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By Root 1053 0

by a British squadron of one heavy and two light cruisers, Exeter, Ajax, and Achilles. Someone on Graf Spee made a costly recognition mistake, and assessed the enemy as a light cruiser and two destroyers rather than what they really were. The Germans bore on to attack. The British split into two divisions, forcing Graf Spee to divide her fire; Exeter was very badly hurt, but so was the German, and though Langsdorf could probably have finished off his opponents, he broke away instead and took refuge in Montevideo. While the Germans hastily made all the repairs they were allowed in a neutral port the British mustered the watchdogs around the lair. On the evening of the 17th, huge crowds watched as the battered German raider steamed out to sea for her last fight. Then, to everyone’s surprise, instead of going down in a blaze of glory, the Germans set off charges and scuttled the ship in the Plate Estuary. Three hours later, the minuscule British squadron that Graf Spee dared not face sailed triumphantly into the harbor. Poor Langsdorf shot himself to refute any charge of cowardice, but the world drew its own conclusions about how long it takes to build a naval tradition and how Britannia still ruled the waves.

There were already examples of that. In November, the Germans had shaken loose two more raiders, the beautiful battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, at the time the finest ships in commission in the German Navy. On the 23rd, they sighted an armed merchant cruiser on the Northern Patrol; H. M. S. Rawalpindi signaled “Enemy battle cruisers in sight” and took her six-inch guns into battle against the Germans’ eleven-inch guns. They finished her off in sixteen minutes, but then they scurried back home, successfully evading the pursuing British main fleet units.

The spring and summer of 1940 were busy with the Norwegian affair, the fall of France, and the unhappy episodes of British ships attacking the French fleet. Not until October of 1940 did the big ships clash again. The pocket-battleship Scheer got out then, and on November 5 she ambushed an eastbound convoy of thirty-seven merchantmen, escorted only by another armed merchant cruiser, H. M. S. Jervis Bay. Captain Fogarty Fegen of Jervis Bay steamed straight for the giant, and though the old merchantman never had a chance, her destruction took long enough for the convoy to scatter. Scheer caught only five of them. The German cruiser Hipper broke loose in early December; on Christmas morning she attacked a troop convoy, but the heavy escort drove her off, and she eventually went to Brest.

In January of 1941, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Hipper all went to sea together; they were at large for sixty days and sank twenty-two ships before they returned to French ports. That was just a warm-up for the main event, however. In May, the mightiest ship in the world, the brand-new Bismarck, sailed from Gotenhavn in company with the cruiser Prinz Eugen.

The ensuing chase was the high point of the naval war in the Atlantic. The Germans went far north of Iceland, then came south through the Denmark Strait, close to the ice ringing Greenland. Five days out, they were sighted by H. M. S. Suffolk, a cruiser on the Northern Patrol. Suffolk shadowed them while heavy British units closed in to contact. The first to meet them were the Hood and the Prince of Wales, one long the pride of the Royal Navy, the other brand-new and still carrying dockyard workers who were caught aboard the ship as she hastily put to sea.

The giants opened fire at each other in the long Arctic dawn on the 24th, Empire Day, at a range of about twelve and a half miles. The ships were positioned in such a way that only the forward British guns could fire, while all the Germans’ bore on target. They concentrated on Hood, and at 0600 Bismarck’s fourth salvo hit her four-inch-gun magazine, aft of the mainmast. The explosion flashed into the main after-magazine for the fifteen-inch guns. There was a huge pillar of fire that soared a thousand feet into the air, a horrendous explosion, and Hood broke in half;