The next morning, King George V and Rodney came within sight, followed soon after by the cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire. Rodney began firing first, followed within a minute by King George V, and finally by Bismarck. The third salvo from Rodney destroyed two of Bismarck’s main gun turrets. The German vessel fired in reply, but her shells straddled Rodney without hitting her. Another hit wrecked Bismarck’s gunnery control system and thereafter her shots went wild. Admiral Tovey’s battleships steamed even closer, knocking out one after another of Bismarck’s guns. In a little over an hour, all of them had been wrecked. In all, the Royal Navy fired 2,876 shells at Bismarck during the battle, hitting her as many as 400 times. While the deck of the battleship was a shambles, however, her hull was still relatively intact and she refused to sink.

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On the British side, Tovey’s ships did not take a single hit, but the firing was so heavy that the battleships, the ageing Rodney in particular, were beginning to come apart under the recoil of their own guns. An American observer on the British battleship noticed that: ‘Longitudinal beams were broken and cracked in many parts of the ship having to be shored. The overhead decking ruptured and many bad leaks were caused by bolts and rivets coming loose.’

After an hour and a half, Tovey ordered his gun crews to cease firing. The British Admiral set a course for home and ordered Dorsetshire to sink Bismarck with torpedoes. The cruiser fired a torpedo into each side of the burning target, which finally sank minutes later. Bismarck’s defeat at the hands of the Royal Navy was doubly crippling to the German fleet, for after the British victory on 26th May the Bismarck’s equally formidable sister-ship, Tirpitz, rarely dared to venture out of port, spending most of the war hiding in a Norwegian fjord.

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