Transcription
The British Navy fired nearly 3,000 shells at the German battleship Bismarck, and it still would not sink. [music] In the end, the crew had to destroy it themselves. Today, it is sitting 3 mi down at the bottom of the Atlantic, and nobody is allowed to touch it.
Most people know the Bismarck sank. What I want to know is where it ended up, what state it is in, and why nobody's ever gone back for it. The answers to those questions are genuinely strange, and some of them I went back and checked three times before I was sure.
The Bismarck was Germany's most powerful battleship. When it was commissioned in August 1940, it was one of the largest warships ever built by a European nation. It was 823 ft long and over 50,000 tons fully loaded. It carried eight 15-in guns in four turrets. A crew of around 2,200 men served aboard. Nazi Germany called it unsinkable. That word would come back to haunt them.
Its entire active career lasted 8 days. In May 1941, the Bismarck left the Baltic on its first and only offensive mission, code-named Operation Rheinübung, alongside the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. The plan was to break out into the Atlantic and attack Allied convoys carrying supplies from America to Britain.
On May 24th, it ran into two British warships in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland: the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the pride of the Royal Navy, the battlecruiser HMS Hood. Within minutes, the Bismarck's guns found their mark. A shell tore through Hood's deck and detonated her ammunition magazine. The explosion was so violent it snapped the Hood in two. She sank in under 3 minutes. Of her crew of 1,421 men, only three survived. It was the Royal Navy's largest loss of life ever from a single vessel.
The destruction of the Hood sent shockwaves through Britain. >> [music] >> The order went out immediately: "Sink the Bismarck at any cost." The Royal Navy committed virtually every available ship to the hunt.
But the Bismarck had also taken damage in that exchange. A hit to one of her fuel tanks had cost her around 1,000 tons of fuel oil and left a visible slick trailing behind her. Her captain turned for the French coast for the port of Brest for repairs. For a day and a half, the British actually lost her. The Bismarck slipped away in the darkness while her pursuers searched in the wrong direction.
Then on May 25th, Admiral Lütjens, apparently not realizing he had lost the British, broke radio silence to send a long message back to Germany. The British intercepted it and were back on the trail.
On the evening of May 26th, torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS [music] Ark Royal attacked. Most of the torpedoes missed or failed to penetrate the Bismarck's armor, but one hit the stern and jammed the rudders hard to port. The Bismarck could no longer steer. She began sailing in circles in the North Atlantic, unable to reach France, unable to maneuver. Her crew spent the night trying to fix the damage. They could not.
The following morning, May 27th, two British battleships, King George V and Rodney, along with two heavy cruisers, closed in. What followed was not really a battle. It was an execution. The British fired over 2,800 shells. They scored more than 400 hits. The Bismarck's guns fell silent one by one. Her superstructure was destroyed. Her crew were suffering catastrophic casualties.
This is the bit that got me. After nearly 2 hours of bombardment at point-blank range, the British ships could not sink her. The Bismarck's armored hull simply refused to go down from gunfire alone. In the end, it was the Bismarck's own crew who finished it. With the ship clearly lost and hundreds of men still alive below decks, the order was given to scuttle. The crew opened the sea valves and set explosive charges. The Bismarck went under at 10:39 in the morning, stern first, colors still flying. Of her crew of approximately 2,200 men, only 114 survived.
Robert Ballard, the same oceanographer who found the Titanic, located the Bismarck wreck in June 1989, 48 years after she sank. And what he found was not what anyone expected. The Bismarck is sitting upright on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 600 mi west of Brest, France, at a depth of about 15,700 ft. That is nearly 3 mi down. >> [music] >>
Despite being hit by over 400 shells, despite being torpedoed multiple times, and despite sinking 3 mi through the ocean, the hull is intact and in remarkable condition. The teak wood decking is still there in places. >> [music] >> The paint is still visible. The anti-aircraft guns are still in their mountings.
Ballard described finding a hole that appeared whole and relatively undamaged by the descent. He said simply, "Bismarck did not implode." That last part needs some explanation because it tells you something important about how she sank. When a ship sinks with air still trapped inside, the water pressure at depth crushes the hull inward. You see catastrophic implosion damage. Ballard found none of that. The compartments were already flooded when she went down. That is consistent with the scuttling. The crew had already opened the sea valves and flooded the ship before she went under. Most experts now agree that the battle damage alone would eventually have sunk her, but it was the crew who actually finished the job.
So, why has nobody salvaged it? The depth alone answers most of the question. 15,700 ft is beyond the reach of any conventional salvage operation. The deepest successful large-scale salvage operations in history have been carried out at a tiny fraction of that depth. Getting to the Bismarck requires specialist deep-sea submersibles, the kind used for scientific research, not commercial salvage. There is no practical way to raise a 50,000-ton battleship from 3 mi down with [music] any technology that exists today.
But even if the depth was not a problem, there is a second reason nobody's going near it. Under international law, the wreck belongs to Germany, and the German government has been unambiguous. The Bismarck is a formally designated war grave. Around 2,100 men went down with that ship. The German government has stated clearly that any attempt to enter the wreck or recover material from it requires their consent, and that consent will not be given. They consider it a seamen's burial site that must be respected. End of discussion.
Interestingly, Ballard kept the exact coordinates of the wreck secret after his 1989 expedition specifically to prevent people going down there and taking things. He considered artifact recovery from the site a form of grave robbing. A subsequent expedition in 2001 did take paying passengers down to the wreck in submersibles, which caused considerable controversy, but nothing was removed.
The wreck itself is expected to last for centuries. The cold deep water, the lack of light, and the absence of the wood-boring organisms that destroy shallower wrecks means the Bismarck is deteriorating extremely slowly. Researchers estimate the hull could remain largely intact for several hundred years yet.
So, that is where the Bismarck is: 3 mi down in the North Atlantic. It is sitting upright, largely intact, flags long gone, but guns still in their places. It is too deep to salvage, and it is legally protected as a formally designated war grave. The most feared battleship Germany ever built lies on the bottom of the ocean after just 8 days of active service. It went out looking for a fight, found one, and that was the end of it.
Now, if you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, please let me know in the comments, and I will make more of these for more ships.