930s, either before the war or just shortly after its commencement), hundreds of additional U-boats and thousands of additional tanks and aircraft could have been produced. These kinds of weapons were much more in keeping with the style of warfare with which Germany had the most success.
But battleships like Bismarck — quite possibly the most beautiful large warship ever built, with its dramatically swept bow and elegantly angled single stack — held an undeniable emotional appeal to maniacally-egotistical, ambitious heads of state with dreams of worldwide domination, and the visceral appeal of wielding one’s battle fleet in grand surface combat obviously overcame the more measured approach of leveraging the country’s industrial/military capabilities for maximum advantage.
In the end, the civilized world should be thankful for the Bismarck’s existence. A WW II Germany with thousands more Focke-Wulf fighters, and Tiger tanks, and hundreds more U-boats would have been that much more deadly and difficult to defeat. The combined industrial capability and manpower reserves of Britain, America and the Soviet Union would have defeated Germany eventually in any case, but victory was achieved sooner and at less cost to the Allies because of the Bismarck.
Wonder how many more Uboats Germany would of had if they had not build a useless surface fleet?
If Hitler hadn’t declared war on the US, he stood a chance of beating the Soviet Union, or at least securing a negotiated truce. Once he declared war, all bets were off.
This seemed like a fatal flaw with the Wermacht - the fascination with big, bad weaponry. The Maus and Gustav to name two more. Both epic failures.
Bismarck and Tirpitz have to be the most overrated battleships in history. They were just an updated version of the World War I era Bayern class battleship. One problem with the ships was the lack of a dual purpose secondary battery. Weight and space were wasted on having to use two systems.
The Fairey Swordfish was so flimsy an aircraft it was nick named “The Stringbag’’.
“Sink the Bismark” - pretty good song by Johnny Horton.
Johnny Horton!
I disagree with the premise of the article. If one reads Churchill’s History of WW2, he said that the Germans would have been better served to keep Bismark hanging around as a threat as it caused the British to retain massive forces in place just to counter the threat of a sortie. If it had ever sortied with the Tirpitz, that would have required 4 battleships to be certain of victory and those would have to be available at all times. Factoring in needed maintenance, refueling, convoy escort, etc. They could have tied down most of the heavy units of the British fleet. That’s what Mahan called a “fleet in being”.
The Hand of God guided that biplane, its torpedo and its pilot.
David and Goliath........................
Interesting stat I came across years ago. Germany produced around 1300 Tiger I tanks. The USA produced about 1400 naval vessels whose displacement exceeded 1000 tons. People today have little understanding of the enormity of our production capacity during the war.
“Hood — the pride of the British navy — was struck by a perfectly-aimed salvo from Bismarck and exploded violently, breaking in two and sinking with just three survivors out of a crew of more than 1,400. After 10 minutes of fighting.”
There’s some renewed debate about what & who actually sank the “Hood”. There’s an intriguing alternate theory that has some evidence for it — that the “Prinz Eugen” actually landed the first hits on Hood.
The explanation lies in the fact that Hood was actually already inside the “immune zone” with respect to Bismark. The “immune zone” is defined by lower arc shots coming in at your heavy side armor as opposed to longer range plunging fire which would have hit the Hood’s notoriously thin deck armor.
There were also some hints that “Bismark’s” 15” AP rounds were malfunctioning or not fused correctly.
Finally, the Eugen had the range and her lighter guns where firing at — what for her — was extreme range. Eugen’s shots were dropping on top of Hood’s deck and starting fires. She was also mostly firing HE rounds rather than AP. The thinking is that the only way Eugen could have gotten a kill shot firing HE was to have dropped a shot right down Hood’s stack. The ensuing explosion below decks would have been vented under the Q-turret where everyone agrees the major explosion occurred.
Personally, I still go with a fluke shot from Bismarck. As statistically unlikely that shot was, believing an even less likely shot from Eugen did it just beggars belief.
Did anybody do a Youtube video of Hitler finding out about the sinking?
And here I was preparing a spirited defense of jelly doughnuts.
The military kept building one more “perfect” weapon, which grew so complicated and expensive that it couldn't work, and the Earth was defeated.
It mocked the US military, practically any time from the 50’s to the 90’s, but it made sense to me as completely possible.
The pursuit of the perfect weapon is often the start of a malaise that corrodes an organization from the inside out.
Today, that translates to "Holy ________ " (fill in the blank.)
Germans scuttled the ship. They've looked at her on the bottom and founded holes blown through the bottom of the hull.
There were stories about it many years ago.
I’ve heard it described that the best weapon the allied forces had against Germany was Hitler.
German battleship Bismarck in August 1940, bow view
A mere 40 operational U-boats in WW I almost starved England out of the war. Germany did not build more than about a hundred because they though they had enough.