Comments by "" (@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684) on "Drachinifel"
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Bismarck's main armour belt extended 2.3 meters below and 2.4 meters above the waterline (As can be seen at 6:43). To intentionally & directly strike that long, narrow strake of armour, showing above the water's surface even from the range of sub 3000m that HMS Rodney closed to whilst making headway in a heavy stormy North Atlantic swell would be nigh on impossible. As the report clearly says "the very large number of hits on the main belt WERE MOSTLY IF NOT ALL FROM SECONDARY guns". A number of the major calibre hits that impacted that long narrow main armour belt more than likely ricochetted off the surface of the sea due to the relatively short range and flattened trajectories involved and lost a large part of their momentum as they did so, that is apart from the two penetrations which were probably the only two direct major calibre hits on the 320mm armour belt..
Gun data for Rodney's 16"/45 Mark I main guns shows their penetration ability as 14.4 inches of vertical armour at 15000 yards. She was firing a LOT closer than this for much of the engagement, so even taking into account her shells striking the main belt at a reasonable angle she would have very little problem with penetrating Bismarck's main belt of 320mm (12.6 inches).
The principle is the same as arguing a dart cannot penetrate the skin of a balloon from 2 miles away. To which the answer is "of course it can.... if it can manage to hit it".
P.S And don't even get me started about Bismarck's wiki page. I've lost count of the exchanges I've had with the page's "self appointed guardian" A.K.A Parsecboy, who polices the page using his jaded, biased agenda, and who when presented with corroborated evidence supporting facts which he doesn't like (such as admiralty reports from the UK national archives), or even correcting blatant errors or misrepresentations on the page, he as a "wiki approved editor" deletes any changes he doesn't like with impunity, and if you've really rubbed his nose in it, will also temporarily ban your IP address from editing wikipedia at all. Not that it "gets my goat"... HONESTLY !!!!
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@_ArsNova WTF were "the Royal Navy under "no stop" orders"? Both HMS Dorsetshire & HMS Maori were directly ordered to pick up survivors by Admiral Tovey. As for your cooment "the dire conditions of those that were rescued", I assume you mean after having floated traumatised for 90 minutes in the oil covered raging north Atlantic, and not the conditions they were kept in onboard the RN ships. Read ANY survviors account and witness the dignity and humanity that was afforded each and every sailor that was rescued, 3 hot meals a day, supplied with rum, sweets and cigarettes, the best medical treatment available for the injured and a full military funeral for the one German sailor who died the following day. If you've any complaints about the events, direct them at Eitel-Freidrich Kentrat, the commander of U-74 who was in the area at the time, and whose periscope it was that was spotted, and which brought the rescue operations to an early end.
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My father (Ldg/st KX 108902 Stanley Higgins) was a stoker onboard HMS Dorsetshire From June 1940 until her sinking in April 1942.
During the final Bismarck action on 27th May 1941, he was off watch from his stoker's station in the boiler rooms, and was at his action station in a damage control party. Part way through the action he was told by the party leader to go "up top" to see what was happening, and he witnessed the flaming, smoke shrouded wreck of Bismarck being pounded before its sinking.
After being stood down from action stations, all available hands were called to "man the sides" and help in the rescue of the Bismarck's survivors. he took part in the rescues, and during his assistance, one particular survivor called Friedrich Junghans, gave dad his "erkennungsmarke" or ID tag in gratitude. It is currently on display in the Merseyside maritime museum in Liverpool, UK.
11 months later on 5th April 1942, at the time of Dorsetshire's own sinking, he was again very luckily off-watch from the boiler rooms ("lucky" as no-one on duty there survived the sinking) and was again called to action stations, at this time he was a leader of a damage control party up near the Dorsetshire's bows adjacent to the ships "paint locker". Very shortly after the commencement of the Japanese air attack, all comms in the ship were lost, though it was all too apparent that Dorsetshire was receiving a heavy pounding, with the ship heeling over and quaking from the impact of the Japanese bombs and the many near misses.
During the chaos and din of the Japanese dive bombing attack, one concussion dislodged a length of heavy suction hose from a bracket on the compartment's bulkhead, the heavy, solid hose, known as an "elephant's foot", hit dad on the head, knocking him senseless for several seconds. On regaining his wits in the now blacked out darkness of the compartment, sensing that the ship was starting to list heavily, he ordered the party to get on the upper deck via a ladder leading to the "bosun's hatch" in the compartment roof. The first man up the ladder shouted that he couldn't unlatch the hatch "dogs". and dad used a crowbar to release the latches and the party crawled out into the burning sunlight on the rapidly inclining foredeck. One party member, a South African named David van Zyl, confided to dad that he couldn't swim and despite desperate pleas from dad for him to jump overboard, he tragically went down with the ship, the rest of the party all survived.
The two cruisers each had a complement of approx 650-700 men on board. After both were sunk, only one intact lifeboat remained afloat from the two ships, This was used to hold the many severely injured sailors while the less heavily wounded and healthy (including my dad), had to cling to assorted flotsam. The sinkings took place at around 2:00pm on a sunday afternoon, they floated through the first night, and right through the following Monday, suffering horrible burns under the tropical sun whilst being crusted in salt from the seawater, dad said the saving grace was the men slathered themselves in thick oil from the sunken ships fuel tanks which began to surface a couple of hours after the ships had gone down, this gave some protection and relief, but they all increasingly believed that in their exhausted state that they were to die during that second night. The British Eastern fleet commander was aware that the two ships were overdue and mercifully sent a light cruiser and 2 destroyers to make a sweep. But it was a Fairey Swordfish from Ceylon that spotted a reflection of the rays of the dying sun on a biscuit tin that had been tied to an oar and held upright being rotated by a man in the boat full of wounded. A message was sent from the aircraft and shortly before sunset, the 3 ships (HMS Emerald, Panther & Paladin) arrived on the scene and rescued 1120 sailors from the approximately 1400 men who were on this ships before their sinking, after having spent 33 hours clinging to wreckage.
He "Crossed the bar" in 2013 aged 93.
Great vid as usual from your channel, all the best.
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You seem to put a lot of stock in survivor's accounts of the final battle and sinking... I'm fully with you on that point. Lets look at some shall we?
From "Battleship Bismarck: A survivor's story" Written by Baron Burkhard von Mullenheim-Rechberg, Bismarck's senior ranking survivor.
Page 211 "Our list to port had increased a bit while firing was going on" followed by "Around 9:30am gas and smoke began to drift through our station" This means that prior to 9:30am Bismarck was already flooding, not something that happens to a healthy seaworthy ship, in other words she was already starting to sink.
Then from an interview conducted for the highly regarded weekly history journal "Purnell's history of the second world war" in the late 1960's with Gerhard Junack (who was Bismarck's only surviving engineering officer and the survivor who supposedly enacted the "scuttle order"). He stated that...
"Somewhere about 1015 hours, I received an order over the telephone from the Chief Engineer (Korvettenkapitän (Ing.) Walter Lehmann) to 'Prepare the ship for sinking.' That was the last order I received on the Bismarck. Soon after that, all transmission of orders collapsed."
Heading back to the account of Mullenheim-Rechberg, on Page 212 he states that (before 10:00am) "I was using all the telephone circuits and calling all over the place in an effort to find out as much as possible about the condition of the ship. I got only one answer. I reached the messenger in the damage control centre and asked "who has and where is the command of the ship? Are there new orders in effect?".... The man said he was in a great hurry. He told me that everyone had abandoned the damage control centre, adding that he was the last one in the room and had to get out... then he hung up".
This vain seach for contact & information over the Bismarck's internal comms happened BEFORE 10:00am which throws some mild doubt on Junack's testimony where he says he was contacted by the chief engineer who supposedly gave him the "scuttle order" over the phone at 10:15am... Hmmmmm.
If taken at face value these survivor testimonies show that there was at least a 45 minute gap between Bismarck starting to sink and the first mention of a "scuttle order" being given. Even if Bismarck's crew had done nothing, Bismarck was going to sink, and if the beaten crew want to help the RN, then all the better... But face it, Bismarck's crew weren't going to scuttle a perfectly seaworthy ship in the middle of the storm tossed North Atlantic of their own free will, it was only for the fact that the RN had already dismantled Bismarck and initiated the sinking process. In other words in every sense the sinking of Bismarck was the result of actions dictated by the Royal Navy.
Anything else is just hurt German pride, bolstered by modern day delusional wehraboos. Germany was well known for trying to hide its national humiliations, such as when they scuttled their "grand fleet" at the end of WW1, like illogically saying "We lost.. but you didn't win", or a pathetic "You didn't beat us because we killed ourselves before you killed us" sort of idiocy.
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@richardbushey2666 First hit in Denmark Strait engagement? PoW on Bismarck. Bismarck achieved 6 hits from 98 380mm rounds expended... not bad, but made to look a lot better by the single "million to one" hit on Hood.
Lütjens had the sense not to chase PoW after Hood's demise, the reason being the German B-dienst team both on board and ashore had given him absolutely ZERO warning of the approach of two of the Royal Navy's largest capital ships, and he righly suspected that more were on their way from the direction of Scapa Flow. Not that he could have chased PoW down, with his speed reduced, down by the bow & with the unrepaired damage in his bow threatening to collapse his forward bulkheads, on top of his suddenly dire fuel situation he had no choice but to continue south and make for France, much to the annoyance of all the "armchair admiral" wehraboos on these threads.
Near stationary? Go check out a map for the final battle... and contrary to popular belief, she wasn't "steaming in circles" either. Aww poor Bismarck's crew had no sleep.... Rodney and KGV were in position to engage Bismarck on the late evening of the 26th May but decided to let Vian engage her through the night.... like a cat toying with its prey, leaving the RN "big hitters" rested and refreshed & ready to engage at first light.... fantastic planning by Jack Tovey in my book, not all battles are won with raw firepower (although they had that too). The only thing where Bismarck excelled was in her "running away power". As soon as she lost that and was engaged by contemporary British warships, she was shown for the mediocre 1930s waste of resources she really was.
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Its difficult to accept the charge that British documentaries in particular are biased !!! We are bottom of the "junior league" compared to the US "Major league champions". They inflict themselves on EVERY aspect of history even when they had little or nothing to do with it. You can see their intent with the US film industry's absolute OBSESSION with putting the yanks into every aspect of history (U-571 anyone?). Just yesterday I watched a documentary on British TV about "operation Dynamo" (The Dunkirk Evacuation) and the primary "talking head" throughout the programme was a US lieutenant colonel in full regalia, apparently the incongruity of a bemedalled senior US officer lecturing on the quintessentially European events of May/June 1940 was totally lost on the doc producers. Yes the man was probably a learned expert of WW2 military matters from West Point or wherever, but the bare faced crass US jingoism of the setup was incredbile !!! That's just one very recent example, but modern media is RIFE with such overbearing US inflection on world history.
Another example is the "battle of Britain". If you read a large amount (but thankfully not all) of US comment here on YT, the "BoB" was "won by the US", solely on the basis that the British bought supplies from the US, but strangely you never hear the counterpart cry of "Romania & the USSR conquered most of mainland Europe in 1939-41", which by using the rationale of US commenters that "we supplied you with fuel / materials" is exactly what Romania and the USSR did whilst using nazi Germany as their proxy.
I can though fully concur with your judgement regarding Thames TV's "The World at War", which is rightfully often described as "landmark TV", even so current repeats of "TWAW" are now savagely edited to make space for more advertising BS, its akin to plastering a landmark such as the Taj Mahal with "Tesla" "Amazon" and "Apple" adverts. Thankfully I have my own unedited, and uninterrupted copies of the entire series.
As you suggest, as the war generation leave our midst world history has (as it always has) been hijacked by those with their own contemporary agendas to push, with the consequence that almost nothing in the last 20 years can hold a candle to the best of pre 2000s documentaries.
Consider that what you now believe to be "British bias" is a reactionary counter balance to the increasing growth in juvenile wehraboo-ism as well as the globalist inspired "anti-Brit" sentiment now pushed in the general MSM, as a result of our rejection of their EUSSR branch of global hegemony, which seeks to "re-interpret" and undermine factual material and subvert the actualité of historical events,
All the best though Vincent.
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And yet here are you unbidden, STILL trying to suggest that the RN didn't sink Bismarck... Why are YOU so obsessed?
IF any scuttling actually took place then all that was scuttled was a 51000 ton mountain of sinking, flaming scrap metal. All guns silenced, her superstructure devastated, her main armour belt broken and penetrated in several places, her command staff physically obliterated, internally aflame from end to end, her stern and port gunwales already underwater, a thousand of her crew dead, and further hundreds of her crew already in the water behind her.... All that any scuttling did was to sink her a few minutes earlier than was already happening.
In the world of boxing the crew's scuttling efforts are what is known as "throwing in the towel", submission of a boxer AFTER he has been punched senseless by a more skillful & powerful opponent, and only a deluded child would say, "the victor didn't win because his opponent killed himself before he lost.", when the truth is the loser had his arse ripped off by the victor and handed back to him on a plate.
Imagine the ignominy of being forced to commit suicide by your opponent?
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