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A couple of editors keep changing John Moffat (Royal Navy officer), apparently based on James Cameron's Expedition: Bismarck, to say that Moffat is wrongly credited with crippling the Bismarck since the torpedo that jammed the rudder hit the starboard side. It seems to me that most sources contradict this, but I think that the regular editors here would know best. I've left a message at Talk:John Moffat (Royal Navy officer) saying as much, and I'd appreciate it if the regulars here could keep an eye on the article to prevent any unsourced or badly sourced changes. The editor's there seem to have a conflict of interest as he or they are related to the pilot they say fired the torpedo. 06:09, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
They have a rear Admiral who used to captain an aircarft carrier and a former first sea lord, as well as the bosses of both naval air museums all saying the same thing.
In the lede, we are told "Bismarck engaged and destroyed the battlecruiser HMS Hood". In the section 'Battle of the Denmark Strait', we are told (in brief but in full in the article)
By 05:52, the range had fallen ... and Hood opened fire, followed by Prince of Wales a minute later. ... Adalbert Schneider ... twice requested permission to return fire. ... Lindemann intervened ... He demanded permission to fire from Lütjens ... and at 05:55 ordered his ships to engage.
Assuming the account is accurate, it implies the Bismarck was engaged first, and only fired on the Hood a full 3 minutes later. Which is to say the lede should be worded something like "Bismarck was engaged by, and destroyed, the battlecruiser HMS Hood".
As it is now, it seems as if the Bismarck acted to destroy the Hood, when the reality is it acted in self defence, and the Hood fired first. MrZoolook ( talk) 20:46, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Actually, its a very valid point. The Bismarck's mission was not to swan around destroying British flagships, it was supposed to evade the battleships and get out into the open ocean to attack convoys, so as to cut off the flow of war munitions to Britain from the supposedly-neutral USA. That is why they held fire as long as they did - they had specific orders to not get involved in delaying actions with British warships. They only returned fire eventually when it became clear that the British ships were going to obstruct the primary mission, and then Hood was quickly dispatched and Prince of Wales ducked and ran. The current wording of the lead does make it look like the Bismarck commanders disobeyed instructions and allowed themselves to be lured away from their primary mission by the tempting prospect of sinking a few battleships instead. The lead should be reworded slightly to say that "At the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Bismarck was engaged by a British battle squadron. Bismarck quickly destroyed the battlecruiser HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, and forced the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to retreat." That would be much more accurate. Wdford ( talk) 17:21, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
So, why does the article claim that the Royal Navy were 'unable to sink her by gunfire' when, in fact, they did sink her by gunfire? And why does the article claim that Bismarck was scuttled by her crew when, as far as we know, that would not be physically possible in the time? When the German High Seas Fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919, the larger ships took over two hours, and in one case over five hours, to sink. HMS Rodney was firing on Bismarck until about 10.15, King George V even later. At 10.27 Bismarck's stern exploded and blew off, where Rodney had hit her at 10.11. HMS Devonshire then closed to fire torpedoes. Bismarck rolled over and sank just after 10.35. It is not possible to claim that the sinking was due to anything other than battle damage. Although Bismarck's engineering officer later said he had given orders to scuttle, the state of communications and general chaos aboard the blazing wreck would have made the order more than a little difficult to carry out. And Bismarck's sister ship Tirpitz was sunk by a 14,000lb RAF Tallboy -- are we to imagine that Bismarck's engineering team had a similarly vast demolition charge in place that could suicide the ship instantly? The officer may well have given such an order, but by then there was no time for it to take effect. Bismarck could only have been sunk by scuttling if the order were given long before Rodney and King George V even opened fire -- which is not the case. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 21:16, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
In accordance with Nazi psychology (and it's startling how many Nazi commanders committed suicide), the Bismarck carried a suicide kit. This suicide kit consisted of white-painted wooden boxes, each marked with a red V for 'Versenken' (scuttling) and containing six sticks of dynamite. The charges were to be placed next to critical valves to cause flooding. This procedure would take many hours to sink the ship. The order to scuttle was only given by the engineering officer after 10.00, when the crew began to abandon ship. The time delay was, allegedly, nine minutes. Given the difficulty in conveying orders, or getting anything done at all aboard the blazing hulk, it is not very likely that the charges were even set before 10.15. And it is not remotely possible that they could have had any serious effect at all by the time Bismarck rolled over and sank at 10.35. In the interim, after Rodney and KG5 ceased fire at 10.15 (so as not to fire on crew abandoning ship), Devonshire scored three torpedo strikes, but Bismarck was sinking anyway, and not for any reason to do with tiny wee boxes of 'six sticks of dynamite' that the Nazis had prepared so as to preserve their 'honour'.
We know what it takes to scuttle a capital ship. At Scapa Flow in 1919 it took two to five hours. With the Graf Spee in the Plate estuary in 1939, the crew had had all day to rig the ship for scuttling 'to preserve the honour of the Third Reich' and had distributed the remaining ammunition around the ship and wired it to timers. The resulting explosions, which caused the ship to 'settle' in less than an hour (she couldn't sink, because there were only 10 feet of water under the keel before she hit the mud), are on film. They were spectacular and enormous and they completely obliterated the view of the ship. That is what it takes to scuttle an armoured capital ship in under an hour, and nothing like that happened with Bismarck -- they just blew some valves. And that procedure could have had no meaningful effect before Bismarck rolled over and sank due to battle damage (there being no other possible cause) at 10.35. Bismarck was sunk by Royal Navy gunfire, and helped on her way by Royal Navy torpedos, as is obvious to the meanest of intelligences.
It's a little depressing that Wikipedia is in the grip of Nazi sympathisers bent on preserving the 'honour' of the Third Reich and deliberately misstating -- by the ever-convenient method of 'cherrypicking', and by claiming unreliable sources as reliable -- what the sources actually say. Although, of course, it isn't in the least surprising. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 18:52, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
I'm not making any personal attack, because, apart from anything else, I don't know who put the false claim in the article. I only know that it is there, and it shouldn't be. The article may note that the false claim -- that the Royal Navy ships 'were unable to sink her with gunfire' -- has been made, but it may not treat the claim as if it were factual when it is not even physically possible. It is not physically possible that the engineering officer's few sticks of dynamite could sink a battleship the size of Bismarck in ten minutes. The charges cannot have been laid before 10.15 and cannot have blown before 10.25. Bismarck began her final roll and dive just ten minutes later, and scuttled ships don't roll, and she had clearly been taking on a lot of water for a long time. Scuttling procedure basically consisted of breaking or blowing the seawater feed pipe -- used for coolant purposes in the engine room -- and leaving the seacock open, or preferably blowing that too to ensure that no one could turn it off again. Then the ship gradually took on enough water to cancel her buoyancy and sink her. It was not intended to have rapid effects because the crew were supposed to take to the rafts.
Rodney and KG5 ceased fire at 10.15. They did not do this because they gave up and admitted defeat because invincible Nazi superships are invincible, as the article falsely claims. They did it because the German crew were abandoning ship in numbers and you are not supposed to 'fire on survivors'. You can still use torpedos, and HMS Devonshire duly did, but you can't fire guns at escaping crew. If anything helped the doomed Bismarck on her way in that brief 20-minute interim after the battleships ceased fire, their job effectively done, it was clearly the Devonshire's three torpedo strikes and not a few sticks of dynamite blowing the odd valve in the engine room.
Bismarck was sunk by Royal Navy gunfire. It is false to claim otherwise and it is not physically possible that the scuttling procedure had any appreciable effect in the time before she rolled over and sank due to battle damage.
You know, it wasn't the first time that Admiral Lutjens had met the Rodney. It had happened before, a couple of months earlier, late on the afternoon of 16 March, 200 miles west of Newfoundland. Lutjens, on the bridge of invincible Nazi supership Gneisenau, decided to attack the lone merchantman MV Chilean Reefer, an ex-Danish 1800-tonner now under the Red Ensign, which was travelling in ballast to Halifax to pick up a load of Canadian bacon. She could make 14 knots and convoys were limited to 11 knots so she was sailing independently. When Gneisenau opened fire on her at about 2010 Zulu, 1710 local, at last light, she sent a distress call with the RRRR code for 'Raider' and her position, 46.11N 44.51W. She put up such a fight, manoeuvring hard and making smoke and firing back with her solitary 4-inch poop gun, that Lutjens and the Gneisenau's captain Otto Fein became afraid. They were afraid that she might be a Q-ship, an armed merchant cruiser with torpedo tubes. They were even more afraid that she might be scouting for a British battleship. So they stood off. They fired over 80 rounds from the main 11-inch battery and the secondary 5.9-inch armament, continuing to fire even after their only two hits set the Chilean Reefer on fire and the crew began taking to the boats -- that is, they deliberately fired on survivors. When the captain, Thomas Bell, was in the last boat, Fein hailed him to come alongside and be captured. Bell said he had to pick up more survivors first. When Bell later tried to come alongside, just as the boat was passing in front of Gneisenau's bow, Lutjens and Fein ordered full ahead and Gneisenau almost ran the boat down. The boat was swept alongside the battleship and had her tiller struck off. The Gneisenau accelerated away at her 32-knot maximum into the darkening east.
That happened because Lutjens and Fein had just seen HMS Rodney looming against the sunset, coming to answer the Chilean Reefer's call. Rodney, seeing only a dim smudge in the east beyond the burning but still floating wreck of the Reefer, flashed 'WHAT SHIP?' Fein and Lutjens ordered the signalman to flash back 'HMS EMERALD' and then picked up their skirts and ran (and probably retired to their cabins for a change of underwear). On board Rodney, Capt Dalrymple-Hamilton did not believe the signal, but he could not have caught the Gneisenau in the dark, so his priority was to stop and pick up the survivors. Three of the Reefer's crew, in one boat, had been taken on board Gneisenau (and one was kept in solitary to make him admit that the Reefer was a Q-ship when it wasn't, and all three were paraded through the streets on arrival at Brest, in defiance of the Geneva rules about subjecting prisoners to public curiosity). Six were killed. Twenty-seven were saved by Rodney, three of whom later died on board.
When Rodney departed the scene that night, the burning wreck of the Chilean Reefer was still afloat. No one ever saw her sink, despite the mighty battleship Gneisenau devoting her best efforts -- over 80 rounds -- to that very purpose for about half an hour. And she was only 1800 tons, by far the smallest ship attacked in the course of the Scharnhorst - Gneisenau sortie, Operation Berlin. So, should we pretend that the mighty Gneisenau was 'unable to sink her with gunfire'? Of course not. Ask Lloyd's. Ask anyone. She was sunk by the gunfire of the German battleship Gneisenau 200 miles off Cape Race on the evening of 16 March 1941. Even though no one saw her go down, and it must have happened a long time after the Gneisenau left the scene.
Bismarck sank on 27 May due to the gunfire of Rodney and KG5, only 20 minutes after they ceased fire so as not to fire on crew abandoning ship. If anything gave her the last nudge it was the torpedos of HMS Devonshire and not the few sticks of dynamite that the engineering officer claimed he ordered to be set. The mythology of the Invincible Nazi Supership They Could Not Sink is just mythology, of an unsavoury and anti-factual kind, and, although the article may recognise that such claims have been made, it should not recognise them as factual. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 19:20, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
I find out there’s a mistake in speed of Bismarck. The actual speed of battleship was 30.1knots and they even earned once a speed of 30.8knots (according to the book written by B.F von Mullenheim-Rechberg) so it is not the 30.01knots like it is on a page now. Please fix that. WIECEq ( talk) 01:18, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Based on the oldest edit in the article history, it appears this article was started with American spellings ("armor", "meter", "kilometer"), so the article ought to be converted back per WP:RETAIN. Parsecboy ( talk) 17:27, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
I removed the text "Bismarck was mentioned in the Wehrmachtbericht (the "armed forces report", a propaganda broadcast) three times during Operation Rheinübung. The first was an account of the Battle of the Denmark Strait; the second was a brief account of the ship's destruction, and the third was an exaggerated claim that Bismarck had sunk a British destroyer and shot down five aircraft."
which was also mentioned in the infobox under "honours and awards". Being named in a propaganda publication's coverage of a battle in which the ship participated, or in an account of the ship's sinking, is a dubious "award" at best. –
dlthewave
☎ 21:03, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
"As reported yesterday, the battleship "Bismarck," after its victorious battle near Iceland, was on 26 May hit by a torpedo from an enemy aircraft and left unmanoeuvrable. True to the last radio message from chief of fleet Admiral Lütjens, the battleship was defeated by overwhelming enemy forces and sank with flag flying together with its commander Kapitän zu See Lindemann and its brave crew, on 27 May before noon."If these really are notable awards, we should be able to cite secondary sources that describe them as such. – dlthewave ☎ 23:38, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
Holy cow these old war stories spawn a lot of chatter. UK English is my two cents, and not making definitive statements about "who sank the ship" beyond that so many shells hit her, and orders to scuttle were given, etc. The fact is, she went down.
The article is missing a section on the impact of the sinking in Britain and Germany. At some point, the German capital ships stayed in port. How did this contribute? Etc.
Thanks. 184.69.174.194 ( talk) 03:37, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
It is strange that the following article is not cited here:
It contains a wealth of very pertinent information, particularly about the damage Bismarck suffered in its final combat. It could be employed to the advantage of this page. Urselius ( talk) 07:48, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
All the accounts I've ever read stated that Lindemann survived to the end and went down with the ship, standing on the bow. Shouldn't this be at least mentioned as a version? This is what Ballard's own book says, so it doesn't just need to be dismissed as 'stupid Nazi propaganda'.
70.16.212.73 ( talk) 18:13, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
Since the turrets were held in place only by their weight, they fell out of the ship when it capsized. After they dropped out, the ship rolled upright on its way to the bottom. Have the turrets been located or are their locations still unknown? Bizzybody ( talk) 09:55, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
Germany was never a part of the washington naval treaty so tonnage limits did not apply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8801:2A88:9100:519B:74F0:E340:ADFC ( talk) 08:14, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
German Capital ships were referred to using male pronouns during the reign of the Third Reich. -A — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.96.30.55 ( talk) 17:18, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
If this is wikipedia's policy, I can do very little about it. But it is disrespectful to the Crews that serve on any ship to refer to their ship improperly; Regardless of what these men died for, their memories should be honored all the same. I protest this decision on such grounds, semantics should not be more important than the memory of the dead. -A — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.96.30.55 ( talk) 17:29, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
Which "Kaiser Bill"? There were two of them. That's why the one I'm assuming you're referring to is Kaiser Wilhelm the second. Also Russian ships are "he" as well. Wandavianempire ( talk) 14:59, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
It's a very peculiar mental deformity for someone to want English-speakers to write English as if it was German. But I daresay very typical of the Third Reich. 86.11.99.75 ( talk) 11:56, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
To follow up on this, the Imperator article doesn’t say that, and didn’t when this point was raised. It also seems that Imperator wasn’t given the male pronoun, and "basic research" hasn’t turned up evidence this request was ever made. Just saying… Xyl 54 ( talk) 03:30, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
The summary of Bismarcks fate is misleading. It implies that scuttling was the primary reason for her sinking, instead of acknowledging the wider picture.
All contemporary experts agree, that regardless of the crews scuttling efforts, Bismarck was:
1) already sinking 2) would sink 3) was spent as a fighting force 4) that the crew abandoned ship 5) that the Royal Navy were still attacking, with orders to "finish her off" 6) that the Royal Navy had no interest in taking her a prize VSTAMPv ( talk) 23:45, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
You have beaten this to death, pal. Yes, the Bismarck would have sunk regardless of the crew's scuttling, but the fact is he was scuttled. A dead tree is gonna fall, but if you cut it down, you don't say it fell. You say you cut it down. Bobafett5204 ( talk) 02:33, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
'She'
You don't cut down a tree that's already falling, what a daft analogy.
Who do I speak to out of this little clique please? VSTAMPv ( talk) 05:25, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
The question is not whether Kapitanleutnant Gerhard Junack, engineering officer in the turbine room, ordered scuttling charges set -- he claimed to have done so -- the question is how much those charges had to do with the sinking. In 1967, in an article in Purnell's History of the Second World War, Vol.2, No.5, he claimed to have received an order by telephone from Korvettenkapitan Walter Lehmann, the ship's chief engineering officer (who did not survive), to 'prepare the ship for sinking'. He stated that this occurred at 10.15 and was the last order of any kind that he received aboard the Bismarck. He said that he ordered the engine-room machinists to place these charges -- which I believe were quite small in naval terms, six sticks of dynamite each, with a detonator and timer, contained in 'V-boxes' which were little white wooden boxes painted with a red V for Versenkung, at the appropriate points. He then tried to contact Lehmann for final instructions, but the phones had gone out. He sent a petty officer to find Lehmann, but the man never returned and Junack said he was killed on the way. Junack said he then decided to go ahead with the procedure and ordered his 'chief machinist' in the turbine room to set the charges with a 9-minute timer. He said he then went up to the aft deck, heard the charges explode -- this cannot have been much before 10.30 -- then tried to organise the men massed on the deck, gave a 'Sieg Heil', which possibly tells you something about him, and jumped into the sea. He said that Bismarck rolled over and sank almost immediately after that (which we know was at 10.40). He was picked up by Devonshire, a ship that the men had already seen approaching.
http://www.kbismarck.com/bismarck-last-hours.html
British naval intelligence, obviously, interrogated the survivors. The Admiralty produced a secret report that August. They noted, among other things, that, according to other survivors, Junack had been 'previously employed by the Gestapo'. His naval record does seem to be a bit vague between 1933 and 1941, but this could be scuttlebutt -- the interrogators observed that the ordinary seamen on the Bismarck did not like their officers very much. However, other survivors testified that, even in the water, before Devonshire rescued them, Junack was yelling at the ordinary seamen, 'Keep your mouths shut!' They appear not to have appreciated this. The Admiralty report (German Battleship Bismarck: Interrogation of Survivors, CB4051 24, August 1941) made this observation:-
'The actual cause of sinking is still a matter of dispute among survivors. There is, however, a considerable body of evidence to support the view that the inevitable end of the "Bismarck" was hastened by the explosion of specially prepared scuttling charges. Several prisoners state that they received definite orders, such as: "Abandon ship. Ship is to be sunk!" "Clear ship for scuttling; apply explosive charges." According to one prisoner, a special "scuttling party" then took charge and explosives, which had been placed in position earlier, were fired, some at the sea-water inlets and discharges, others in the turbine rooms, boiler rooms and auxiliary machinery rooms. All watertight doors and flooding valves were left open and the ship sank ten minutes after the charges were fired, capsizing to port. It was stated that all propellers still revolved.'
http://www.uboatarchive.net/Int/BismarckINT.htm
The 'one prisoner' mentioned there is obviously Junack. But evidently not all the survivors believed that the scuttling procedure, if it really happened, had anything much to do with the sinking (hence the 'matter of dispute'). And 'hastening the inevitable' does not mean that the Bismarck was sunk by scuttling. It means she was sinking anyway -- the British could see she was low in the water by then, and surveys have found torpedo holes in areas that should have been above the waterline. The scuttling procedure may have accelerated the process by a few moments, is all. Junack is also on record as saying that the stern compartments had been flooded ever since the successful Swordfish strike by Ark Royal and that during the final battle the Bismarck took penetrating hits in the engine room and the boiler room -- specifically in the boiler room at 09.15-09.30, starting a fire, and in the turbine room at 09.30 (Admiralty report, op. cit., p.23).
So, by Junack's account, Bismarck rolled over and sank a bare ten minutes after the detonation of those small charges in the machinery spaces, whose sole purpose was to rupture pipes and valves so as to allow seawater ingress. RMS Titanic remained afloat for 2 hours 40 minutes after sustaining a hull rupture which, according to the evidence of the builder's chief naval architect at the inquiry, amounted to 12 square feet or 1.1 square metres. What would be the equivalent opening caused by the rupture of those pipes and valves on board Bismarck? And how much water would a vessel displacing 40,000-50,000 tons have to ship before it lost buoyancy as its density exceeded that of the surrounding sea? And could it really ship that much in just ten minutes? The Graf Spee, of course, sank almost immediately, but the Graf Spee was blown by up her entire remaining stock of ammunition, a considerable tonnage -- a bit like the Hood but on purpose. The charges used on the Bismarck were incomparably smaller.
Scuttling was not even intended to produce an immediate result like that. The most famous case of scuttling, of course, was the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919. The German navy considered this an honourable patriotic act which meant they were not really defeated, rather as the German army used the anti-Semitic 'stab in the back' myth to the same purpose. This is why the German navy of the Second World War was obsessed with scuttling and it is why all German warships carried those peculiar 'suicide pills', the V-boxes in the engine rooms.
At Scapa Flow, the skeleton crews had days to prepare the ships for the great event, even going to the lengths of making extra holes in all the bulkheads to speed the flooding process. And of course they opened all the watertight doors throughout the ships, which wasn't possible on the Bismarck because the ship was on fire and in chaos and a large number of the crew were dead already. Junack only said that the engine-room watertight doors were opened.
After the scuttle order was signalled at Scapa Flow, it was a full 40 minutes before even one ship showed a visible list. The last ship to sink, the battlecruiser SMS Hindenburg displacing at least 36,000 tons, didn't go down for nearly six hours. And almost a third of the 74-strong fleet -- 18 destroyers, three cruisers and one capital ship -- failed to sink at all. Some of these were saved by Royal Navy boarding parties, but most of them just... didn't sink. The scuttling didn't work. Scuttling is not some abracadabra that magically and instantly sends a ship to the bottom. And the likelihood of Junack's puny demolition charges causing the Bismarck to founder in just ten minutes, unless she was sinking anyway, is negligible. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 19:56, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 |
A couple of editors keep changing John Moffat (Royal Navy officer), apparently based on James Cameron's Expedition: Bismarck, to say that Moffat is wrongly credited with crippling the Bismarck since the torpedo that jammed the rudder hit the starboard side. It seems to me that most sources contradict this, but I think that the regular editors here would know best. I've left a message at Talk:John Moffat (Royal Navy officer) saying as much, and I'd appreciate it if the regulars here could keep an eye on the article to prevent any unsourced or badly sourced changes. The editor's there seem to have a conflict of interest as he or they are related to the pilot they say fired the torpedo. 06:09, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
They have a rear Admiral who used to captain an aircarft carrier and a former first sea lord, as well as the bosses of both naval air museums all saying the same thing.
In the lede, we are told "Bismarck engaged and destroyed the battlecruiser HMS Hood". In the section 'Battle of the Denmark Strait', we are told (in brief but in full in the article)
By 05:52, the range had fallen ... and Hood opened fire, followed by Prince of Wales a minute later. ... Adalbert Schneider ... twice requested permission to return fire. ... Lindemann intervened ... He demanded permission to fire from Lütjens ... and at 05:55 ordered his ships to engage.
Assuming the account is accurate, it implies the Bismarck was engaged first, and only fired on the Hood a full 3 minutes later. Which is to say the lede should be worded something like "Bismarck was engaged by, and destroyed, the battlecruiser HMS Hood".
As it is now, it seems as if the Bismarck acted to destroy the Hood, when the reality is it acted in self defence, and the Hood fired first. MrZoolook ( talk) 20:46, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Actually, its a very valid point. The Bismarck's mission was not to swan around destroying British flagships, it was supposed to evade the battleships and get out into the open ocean to attack convoys, so as to cut off the flow of war munitions to Britain from the supposedly-neutral USA. That is why they held fire as long as they did - they had specific orders to not get involved in delaying actions with British warships. They only returned fire eventually when it became clear that the British ships were going to obstruct the primary mission, and then Hood was quickly dispatched and Prince of Wales ducked and ran. The current wording of the lead does make it look like the Bismarck commanders disobeyed instructions and allowed themselves to be lured away from their primary mission by the tempting prospect of sinking a few battleships instead. The lead should be reworded slightly to say that "At the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Bismarck was engaged by a British battle squadron. Bismarck quickly destroyed the battlecruiser HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, and forced the battleship HMS Prince of Wales to retreat." That would be much more accurate. Wdford ( talk) 17:21, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
So, why does the article claim that the Royal Navy were 'unable to sink her by gunfire' when, in fact, they did sink her by gunfire? And why does the article claim that Bismarck was scuttled by her crew when, as far as we know, that would not be physically possible in the time? When the German High Seas Fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919, the larger ships took over two hours, and in one case over five hours, to sink. HMS Rodney was firing on Bismarck until about 10.15, King George V even later. At 10.27 Bismarck's stern exploded and blew off, where Rodney had hit her at 10.11. HMS Devonshire then closed to fire torpedoes. Bismarck rolled over and sank just after 10.35. It is not possible to claim that the sinking was due to anything other than battle damage. Although Bismarck's engineering officer later said he had given orders to scuttle, the state of communications and general chaos aboard the blazing wreck would have made the order more than a little difficult to carry out. And Bismarck's sister ship Tirpitz was sunk by a 14,000lb RAF Tallboy -- are we to imagine that Bismarck's engineering team had a similarly vast demolition charge in place that could suicide the ship instantly? The officer may well have given such an order, but by then there was no time for it to take effect. Bismarck could only have been sunk by scuttling if the order were given long before Rodney and King George V even opened fire -- which is not the case. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 21:16, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
In accordance with Nazi psychology (and it's startling how many Nazi commanders committed suicide), the Bismarck carried a suicide kit. This suicide kit consisted of white-painted wooden boxes, each marked with a red V for 'Versenken' (scuttling) and containing six sticks of dynamite. The charges were to be placed next to critical valves to cause flooding. This procedure would take many hours to sink the ship. The order to scuttle was only given by the engineering officer after 10.00, when the crew began to abandon ship. The time delay was, allegedly, nine minutes. Given the difficulty in conveying orders, or getting anything done at all aboard the blazing hulk, it is not very likely that the charges were even set before 10.15. And it is not remotely possible that they could have had any serious effect at all by the time Bismarck rolled over and sank at 10.35. In the interim, after Rodney and KG5 ceased fire at 10.15 (so as not to fire on crew abandoning ship), Devonshire scored three torpedo strikes, but Bismarck was sinking anyway, and not for any reason to do with tiny wee boxes of 'six sticks of dynamite' that the Nazis had prepared so as to preserve their 'honour'.
We know what it takes to scuttle a capital ship. At Scapa Flow in 1919 it took two to five hours. With the Graf Spee in the Plate estuary in 1939, the crew had had all day to rig the ship for scuttling 'to preserve the honour of the Third Reich' and had distributed the remaining ammunition around the ship and wired it to timers. The resulting explosions, which caused the ship to 'settle' in less than an hour (she couldn't sink, because there were only 10 feet of water under the keel before she hit the mud), are on film. They were spectacular and enormous and they completely obliterated the view of the ship. That is what it takes to scuttle an armoured capital ship in under an hour, and nothing like that happened with Bismarck -- they just blew some valves. And that procedure could have had no meaningful effect before Bismarck rolled over and sank due to battle damage (there being no other possible cause) at 10.35. Bismarck was sunk by Royal Navy gunfire, and helped on her way by Royal Navy torpedos, as is obvious to the meanest of intelligences.
It's a little depressing that Wikipedia is in the grip of Nazi sympathisers bent on preserving the 'honour' of the Third Reich and deliberately misstating -- by the ever-convenient method of 'cherrypicking', and by claiming unreliable sources as reliable -- what the sources actually say. Although, of course, it isn't in the least surprising. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 18:52, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
I'm not making any personal attack, because, apart from anything else, I don't know who put the false claim in the article. I only know that it is there, and it shouldn't be. The article may note that the false claim -- that the Royal Navy ships 'were unable to sink her with gunfire' -- has been made, but it may not treat the claim as if it were factual when it is not even physically possible. It is not physically possible that the engineering officer's few sticks of dynamite could sink a battleship the size of Bismarck in ten minutes. The charges cannot have been laid before 10.15 and cannot have blown before 10.25. Bismarck began her final roll and dive just ten minutes later, and scuttled ships don't roll, and she had clearly been taking on a lot of water for a long time. Scuttling procedure basically consisted of breaking or blowing the seawater feed pipe -- used for coolant purposes in the engine room -- and leaving the seacock open, or preferably blowing that too to ensure that no one could turn it off again. Then the ship gradually took on enough water to cancel her buoyancy and sink her. It was not intended to have rapid effects because the crew were supposed to take to the rafts.
Rodney and KG5 ceased fire at 10.15. They did not do this because they gave up and admitted defeat because invincible Nazi superships are invincible, as the article falsely claims. They did it because the German crew were abandoning ship in numbers and you are not supposed to 'fire on survivors'. You can still use torpedos, and HMS Devonshire duly did, but you can't fire guns at escaping crew. If anything helped the doomed Bismarck on her way in that brief 20-minute interim after the battleships ceased fire, their job effectively done, it was clearly the Devonshire's three torpedo strikes and not a few sticks of dynamite blowing the odd valve in the engine room.
Bismarck was sunk by Royal Navy gunfire. It is false to claim otherwise and it is not physically possible that the scuttling procedure had any appreciable effect in the time before she rolled over and sank due to battle damage.
You know, it wasn't the first time that Admiral Lutjens had met the Rodney. It had happened before, a couple of months earlier, late on the afternoon of 16 March, 200 miles west of Newfoundland. Lutjens, on the bridge of invincible Nazi supership Gneisenau, decided to attack the lone merchantman MV Chilean Reefer, an ex-Danish 1800-tonner now under the Red Ensign, which was travelling in ballast to Halifax to pick up a load of Canadian bacon. She could make 14 knots and convoys were limited to 11 knots so she was sailing independently. When Gneisenau opened fire on her at about 2010 Zulu, 1710 local, at last light, she sent a distress call with the RRRR code for 'Raider' and her position, 46.11N 44.51W. She put up such a fight, manoeuvring hard and making smoke and firing back with her solitary 4-inch poop gun, that Lutjens and the Gneisenau's captain Otto Fein became afraid. They were afraid that she might be a Q-ship, an armed merchant cruiser with torpedo tubes. They were even more afraid that she might be scouting for a British battleship. So they stood off. They fired over 80 rounds from the main 11-inch battery and the secondary 5.9-inch armament, continuing to fire even after their only two hits set the Chilean Reefer on fire and the crew began taking to the boats -- that is, they deliberately fired on survivors. When the captain, Thomas Bell, was in the last boat, Fein hailed him to come alongside and be captured. Bell said he had to pick up more survivors first. When Bell later tried to come alongside, just as the boat was passing in front of Gneisenau's bow, Lutjens and Fein ordered full ahead and Gneisenau almost ran the boat down. The boat was swept alongside the battleship and had her tiller struck off. The Gneisenau accelerated away at her 32-knot maximum into the darkening east.
That happened because Lutjens and Fein had just seen HMS Rodney looming against the sunset, coming to answer the Chilean Reefer's call. Rodney, seeing only a dim smudge in the east beyond the burning but still floating wreck of the Reefer, flashed 'WHAT SHIP?' Fein and Lutjens ordered the signalman to flash back 'HMS EMERALD' and then picked up their skirts and ran (and probably retired to their cabins for a change of underwear). On board Rodney, Capt Dalrymple-Hamilton did not believe the signal, but he could not have caught the Gneisenau in the dark, so his priority was to stop and pick up the survivors. Three of the Reefer's crew, in one boat, had been taken on board Gneisenau (and one was kept in solitary to make him admit that the Reefer was a Q-ship when it wasn't, and all three were paraded through the streets on arrival at Brest, in defiance of the Geneva rules about subjecting prisoners to public curiosity). Six were killed. Twenty-seven were saved by Rodney, three of whom later died on board.
When Rodney departed the scene that night, the burning wreck of the Chilean Reefer was still afloat. No one ever saw her sink, despite the mighty battleship Gneisenau devoting her best efforts -- over 80 rounds -- to that very purpose for about half an hour. And she was only 1800 tons, by far the smallest ship attacked in the course of the Scharnhorst - Gneisenau sortie, Operation Berlin. So, should we pretend that the mighty Gneisenau was 'unable to sink her with gunfire'? Of course not. Ask Lloyd's. Ask anyone. She was sunk by the gunfire of the German battleship Gneisenau 200 miles off Cape Race on the evening of 16 March 1941. Even though no one saw her go down, and it must have happened a long time after the Gneisenau left the scene.
Bismarck sank on 27 May due to the gunfire of Rodney and KG5, only 20 minutes after they ceased fire so as not to fire on crew abandoning ship. If anything gave her the last nudge it was the torpedos of HMS Devonshire and not the few sticks of dynamite that the engineering officer claimed he ordered to be set. The mythology of the Invincible Nazi Supership They Could Not Sink is just mythology, of an unsavoury and anti-factual kind, and, although the article may recognise that such claims have been made, it should not recognise them as factual. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 19:20, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
I find out there’s a mistake in speed of Bismarck. The actual speed of battleship was 30.1knots and they even earned once a speed of 30.8knots (according to the book written by B.F von Mullenheim-Rechberg) so it is not the 30.01knots like it is on a page now. Please fix that. WIECEq ( talk) 01:18, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Based on the oldest edit in the article history, it appears this article was started with American spellings ("armor", "meter", "kilometer"), so the article ought to be converted back per WP:RETAIN. Parsecboy ( talk) 17:27, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
I removed the text "Bismarck was mentioned in the Wehrmachtbericht (the "armed forces report", a propaganda broadcast) three times during Operation Rheinübung. The first was an account of the Battle of the Denmark Strait; the second was a brief account of the ship's destruction, and the third was an exaggerated claim that Bismarck had sunk a British destroyer and shot down five aircraft."
which was also mentioned in the infobox under "honours and awards". Being named in a propaganda publication's coverage of a battle in which the ship participated, or in an account of the ship's sinking, is a dubious "award" at best. –
dlthewave
☎ 21:03, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
"As reported yesterday, the battleship "Bismarck," after its victorious battle near Iceland, was on 26 May hit by a torpedo from an enemy aircraft and left unmanoeuvrable. True to the last radio message from chief of fleet Admiral Lütjens, the battleship was defeated by overwhelming enemy forces and sank with flag flying together with its commander Kapitän zu See Lindemann and its brave crew, on 27 May before noon."If these really are notable awards, we should be able to cite secondary sources that describe them as such. – dlthewave ☎ 23:38, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
Holy cow these old war stories spawn a lot of chatter. UK English is my two cents, and not making definitive statements about "who sank the ship" beyond that so many shells hit her, and orders to scuttle were given, etc. The fact is, she went down.
The article is missing a section on the impact of the sinking in Britain and Germany. At some point, the German capital ships stayed in port. How did this contribute? Etc.
Thanks. 184.69.174.194 ( talk) 03:37, 10 March 2019 (UTC)
It is strange that the following article is not cited here:
It contains a wealth of very pertinent information, particularly about the damage Bismarck suffered in its final combat. It could be employed to the advantage of this page. Urselius ( talk) 07:48, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
All the accounts I've ever read stated that Lindemann survived to the end and went down with the ship, standing on the bow. Shouldn't this be at least mentioned as a version? This is what Ballard's own book says, so it doesn't just need to be dismissed as 'stupid Nazi propaganda'.
70.16.212.73 ( talk) 18:13, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
Since the turrets were held in place only by their weight, they fell out of the ship when it capsized. After they dropped out, the ship rolled upright on its way to the bottom. Have the turrets been located or are their locations still unknown? Bizzybody ( talk) 09:55, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
Germany was never a part of the washington naval treaty so tonnage limits did not apply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8801:2A88:9100:519B:74F0:E340:ADFC ( talk) 08:14, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
German Capital ships were referred to using male pronouns during the reign of the Third Reich. -A — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.96.30.55 ( talk) 17:18, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
If this is wikipedia's policy, I can do very little about it. But it is disrespectful to the Crews that serve on any ship to refer to their ship improperly; Regardless of what these men died for, their memories should be honored all the same. I protest this decision on such grounds, semantics should not be more important than the memory of the dead. -A — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.96.30.55 ( talk) 17:29, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
Which "Kaiser Bill"? There were two of them. That's why the one I'm assuming you're referring to is Kaiser Wilhelm the second. Also Russian ships are "he" as well. Wandavianempire ( talk) 14:59, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
It's a very peculiar mental deformity for someone to want English-speakers to write English as if it was German. But I daresay very typical of the Third Reich. 86.11.99.75 ( talk) 11:56, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
To follow up on this, the Imperator article doesn’t say that, and didn’t when this point was raised. It also seems that Imperator wasn’t given the male pronoun, and "basic research" hasn’t turned up evidence this request was ever made. Just saying… Xyl 54 ( talk) 03:30, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
The summary of Bismarcks fate is misleading. It implies that scuttling was the primary reason for her sinking, instead of acknowledging the wider picture.
All contemporary experts agree, that regardless of the crews scuttling efforts, Bismarck was:
1) already sinking 2) would sink 3) was spent as a fighting force 4) that the crew abandoned ship 5) that the Royal Navy were still attacking, with orders to "finish her off" 6) that the Royal Navy had no interest in taking her a prize VSTAMPv ( talk) 23:45, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
You have beaten this to death, pal. Yes, the Bismarck would have sunk regardless of the crew's scuttling, but the fact is he was scuttled. A dead tree is gonna fall, but if you cut it down, you don't say it fell. You say you cut it down. Bobafett5204 ( talk) 02:33, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
'She'
You don't cut down a tree that's already falling, what a daft analogy.
Who do I speak to out of this little clique please? VSTAMPv ( talk) 05:25, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
The question is not whether Kapitanleutnant Gerhard Junack, engineering officer in the turbine room, ordered scuttling charges set -- he claimed to have done so -- the question is how much those charges had to do with the sinking. In 1967, in an article in Purnell's History of the Second World War, Vol.2, No.5, he claimed to have received an order by telephone from Korvettenkapitan Walter Lehmann, the ship's chief engineering officer (who did not survive), to 'prepare the ship for sinking'. He stated that this occurred at 10.15 and was the last order of any kind that he received aboard the Bismarck. He said that he ordered the engine-room machinists to place these charges -- which I believe were quite small in naval terms, six sticks of dynamite each, with a detonator and timer, contained in 'V-boxes' which were little white wooden boxes painted with a red V for Versenkung, at the appropriate points. He then tried to contact Lehmann for final instructions, but the phones had gone out. He sent a petty officer to find Lehmann, but the man never returned and Junack said he was killed on the way. Junack said he then decided to go ahead with the procedure and ordered his 'chief machinist' in the turbine room to set the charges with a 9-minute timer. He said he then went up to the aft deck, heard the charges explode -- this cannot have been much before 10.30 -- then tried to organise the men massed on the deck, gave a 'Sieg Heil', which possibly tells you something about him, and jumped into the sea. He said that Bismarck rolled over and sank almost immediately after that (which we know was at 10.40). He was picked up by Devonshire, a ship that the men had already seen approaching.
http://www.kbismarck.com/bismarck-last-hours.html
British naval intelligence, obviously, interrogated the survivors. The Admiralty produced a secret report that August. They noted, among other things, that, according to other survivors, Junack had been 'previously employed by the Gestapo'. His naval record does seem to be a bit vague between 1933 and 1941, but this could be scuttlebutt -- the interrogators observed that the ordinary seamen on the Bismarck did not like their officers very much. However, other survivors testified that, even in the water, before Devonshire rescued them, Junack was yelling at the ordinary seamen, 'Keep your mouths shut!' They appear not to have appreciated this. The Admiralty report (German Battleship Bismarck: Interrogation of Survivors, CB4051 24, August 1941) made this observation:-
'The actual cause of sinking is still a matter of dispute among survivors. There is, however, a considerable body of evidence to support the view that the inevitable end of the "Bismarck" was hastened by the explosion of specially prepared scuttling charges. Several prisoners state that they received definite orders, such as: "Abandon ship. Ship is to be sunk!" "Clear ship for scuttling; apply explosive charges." According to one prisoner, a special "scuttling party" then took charge and explosives, which had been placed in position earlier, were fired, some at the sea-water inlets and discharges, others in the turbine rooms, boiler rooms and auxiliary machinery rooms. All watertight doors and flooding valves were left open and the ship sank ten minutes after the charges were fired, capsizing to port. It was stated that all propellers still revolved.'
http://www.uboatarchive.net/Int/BismarckINT.htm
The 'one prisoner' mentioned there is obviously Junack. But evidently not all the survivors believed that the scuttling procedure, if it really happened, had anything much to do with the sinking (hence the 'matter of dispute'). And 'hastening the inevitable' does not mean that the Bismarck was sunk by scuttling. It means she was sinking anyway -- the British could see she was low in the water by then, and surveys have found torpedo holes in areas that should have been above the waterline. The scuttling procedure may have accelerated the process by a few moments, is all. Junack is also on record as saying that the stern compartments had been flooded ever since the successful Swordfish strike by Ark Royal and that during the final battle the Bismarck took penetrating hits in the engine room and the boiler room -- specifically in the boiler room at 09.15-09.30, starting a fire, and in the turbine room at 09.30 (Admiralty report, op. cit., p.23).
So, by Junack's account, Bismarck rolled over and sank a bare ten minutes after the detonation of those small charges in the machinery spaces, whose sole purpose was to rupture pipes and valves so as to allow seawater ingress. RMS Titanic remained afloat for 2 hours 40 minutes after sustaining a hull rupture which, according to the evidence of the builder's chief naval architect at the inquiry, amounted to 12 square feet or 1.1 square metres. What would be the equivalent opening caused by the rupture of those pipes and valves on board Bismarck? And how much water would a vessel displacing 40,000-50,000 tons have to ship before it lost buoyancy as its density exceeded that of the surrounding sea? And could it really ship that much in just ten minutes? The Graf Spee, of course, sank almost immediately, but the Graf Spee was blown by up her entire remaining stock of ammunition, a considerable tonnage -- a bit like the Hood but on purpose. The charges used on the Bismarck were incomparably smaller.
Scuttling was not even intended to produce an immediate result like that. The most famous case of scuttling, of course, was the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919. The German navy considered this an honourable patriotic act which meant they were not really defeated, rather as the German army used the anti-Semitic 'stab in the back' myth to the same purpose. This is why the German navy of the Second World War was obsessed with scuttling and it is why all German warships carried those peculiar 'suicide pills', the V-boxes in the engine rooms.
At Scapa Flow, the skeleton crews had days to prepare the ships for the great event, even going to the lengths of making extra holes in all the bulkheads to speed the flooding process. And of course they opened all the watertight doors throughout the ships, which wasn't possible on the Bismarck because the ship was on fire and in chaos and a large number of the crew were dead already. Junack only said that the engine-room watertight doors were opened.
After the scuttle order was signalled at Scapa Flow, it was a full 40 minutes before even one ship showed a visible list. The last ship to sink, the battlecruiser SMS Hindenburg displacing at least 36,000 tons, didn't go down for nearly six hours. And almost a third of the 74-strong fleet -- 18 destroyers, three cruisers and one capital ship -- failed to sink at all. Some of these were saved by Royal Navy boarding parties, but most of them just... didn't sink. The scuttling didn't work. Scuttling is not some abracadabra that magically and instantly sends a ship to the bottom. And the likelihood of Junack's puny demolition charges causing the Bismarck to founder in just ten minutes, unless she was sinking anyway, is negligible. Khamba Tendal ( talk) 19:56, 20 March 2021 (UTC)