Comments by "Doug JB" (@dougjb7848) on "The Drydock - Episode 322" video.

  1. I had to listen twice to be sure he had not said “Chikuma.”
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  2. I think he already has? Basically: A) If Denmark Strait happened as it did, and then Bismarck eluded her pursuers completely, she would still have been hampered by the damage from the PoW. The worst effect would not have been “leaking oil trail making her easier to find from the air” because those tanks would have gone empty pretty quickly and not been refilled. Rather, her damaged bow reduced her speed, and the loss of fuel storage reduced her range and required much more frequent refueling. Together, they impaired perhaps her greatest asset: operational mobility. The KM’s network for resupply ships was already being compromised by the RN, and losing even one of these vessels could well have forced Lutjens to head back to Europe. B) If the action at Denmark Strait did not result in Bismarck being damaged, even though she would have remained highly mobile she would still face the issue of range / time being needing to refuel. Her propulsion system was much less efficient in combat conditions than her designers had foreseen, and combined with RN success against the resupply ship network would have forced Lutjens to return to Europe. Even if her resupply network were not compromised, she would still face the same restrictions as any surface commerce raider: detecting targets in a region that the RN would actively steer targets away from. This had already affected Operation “Berlin,” the raiding cruise of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which Lutjens had commanded. So, let’s assume Bismarck gets into the North Atlantic without serious damage, and is able to steal around for 3, maybe as many as 6, weeks before needing to head for Europe. The RN would have had all that time to marshal ships throughout the area Bismarck would have to cross to get home, and the KM would have had little ability to counter - Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were stuck in Brest, Hipper was recovering from damage, and Scheer was just finishing a refit. None of these ships would have been able to sortie in an attempt to distract the RN
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