I know this is kinda off topic but i saw in a documentary that the Bismarck was actually not sunk by the RN but scuttled by her own crew. It seems the visited the wreck of the Bismarck and found that most of the shells fired from the British ships did not pierce the armor because of their close range?

Well that was shown on Discovery channel and was debated. With the German side, tehy would probably say they destroyed it to say that they suicide rather than to be defeated. With the British story, they have to avenge their Prince of Wales and to uplift soldiers' morale, they will say that they defeated it. As for me I don't know since I didn't end the show. It's already morning at that time :-)

I watched it until the end and it seems that the torpedoes launched from the british ships( cant remember their names) did not even hit the Bismarck.

As I remember, one of the Swordfish hit it after lots of casualties. That torpedo was critical - it ended the Bismarck's journey and ended it it circles wherein the Brit ships pull all it can for just a single ship! Imagine how powerful Bismarck was during it's time.

The torpedo the struck Bismark, hit in the rudder area. It jammed the rudder so she just sailed in circles as Shonan had said.. From what I have seen and read, she took a pounding at the hands of the British and was still afloat.. Kinda makes you think she was scuttled.. I think if it had not been for that swordfish' tprpedo, Bismark would have made a german held french port and the war in the atlantic would have turned out much differemt

Regardless of who finally sent the Bismark to Davy Jones locker.... she went. The battle which sent her there was inevitable. Even if the torps from the Brit fleet did little against her, she had been hammered by the Gunners, pretty much decimating all command and control on board, including her own gunnery. With no command or worthy defensive ability...... and just steaming lazy circles they had no choice..... be pounded to splinters or scuttle the vessel. The other great German floating war machines of her day also suffered similar fates thorugh either scutteling (Graf Spee) or arial bombardment (Tirpitz).

http://www.lancastermuseum.ca/tirpitz.html


http://www.ocean98.org/spee.htm

This subject has been debated and argued over since that movie came out. But the facts remain, The King George V , and Rodney gave the Bismarck a pounding and pulverized her to the point where she could not fight back. If the crew did scuttle there ship, it just gave her a more speedy course to the bottom. She would have ended up there anyway. But there is a lot of this lost in time that we will never know. They were to close for effective fire, at a longer range the projectiles would have been able to hit the deck area in plunging arcesentering the ship at its weak spot and exploding from with inside. There is no doubt, she was a strong ship. So was her sister ship the Tirpitz, but she was snk by aircraft.

Just my 2 clams worth.

Garry

Whether the Germans of Brit destroyed it, it only meant one thing - sink it!

BTW, I though the Tirpitz was sabotaged by British troops (Call of Duty) or was that another ship?

As others have said, it doesn't matter one bit if it was sunk by torpedoes, or the scuttled, it sank. By the way, durring the last battle, Bismarck never even hit the British ships. Oh and Ave, the show does say, as did Ballard who found the ship, that the British torpedoes did hit, they just hit where they didn't penetrate.

Hmmmmm, ya know, one of the advantage's of being someone 'new to the game', and being able to look 'in' from the outside, is, that isn't it intriguing that both the German 'crown' of the Fleet , the Bismark, and the 'crown' of the Japanese Fleet, the 'Yamato' , neither fired a round from their supposedly impressive guns that did a 'Tinker's Damn' against another ship to save themselves!!!!!
Amazing.

Tread.

Tread, it wasn't that Bismarck didn't fire a round to save herself, it was she didn't hit anything. A shell very early in the battle took out her main fire control and another knocked out her front two turrets. The assistant gunnery office, who wrote the book Bismarck a survivors story, had just about found the range from his secondary control position when a shell knocked it out also. After that they were on local control, from the turrets, and that is very primitive.

I would hardly say sinking the Hood was not firing a round.

Believe it or not Yamato I believe did fire her guns. The Japanese try a technique of firing thein main battery guns to raise huge shell splashes in front of attacking torpedo bombers. I just don't think any of them did any good. It was a good try though.

To add on what Halfyank mentioned--about Bismarck: A Survivors Story... I picked this book up from my library to do some background research on the Bismarck before startting the kit I have. `A theme I picked up from the book was that the ship was pushed into service, the high commands wannting more of a presense in the Atlantic than just U-boats. SO the ship could have used more testing/training...perhaps the crew was not as ready as they could have been, and perhaps a lil too cocky? I know they thought they were unsinkable-- at least the high commands did.. any ideas?

Sean

Although it's without question that the British would have eventually sunk Bismarck, regardless of her(or 'his' as the Germans would say) crew's preparations to scuttle the ship, the key event in the entire operation was the decision by Adm Lutjens to NOT refuel Bismarck when in Norway. Had he done this, he would have had more options as far as evading the British fleet later in the battle, and he may have made it back to German occupied France for repairs.

I know that I've posted this on this site somewhere else, but these are some GREAT sites on the Bismarck and her sister ship Tirpitz:

www.kbismarck.com
www.bismarck-class.dk

Go Pats!!

Todd