The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [206]
120 feet wide, designed to carry eight 15″ guns and six aircraft, with 13″ armour made of specially hardened Wotan steel on her turrets and sides. Listed as 35,000 tons to comply with the London Treaty, she would in fact be 42,000 tons standard displacement and over 50,000 tons fully laden. There had never been a warship like her: she symbolized not only a resurgent Navy but the whole resurgent German nation… Warships combine uniquely grace and power, and Bismarck, massive and elegant, with the high flare of her bows and majestic sweep of her lines, the symmetry of her turrets, the rakish cowling of her funnel, her ease and arrogance in the water, was then the most graceful, most powerful warship yet built. No German saw her without pride, no neutral or enemy without admiration.39
Furthermore she had twelve boilers, her four gun turrets each weighed 1,000 tons – they were nicknamed Anton, Bruno, Caesar and Dora – she could sail at 29 knots and her crew numbered 2,065. Prinz Eugen, meanwhile, displaced 14,000 tons, had eight 8-inch guns and a speed of 32 knots.
These two warships left port at Gotenhafen (present-day Gdynia) at 21.30 hours on Sunday, 18 May 1941 in Operation Rheinübung (Rhine Exercise), a break for the Atlantic. Because several Polish labourers had been killed by oil fumes while cleaning her tanks, Bismarck sailed 200 tons of fuel short, something which her captain, Ernst Lindemann, was later bitterly to regret. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen skirted as far as possible away from the major British naval base of Scapa Flow and sailed through the Denmark Straits, where on the afternoon of Friday, 23 May they were shadowed with radar by the Royal Navy heavy cruisers HMS Norfolk and HMS Suffolk, until HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Hood were able to intercept them at dawn the next day. ‘If any one ship could be said to have been the embodiment of British sea-power and the British Empire between the wars,’ wrote Kennedy, ‘it was “The mighty Hood”, as Britain and the Navy called her.’ Built on Clydeside in 1916, she was, at 860 feet, 38 feet longer even than the Bismarck. Like Bismarck she had eight 15-inch guns in four massive turrets. With her maximum speed of 32 knots – she was the fastest ship of her size afloat – a ton of oil only got her half a mile. She had everything except upper-deck armour, because she had been built just before the battle of Jutland, when three British battle cruisers had been lost from shells falling vertically through their decks. Despite this, she had not been reconditioned.
When the Hood and Prince of Wales exchanged fire, at a range of 13 miles, with Bismarck and Prinz Eugen at 06.00 on Saturday, 24 May 1941, Norfolk and Suffolk were not close enough to provide support. In his fine memoir Pursuit: The Sinking of the Bismarck, Kennedy described how ‘For a moment the world stood still, then the guns spoke with their terrible great roar, the blast almost knocked one senseless, thick clouds of cordite smoke, black and bitter-smelling, clutched at the throat, blinded the vision, and four shells weighing a ton apiece went rocketing out of the muzzles at over 1,600 miles per hour.’40
Without the Norfolk and Suffolk to harry Bismarck from the rear, there was nothing to draw her fire from Hood, which was also taking fire from Prinz Eugen, and because the two German ships had swapped places since the last visual report, Hood was firing at the wrong target – Prinz Eugen rather than Bismarck – as the two looked alike at that distance despite their very different displacements.41 The Germans also had the weather gauge working in their favour, so that the British range-finders on the forward turrets were drenched with spray and other, less accurate instruments in the control tower had to be used instead. Furthermore, only the front turrets