The Ships of Battlegroup: Germany Bismarck (BB)

Displacement	45,200 tons	Belt Armor	12.6 inches
Overall Length	813 feet	Deck Armor	8.7 inches
Beam	118 feet	Main Turret Armor	14.2 inches
Speed	31 knots	Main Guns	8 × 15″

Laid down on July 1, 1936, launched on February 14, 1939 and commissioned in August 1940, the ship carried a main armament of eight 15 inch main guns mounted in two centerline superfiring twin turrets both forward and aft. Supposedly built to treaty limits of 35,000 tons displacement, the Bismarck was much larger, although, under new agreements, by the time she was launched the additional tonnage was "legal". British wartime propaganda greatly exaggerated the capabilities of the Bismarck fast battleship class (which also included her sister ship, Tirpitz). The ship’s notoriety was further enhanced postwar by popular "Sink the Bismarck" books, movies, games and a catchy hit song. In reality, the class shared many design features of the First World War Baden class, with a longer and finer hull, more horsepower and a greatly increased maximum speed. A serious design flaw was that, unlike contemporary foreign battleships, the armor belt did not protect the ship’s communications systems and this made an admittedly hard to sink ship one that was relatively easy to knock out of action.

She was named after the "Iron Chancellor", Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the father of the modern German nation-state. Bismarck had a spectacularly short operational career. After completing her acceptance trials in the Baltic, she was sent on a commerce raiding mission accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. She never returned. Discovered by British cruisers on the 23rd of May 1941 trying to slip into the Atlantic via the Denmark Strait (between Greenland and Iceland), the German sortie attracted the attention of every British Royal Navy ship in the area. She managed to destroy her arch-nemesis Hood in less than ten minutes of gunfire. Damaging and being damaged in return by the Prince of Wales, Bismarck was hounded by the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command until the 27th. A lucky (depending on your point of view) hit by a Swordfish torpedo plane from Ark Royal damaged Bismarck’s rudder, allowing the British Home Fleet to catch up. King George V and Rodney proceeded to pound Bismarck, which lost her communications to early hits and soon ceased to defend herself, into submission. Whether it was the cumulative effects of those two battlewagons’ shells, or the torpedoes from British destroyers and cruisers, or the scuttling charges by her own crew; the results were the same—Bismarck was sunk. Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute led a team that found her watery grave on June 8, 1989, under nearly three miles of water south of Ireland and west of France.

For contemporary foreign battleships, see: North Carolina and Washington .

Where did we get all these fascinating historical tidbits and factoids? See the Bibliography for the culprits.