The Legendary Mission To Sink The Bismarck | History Hit | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show [Music] [Applause] 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 realized that what i thought was pretty was death and destruction in the form of about eight tons of metal coming my way the weather had deteriorated considerably and we flew off um into cloud in snow and appalling really flying conditions six miles [Music] 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 [Music] bismarck is a quantum leap for the germans no question bismarck is as capable as anything that the british have got bismarck is a very impressive warship she is extremely dangerous bismarck was now loose in the atlantic the admiralty were now trying to find whatever ships they could and throw them at the problem [Music] the british have one job to sink bismarck if left unchecked bismarck threatened to dominate the atlantic and starve britain of the vital food and military supplies that flowed from the rest of the world the admiralty had no choice bismarck had to be stopped [Music] on valentine's day 1939 at the blum and vos shipyard in hamburg the biggest ship ever built in europe was launched it was a triumphant day for hitler he'd swept to power on the promise of overturning the treaty of versailles and returning germany to a position of pride and power and now he was christening one of the most powerful ships afloat a stark statement of intent he concluded his speech may the german soldiers and officers who will have the honor to command this ship one day prove themselves worthy of the name the bismarck bismarck is quite a large battleship for her era she is about 250 meters in length which is fairly impressive and 30 meters in the beam so she's wider than a lot of contemporary battleships this helps to make her a very steady gun platform she's able to make a very respectable speed of 29 knots at full speed and that is quite fast what's important about that is it's a speed that she can maintain in all weathers a lot of ships have a rated maximum speed but it often drops in bad weather bismarck can push through and maintain her maximum speed when conditions are rough her armament is quite impressive she has eight 15-inch guns mounted in twin turrets two forward to half lastly there's bismarck's armor and protection scheme in keeping with traditional german warship building practice they have emphasized what the more hyperbolic would call unsinkability she has an incredible amount of internal subdivision making her very hard to flood and therefore to sink her armor protection is comparable to most modern battleships of the era and not only does she have very impressive protection on the side of the hull with a fairly dense armor belt her turrets are very well protected and her command space has a very heavily armored conning tower so between all of this bismarck is a very impressive warship she's by no means the best battleship of her generation but she is extremely dangerous bismarck is a quantum leap for the germans no question um so prior to bismarck coming into service their most powerful ships are what would nicknamed the twins the scharnhorst denies now these are relatively small the germans call them battleships the british always call them battle cruisers actually what they are is a development of the panzer schiffer so they're armed with 11-inch guns they're quite fast but they're not really a match on a one-on-one for any british battleship afloat at that point bismarck is bismarck is as capable as anything that the british have got radar had designed the bismarck as a commerce raider as such it was probably unstoppable if bismarck had broken out into the atlantic as other cruisers and uh and smaller ships had done throughout 1939 and 1940 the british would have a real problem they had lacked the ships with the firepower to be able to take on bismarck effectively on the high seas but it would be two years before bismarck was ready to threaten the seas two years it would see western europe fall almost entirely into nazi control the uk had weathered the pounding from the luftwaffe and avoided invasion by the wehrmacht but on the fringes of europe she was still desperately vulnerable britain now relied on fragile cargo routes that crisscrossed the oceans for her food and vital supplies that allowed her to continue resisting nazi domination grand admiral raider head of the german navy had witnessed the successes of the army and luftwaffe as they had dominated central europe but also had seen how they'd struggled to subdue britain he was keen to remain useful in the eyes of the fuhrer and add naval victories to germany's impressive list of achievements it would now be the turn of the kriegsmarine to try and break the british [Music] so the german navy in the second world war the most important thing to realize about it is it's terribly small nevertheless they've used it operationally um most notably perhaps in in norway in 1940 when they use almost their entire fleet to transport an army and carry out a surprise attack on norway they have their pocket battleships the famous panzer schiffer they they go out on commerce raiding missions they're in place at the beginning of the war so by 1941 you've got a german navy that has been probably to be fair doing the best it can given the resources it has the german navy had been designed on different lines from the royal navy the royal navy was all about sea power and sea control controlling the sea lanes and imposing its will on the enemy essentially the same thing it had done in the napoleonic wars and during the first war the germans were in the business of sea denial limiting the the enemy's fleet and pinning it in place but also then attacking his sea lanes when we think about the commerce raiding of the germans in the second world war we tend to focus on u-boats on submarines and clearly that's what does the most damage overall during the war however if you are able to put big capital ships to sea as well as submarines that's the dream ticket in terms of commerce raiding because if you want to protect your merchant ships from submarines what do you do you group them into a convoy with lots of small warships that are anti-submarine ships around it job done however if a battleship like bismarck rocks up then the battleship can destroy all those small escorts and the convoy so the only thing that a convoy can do if a battleship like bismarck appears is scatter and if it scatters then all those individual merchant ships can be sunk by submarines what was a game changer for it came in the spring of 1940 with the capture of french ports on the atlantic particularly brest which had a they had dry docks they had port facilities which could serve as both a u-boat fleet but also if german battleships and heavy cruisers broke out into the atlantic they could use places like breast as a [Music] base raider was quick to take advantage of the newly captured french ports on the atlantic coast he based his u-boat wolf packs there and sent them out deep into the atlantic to prey upon british supply lines the impact was immediate and devastating the u-boat captains call this the happy time despite these successes most still believe that only warships on the surface could deal a decisive blow in the campaign and so as bismarck underwent its final sea trials raider launched operation berlin in january 1941 two fast powerful battleships nisenael and scharnhorst swept through the atlantic from greenland to the azores smashing into britain's vulnerable shipping lanes the threat of germany's surface fleet was now very real raider was thrilled with the success of operation berlin and desperate to try and repeat it this time with his new super weapon bismarck unfortunately for him there were no other big gunned battleships that were operational but bismarck would sail anyway accompanied only by a squadron of smaller vessels and the heavy cruiser prince eugen the men in command of bismarck were vice admiral gunter luchans and his captain ernst lindemann luchans had been in charge of operation berlin and was now about to leave germany's most potent naval asset out on another commerce raiding mission operation rhinubung and so on the 19th of may 1941 the world's heaviest commissioned battleship slid out of a dockyard on the german occupied baltic coast escorted by her consort prince oygan on board the prince oregon was a small team from the propaganda company tasked with reporting on the mission amazingly with them was a cameraman called lagamin bismarck's maiden operation was filmed bismarck wants to avoid contact with the royal navy as much as possible the plan was to get out into the open atlantic and start raiding not to engage other capital ships but to get there completely unseen would prove impossible within hours of leaving port a swedish cruiser spotted the flotilla sailing west through the baltic sea the swedish reporter of it's not named the ship and contact was lost once it left swedish waters the message that made its way to the british admiralty only read as bismark and prince oygan slipped out into the north sea and up towards norway the british were already flying reconnaissance sorties over the scandinavian coast on the 21st of may flying officer michael suttling flew over a fjord near bergen and took a photograph that sent a chill to the core of the british admiralty the size of the ship in the photograph could only mean one thing admiral john toby put the royal navy on high alert bismarck was loose so to understand the royal navy in 1941 we actually need to rewind quite a bit actually actually let's rewind to 1815 very very briefly because at the end of the napoleonic wars that the royal navy is the single most powerful dominant force in the world there's nothing else to touch it and that's the case for the whole of the 19th century so the royal navy goes into the first world war with a new young threat at sea and also no operational experience fighting sea battles for the best part of 100 years because there hasn't been anyone to take them on lots and lots of lessons are learnt for the royal navy during the first world war um about command and control um and the the guys who were the the junior officers commanding ships or first lieutenants of ships in the first world war those are the people who are running the navy in the second world war so they've got the men and they've also got the ships um the royal navy at the start of the second world war it has its gaps but it's still the most powerful the most potent navy in the world so you've got a mix of older ships that are being refurbished and that's actually a program that is is underway when the war breaks out the battleships particularly were old however five new ones were building in 1941 and two of them by may had entered service with the home fleet the king george v and the prince of wales so that at least gave the british modern speedy battleships that said they've got considerable things facing them although the royal navy is huge it is very very stretched they have gone into the second world war confident that they could fight the germans that's fine they could fight the germans and the italians with the french alongside them but they lose the french in 1940 so suddenly they're up against the german navy combined with the italian navy and they're doing it on their own i'm deep beneath the streets of liverpool now in derby house and this is one of the most important spaces of the british war effort because it was from here that the british directed operations in the battle of the atlantic here is where the information was gathered and plotted so that it could be instantly accessible you've got all the states readiness of aircraft squadrons of convoys of naval assets and then those assets will be plotted on this amazing map of the north atlantic you've got military vessels and submarines enemy and allied you've also got merchant marine convoys ons that means outbound from britain hx means that it's left halifax heading for the uk it gives commanders here a real-time view of what is going on in this battle space it is essential to british success in the all-important battle of the atlantic and as such it was at the heart of that titanic month may 1941 when the british attempted to catch the bismarck it was quite the undertaking the british home fleet left their base in scotland these convoys were stripped of their military escorts all non-essential missions were cancelled it was the biggest single naval operation of the second world war thus far and at its heart was the pride of the fleet the mighty hood it's a massive ship which is beautiful to look at she was a wonderful looking ship she was long and uh perfectly symmetrical two turrets forward two masks two funnels two turrets left marvelous looking ship i'd never seen anything quite so powerful and beautiful for what beautiful for a battleship sounds awful but it's there's no other way to describe them hood was pretty much equivalent in size to bismarck she was about 860 feet in length which was a very large vessel indeed somewhat slimmer than bismarck at only 100 foot in the beam she was therefore perhaps best to describe her as an ocean greyhound she was designed to be fast and she was designed to be very powerful there's also a similarity in primary armament she has eight 15-inch guns dispersed in very much the same way we see on the bismarck two twin turrets forward two twin turrets aft hood was quite respectably protected but her protection scheme was dated so although her armor was only marginally thinner than bismarck's in terms of horizontal protection and was actually thicker in places around her turrets could have been designed before the effects of long-range plunging fire had been fully understood and because she had never had the comprehensive refits that had graced a couple of the royal navy's other capital ships it meant that she went into battle with a scheme of protection that was inadequate to the demands of modern naval warfare the final element of course was her speed that long thin hull was meant to purchase a very high speed and in fact the reason her upper deck is so low at the stern it was basically to save weight to squeeze as many knots as they could out of this design which had already sacrificed a lot of weight in other directions as completed hood could manage 31 to 32 knots fairly easily a very high speed for a ship this size but unfortunately by 1941 her engines although maintained were aging and unlike bismarck she wasn't designed in the same way to cope with very heavy weather so while her printed speed as complete might have been 31 knots her actual speed in 1941 was probably no better than bismarck's it may even have been a not or so slower by the start of the second world war hood was probably the most famous warship in the world during the interwar years hood spent most of her time showing the flag she toured the world and was a floating embodiment of british sea power she looked powerful she looked sleek she looked above all she looked elegant she's the perfect vessel for showing the flag brass bands playing cocktail parties and she'll impress anyone the trouble was during that time she hadn't been overhauled she could have been modified and improved and re-armored but she was too useful as a as the poster child of british empire there is a mythical status to hood that is hard to defend um she is a battle cruiser this is an evolutionary dead end for warships really that that really should have been killed off after the battle of jutland when three of them blow up in sync their best defense is supposed to be their speed so they are they look like a battleship and they have the same guns as a battleship they do not have the armor protection of a battleship and as a consequence they can go faster and they're supposed to be used for scouring the oceans of commerce raiders so you want a battle cruiser to go and find a pocket battleship and sink it you do not want them standing up in the line against battleships and they learn this at jutland so they don't build anymore and actually the royal navy only enters the second world war with three of them hood renown and repulse all of which date back to the the closing years of the first world war they are laid down and completed during the first world war renowned and repulsed actually see service in the first world war and hood comes in shortly afterwards so she is built really with problems she gets this nickname the mighty hood and she is fundamentally the wrong ship to attach that label to they really should not have done that despite those concerns under the command of vice admiral lancelot holland would be at the head of the strike force against bismarck and should be accompanied by a brand new battleship hms prince of wales the pair were ordered to cruise to the south of iceland where she could use her speed to intercept bismarck whichever route she took to get into the atlantic admiral toby knew there were three options available to elections but still didn't know which he would take he therefore ordered heavy cruisers to take up positions between shetland and the pharaohs in the icelandic pharaoh gap and in the denmark straits the channel of water between iceland and greenland the royal navy had set its trap whichever way into the rich hunting grounds of the atlantic that bismarck and prince oregon chose to take the navy would be waiting whether it was between the pharaohs and iceland or the denmark strait between iceland and greenland the german ships would have to pass through a british net all these british ships had to do now was keep their eyes open and wait on the 22nd of may bismarck and prince organ were cruising off the coast of norway and luncheons needed to decide which passage they would take he knew the royal navy would be out there somewhere but he didn't know where at 1200 hours he ordered a new course bismarck and prince eugen would try and break out into the atlantic through the denmark straits stationed in the straits were sister ships hms norfolk and suffolk they'd been dispatched on the 21st of may and their crews had been waiting patiently in foul north atlantic weather they would be the tripwire for the entire british plan suddenly at 20 past seven to my right shoulder ship and then two ships i swung my room off this round steaming that fast from behind this camera and i just put this down the water this mountain what actually happened is that the the weather which was closed right down it suddenly lifted it and they were there almost doubled and i know that i know the distance because right behind me in the full control it was a communication person who was repeating messages from the radar 12 thousand yards is six little miles six multiple miles from chicago to us as the german ships are pushing through they are spotted by the british cruiser hms suffolk on patrol in the denmark strait now suffolk and norfolk they're not powerful enough to engage bismarck clearly but what they can do is absolutely classic cruiserwork which is to find the enemy report the enemy's presence and then shadow them and that's what they do they pick up the germans the british have the advantage of radar so they start to shadow the germans through the denmark strait the germans try and throw them off they know that the risks are there um periodically bismarck turns and fires at them it's very it's a dance that the british are very used to they pull out a range they pull back in again and keep methodically following them while heavier forces can be summoned up and the nearest force that can be brought up um is hms hood together with the brand new battleship hms prince of wales [Music] the british were planning to steal a march on the germans so they in fact uh went to action stations very shortly after midnight on the morning of the 24th of may the germans were at a slightly lower alert level they they knew there were british cruisers tailing them but those cruisers didn't represent an existential threat they were more of a highly dangerous nuisance and so the germans were at the next alert level down what that meant was that some of their crews were able to rest while about two-thirds of the crew were closed up and when they did sight hood and prince of wales it was a simple matter to go to full action stations and summon the remaining crew to their battle stations so the state of play when these two forces meet is quite interesting because at the beginning at the outset you would think the british have the advantage actually hood we've discussed is quite old um but she's still got those powerful 15-inch guns um she's got her speed and she's accompanied by prince of wales which is another battleship brand new 14-inch gun quadruple turrets you know a very powerful unit set against that the germans have bismarck now bismarck is also on new and untried we tend to forget that bismarck and prince of wales are both on their first operational deployments prince of wales has been rushed into hers bismarck's had a little bit more work up time but neither of them have fought a battle and then the germans have prince oregon also brand new heavy cruiser realistically she's pretty outmatched prince oregon is not designed to go toe-to-toe with either hood or prince of wales british also have two cruisers so there's a stronger british force there prince of wales uh hood's consort in this operation is a brand new battleship she's one of the new king george the fifth class battleships these are very powerful warships they're very well designed they're reasonably fast and her presence there should have been enough to ensure a british victory but there was a lot going on under the surface the first was prince of wales was extremely new her crew had only just been assigned many of them were inexperienced and the ship still had civilian contractors aboard because she'd been rushed into service so quickly and sent out to accompany uh hood so what this meant in practice was you have a ship with a crew who are unfamiliar with her um the ship has not undergone what they would call a shakedown cruise in order to knock her systems into order um iron out all the kinks identify potential mechanical problems and rectify them none of that's really had a chance to happen so although on paper prince of wales is an extremely powerful asset she is not all that she seems and in many respects is actually less than she seems when don came and the two sides spotted each other who'd realized that the germans weren't quite where he expected them to be shortly before luchans had altered course essentially he's heading south now he's heading more on a southeasterly course [Music] holland had a decision to make he could either continue to shadow the german ships and wait for royal navy reinforcements to arrive or he could engage the enemy at 5 37 a.m he made his decision he would fight the message was conveyed back to the [Music] admiralty admiral holland has no other choice other than to engage bismarck that's his job so the german job is to avoid action and to to get through into the atlantic that's luchan's job holland's job is to stop him so holland has to fight a battle and actually he's got trained experienced crews i think we tend to think of the problems with hood the advantage of hood is she's she's a long-standing you know she's been in service for a long time that's an experienced crew you know all any faults mechanical thoughts with her have been ironed out long before you know very coherent unit that knows what it's doing and then prince of wales is a very powerful new force so there's nothing wrong with holland's decision he has to engage the men on board the two british capital ships were now preparing for battle we were all right on the hood because i mean it was the best it was the funniest ship in the world and we were safe no bother there was a certain amount of tension yes i wouldn't say we thought it was going to be historic but we thought the hood was the best and we would beat the enemy but as i said previously there were going to be casualties you don't go into any action like that without expecting casualties but once again it's going to happen to someone else it's not going to happen to me and over the loudspeaker system came a voice we didn't know particularly and he said this is the chaplain speaking this was the prayer between before edge heal oh lord there knows how busy we shall be today if we forget thee do not forget us hood was in a lot of danger at the outset of the engagement it's very obvious from the start that the british are at a disadvantage they've approached out of position uh the germans are very fine of hood's bow which means that they are crossing the british tea their full broadside can be brought to bear on the british ships whereas the british have a rather awkward choice to make they can either turn to match the germans in which case you have an engagement where hood is at a serious disadvantage in terms of her protection or they can attempt to close the range however in closing only the forward turrets on the hood and on the prince of wales are able to bear holland takes this decision god knows i wouldn't want to take it to to push close in as fast as possible before going into line so he accepts the fact that he's going to be outgunned for a while that the germans will be able to bring all their guns to bear on just his forward guns as they close so that's the decision he takes the reason why holland decides to close is to try and avoid the possibility of plunging fire as quickly as he can now what is plunging fire that is where you elevate your guns a bit like a military howitzer and you fire a shell that goes up in the air and then plunges down and what that does is if you hit the target you're going to go through the deck armor rather than the armor belt around the side of the ship now on any warship that the deck armor is more vulnerable than the armor belt on hood it's a particular problem because hood is a battle cruiser they have sacrificed armour protection for speed and hood's deck armor is really really not up to speed now holland knows this so what he wants to do is get under under the plunge as soon as he can blow to blow like boxers pummeling each other on the belt armor fundamentally he's got two very powerful ships and the germans only have one very powerful ship he's pretty confident he can win that when the radar had first got this range it was somewhere in the region of about nearly twenty thousand yards i should imagine and watching this pointer it was going twenty thousand nineteen thousand eighteen thousand seventeen thousand sixteen thousand if it had been me being a coward i should have laid off and ate at the range of the 15 inch guns and probably walloped him from there and i thought my goodness in a minute we will be getting out our cutlasses and going aboard that german and giving them a good old taste of the nelsons and the drakes hood's huge guns opened fire at 0-5-53 hurling enormous projectiles an astonishing 24 kilometers but hud's crew had made a terrible mistake they were firing on the leading german ship believing it to be bismarck but during the night bismarck and prince eugen had changed position so for several crucial minutes hud was firing at the wrong target and it's only in isolation it isn't that important but the problem is all these little things are these leveling factors that then start to give the germans an advantage so you've got some time lost when they're targeting the wrong ship essentially not only does that mean you're losing opportunities to hit bismarck but it's also giving bismarck a free shoot because they're not being distracted by gunfire going off around them and shell splashes in the water um when you add that to the the need to close the range because of hud's feeble deck armor the mechanical problems on board prince of wales all these factors then are starting to to level things up for the germans and take away what should have been a british advantage the crew on board the prince of wales made no such error and despite her mechanical problems it was the new battleship that scored the first hit a shell smashed through bismarck's bow without exploding but severing fuel lines bismarck like a prized fighter absorbed the blows then captain ernst linderman barked a command to his gunnery officer schneider permission to fire at 0-5-55 bismarck's guns roared on board the prince oygan the camera captured the huge flares from bismarck's 15-inch guns as well as the enormous shell splashes caused by british rounds falling all around the german ships as i was looking at the bismarck i saw all these little winking lights and i thought oh isn't that pretty then all of a sudden i realized that what i thought was pretty was death in destruction in the form of about eight tons of metal coming my way holland had ordered prince of wales and hood to stay pretty close together to better coordinate their fire but this presented bismarck with an easier target using state-of-the-art zeiss stereoscopic range-finding equipment high in the superstructure of bismarck the artillery officer observed where his shells were landing and edged them ever closer to the british ship correcting his fire bismarck was closing in as bismarck's shells roared overhead admiral holland realized his terrible mistake he calmly ordered shift target to the right his guns would now focus on bismarck but he lost valuable minutes holland is is doing the best he can with the force that he's got available and i think he's demonstrating a knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the ships he's got um and trying to compensate for that in the best way he can um and you know these these smaller factors they they happen in battle and i think it's very easy for us to sit there and say well the lookouts should have done their job better and distinguish between prince oregon and bismarck and you know you can argue about all these things but actually he's got to do the job with the tools he has there's always a strong element of luck and some of these things just go against him the cards don't turn in the right [Music] way another salvo from bismarck came screaming in this time it was a hit a shell landed an ammunition store luckily there was not a catastrophic detonation and fires were contained prince oygan also scored a hit on hood german gunners smelt blood at 6am admiral holland made the decision to turn his ship to bring all of his guns to bear at the same time bismarck at a distance of about nine miles unleashed another savage salvo her monstrous shells dropped all around hood until one of them scored another direct hit [Music] no one knows where the fatal blow landed there's no way that we can know but there are two theories that were advanced at the time and have many supporters today one is that the shell simply plunged through the decks which would not be unexpected in terms of what was understood at the time a plunging fire hit that penetrates through this protection that is not adequate to guard against it scores a lucky hit in a magazine and starts off a chain reaction which dooms the ship the other possibility that it might have been what's called a short where the shell does not actually hit the ship at first but lands in the water very close by and what happens in the case of a a hit like that is that the shell has entered the water but by sheer good or bad fortune depending on whether you're the recipient actually travels beneath the level of the side armor and penetrates the hull below it that too could have caused the chain reaction that destroyed hood because of course the bottom of the ship is where the magazines are and if a heavy shell like that gets through and causes a fire then you have problems it's interesting to note that one of the hood survivors stated that as hood was making her turn and was able to finally unmask her rear gun batteries x turret the third one from the bow fired why turret remained strangely silent so it's entirely possible that whatever was going wrong had begun to go wrong at that point regardless within the next few minutes everyone saw the explosion which destroyed hood witnesses to that fateful moment say that a flame like a blowtorch flared up into the sky followed by an almighty explosion hood disintegrated i personally didn't hear any explosion at all again the ship shuddered and we were all thrown off our feet and all i saw was a gigantic sheet of flame which shot round the front of the compass platform after after the hit you you heard the screams and the uh noise of uh of the carnage that was going on there was no already given to abandon ship it wasn't necessary on the horizon of the prince eugen film distant smoke from the stricken hood can be seen witnesses likened the devastation to what happened to hms barham just six months after hud it too saw its magazines explode ripping the ship apart in the corner of my binoculars where i could see we were so close i could see the hood also there was a huge great orange flash and then when i looked at from my binoculars to where the hood was there was no hood hood was ripped in half the stern section sank within seconds the bows rose vertically up into the air the guns fired one last eerie salvo a final act of defiance from a doomed gun crew within three minutes the mighty hood the pride of the royal navy the most famous ship in the world sank beneath the waves of 1418 men on board only three survived we received information that the hood have been had been sunk that sounded impossible and we waited for confirmation we are very anxious that we should serve the guns quickly because if the hood had been something we had would have a double job as the crew of the prince of wales watched in horror as their comrades were sucked beneath the waves the reality of their own position now suddenly dawned on them they were one british ship facing two germans in the next four minutes seven shells smashed into prince of wales the situation was getting desperate we'd had a 15-inch shell go through the bridge and exploded as it was going out and killed an awful lot up there and a boy of 16 thinks that being wounded is a nick in the shoulder but i in my keenness i was very very keen in those days went to do what i was supposed to do and start tidying up the bridge and i went in and expecting to see people and the first thing i saw as went in the wood paneling was just little bits of flesh spattered all around and that was a very very big shock to me i don't think i ever got over that less than 10 minutes after hood had slipped beneath the waves captain john leach of the prince of wales decided that the odds were stacked too heavily against him he ordered a hard turn to port and for his ship to make an escape and then to our dismay at about ten part six the captain came on sin i remember his words hood's blown up broken into now the hood was the legend of so the british have been terrified about what bismarck might have been capable of if it was unleashed on the allied supply routes across the atlantic now in the space just a couple of minutes firing just a few salvos bismarck hadn't sung some unarmed merchant ship but the pride of the royal navy britain's worst fears had been realized [Music] hms norfolk that had been shadowing the battle sent a simple communique back to the admiralty in london they released a terse note that same evening during the action hms hood received an unlucky hit in a magazine and blew up there was nothing really in the british psyche that could replace a loss so so dramatic of such a prestigious warship it was essentially a huge slap in the face to british pride and a british sense of naval superiority the world had almost turned upside down what on earth could the could the bismarck do next the royal navy itself is not going to be super surprised by this one of the things that has allowed the royal navy to be so dominant for so many centuries is culturally they have always seen ships that are assets to be used and when you use assets you might lose them this isn't the first ship the royal navy have lost in action politically and in terms of domestic morale it's devastating that the hood has gone and who hasn't just gone she's gone in seconds and taken almost her entire ship's company other than three men down with her so that is a really significant problem and you have to look at the wider context without trying to divert us too much this is not a point where the war is going well for the british anyway so from churchill downwards this has to be avenged it has to be very publicly avenged [Music] in germany the news that hood had been sunk was met by widespread jubilation goebbels made the most of it it was huge propaganda coup bismarck uh had bested the most famous warship in the world and the pride of the british fleet so there was no stopping germany which could now break out in the atlantic and destroy allied convoy routes that was the message coming out of germany hitler was delighted his his support of radar had been vindicated and for the moment everything looked rosy when word of bismarck's success was radioed back to germany hitler's propaganda minister joseph goebbels immediately broadcast it to the nation germany now had a huge maritime victory to cheer alongside its remarkable run of conquests on the european continent the british were devastated but that disappointment didn't breed despondency instead the admiralty were gripped by an iron determination every ship every asset was now redirected to one very simple end to sink the bismarck [Music] we turned in and made our attack down to 90 feet dropped the fish turned hard downwind and jinked all over the sky and of course the ship itself you could see all the guns firing at you with a tracer in green red orange white all coming towards you suddenly there were great eruptions of spray going up in the air and we realized that she was firing her main armament at us [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 393,641

Rating: 4.8241143 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, bismarck, ww2, naval history, kriegsmarine, royal navy, german ww2, history hit, dan snow, hms hood, world war ii

Id: 0QH-DELHHSY

Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021

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