Comments by "" (@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684) on "Drachinifel"
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@bookaufman9643 Worry not Boo, the reply above took me 2 minutes, no trouble at all.
Dont forget Boo, Naval gunnery is not the same as firing a rifle at a target. Rifle shooting at "normal" ranges means that the bullet trajectory is close to flat, and the bullet may have a flight time of a couple of seconds or so, therefore with correctly set sights and fair conditions reasonably good accuracy is a matter of the shooter's individual skill. Naval gunnery at 12 miles distance means shells being fired with an arcing trajectory with the time between the moment of firing and impact of the shell being 30 - 40 seconds or more. In that time both ships may have moved hundreds of meters (Hood moving at 29 knots would cover nearly 600m in 40 seconds), changed course, the wind may have strengthened or weakened and so on. A ship's fire control system has to take its range estimate from its rangefinders, then factor in a large number of variables (including the obvious ones mentioned above, but also many others less obvious) and then the spotters have to observe the fall of shot (30-40 seconds or more later) and then pass on corrective information to the fire control team, who then "rinse and repeat" the above process until hits are observed. This is why I said that Hood had effectively wasted a good number of salvoes directing her fire onto Prinz Eugen, before she realised her mistake and had to start again on Bismarck. It must be remembered that the first 4 salvoes from Bismarck also missed completely, as they were also ranging the British ships, but that said to land hits with her 5th salvo was excellent shooting (Though the inexperienced crew of Prince of Wales landed the first hit in the encounter with their 6th salvo hitting Bismarck).
HMS Hood (and Royal Navy warships in general) had what might be considered as "last gen" coincidence rangefinding equipment when compared to Bismarck / PE with their stereoscopic rangefinding equipment, though Hood & PoW did also have working gunnery radar fitted.
If you'd like a "crash course" in naval rangefinding and fire control theory and practice, then another of Drachinifel's vids here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbXyAzGtIX8 will give you a far better understanding of the problems faced by naval gunners than most people watching YT naval vids.
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Talk about COMPLETE nonsense !!!
You want evidence? I got Evidence !!! Where better to look than "the survivors" whose words you hold so dearly. Lets look at the testimonies of people who actually witnessed the events of Bismarck's sinking first hand, and not some unresearched, modern day revisionist nonsense written for those who know no better. The survivor's statements below are all with regard to Bismarck's final battle on the morning of 27th May 1941.
From "Battleship Bismarck: A survivor's story" Written by Baron Burkhard von Mullenheim-Rechberg, Bismarck's fourth gunnery officer, and her 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 search 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.
Just remember 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?
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 first" sort of idiocy.
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