Hunt for Bismarck

Germans abandoning their mission to attack British shipping were intercepted, and a showdown began between the British Home Fleet and Bismarck, the German navy’s most powerful warship.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in British Heritage magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

by Bruce Heydt

For more than 20 years HMS Hood upheld the pride and traditions of the Royal Navy. The battle-cruiser was launched at the close of the First World War and in the interwar years she became the sentimental favourite of all the navy’s ships. She was designed for speed, yet her broadside firepower could match that of anything then afloat.

By the late 1930s, Hood, though still a majestic warship, began to show her age. The Royal Navy scheduled her for a refit intended to give her an even more powerful punch and to reinforce her relatively thin defensive armour–a weakness her original designers had accepted in return for higher speeds. The upgrade would have made Hood as potent a weapon as the newest battleships, but when war broke out in September 1939, the Admiralty cancelled the refit and rushed Hood immediately into wartime service.

In contrast to Hood, HMS Ark Royal was one of the Royal Navy’s most modern warships. The first British ship to be designed from the start as an aircraft carrier, she represented such an innovation that the Navy had not yet acquired high-performance aircraft capable of flying from her deck. At the start of the war, Ark Royal carried a squadron of obsolescent Fairey Swordfish bombers.

In the very year the Second World War began, two more warships were launched, neither of which was completely outfitted and ready for action until 1941. One, HMS Prince of Wales, represented the state of the art in British battleship design. The other, the German Navy’s Bismarck, became the most powerful warship afloat and represented Hitler’s most potent threat to British merchant shipping in the Atlantic.

Bismarck’s primary mission was to attack escorted British merchant convoys. In April 1941 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German navy, planned to form a battlegroup of the ships Bismarck, Prinz Eugen, Scharnhorst, and Gniessenau that would be capable of destroying even the most heavily defended convoys. But before these ships could depart for the Atlantic, all except Bismarck had been damaged by British bombs and mines.

Unwilling to delay the operation long enough to repair all of his ships, Raeder insisted on sending Bismarck into the British shipping lanes accompanied only by Prinz Eugen, whose damage was not extensive and could quickly be fixed.

On 18th May, 1941, the two warships sailed from the occupied Polish port of Gdynia, bound for Bergen, Norway. After refueling, they continued on their way, heading north-west in order to pass into the Atlantic via the Denmark Strait, between Greenland and Iceland.

Their secretive dash for the open sea did not go unnoticed as they had hoped. While enroute to Bergen, a Swedish cruiser spotted them and relayed a report to the British military attaché in Stockholm. A member of the resistance in occupied Norway also managed to radio the news to London. Guided by these reports, a British reconnaissance plane spotted the warships anchored in a Norwegian fjord on 21st May.

The British Home Fleet, however, remained uncertain which route the battleship would take on its way into the Atlantic. It could steam through the English Channel, between the coast of Scotland and the Faeroe Islands, between the Faeroes and Iceland, or through the Denmark Strait. Until the intended route became clear, the Home Fleet could not risk concentrating its strength along any one of the possible avenues.

The British cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk were already patrolling the seas between Greenland and Iceland when the crisis began. Admiral Sir John Tovey, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, ordered Hood, Prince of Wales, and six destroyers to assist the cruisers. The brand-new Prince of Wales sailed with civilian construction workers still trying to iron out some problems with the ship’s main guns.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to