How did the Bismarck really sink?

I was once informed that HMS "Prince of Wales" was still ironing out 'bugs' from her recent commissioning at the time of the Bismark chase, and that during the Battle For Denmark Straits, she actually still had civilian contractors and tradesmen still onboard, ironing out all the flaws.

POW actually broke contact after the demise of Hood, something for a British ship of the period that was quite rare, even unknown.

I personally don't give a flying fig whether "Bismark" was scuttled or not. The principle reason for her demise was the insistance of the Reich Navy to believe it could operate ships like Bismark without proper aerial recon, or an escorting aircraft carrier or two. Surface raiders like Bismark were dinosaurs. Built more for the propaganda value of flying the flag and taking great pictures, the steel and fittings used to construct these pointless monsters could have been put to much better use than ending up at the bottom of the abyssal plain.

Admiral Yamamoto said of the "Yamato" & "Musashi" when commissioned...."These ships will be about as useful in modern warfare as Samurai swords."

Somebody should have told the German Naval Planners this, coming up with their aptly named "Z Plan"....Z alright, it certainly wasn't "A" grade, even if they'd waited for 1945. The "state of the art" in naval warfare had passed "Plan Z" by from the moment of it's adoption, even before that.

Bismark was obselete from the moment she was first concieved as an idea, and doomed from the moment she was sent on her mission with only a silly heavy cruiser as an escort, and with little or no supporting air-cover.

Magnetic mines sank more shipping than German surface vessels.

Only motor torpedo boats, in terms of tonnage sunk, had a worse record as a contribution to the Axis cause at sea, and they cost a fraction of the time, men and material that "Bismark" cost, let alone all the other wastes of space of the Reich Surface fleet.

 

True as history illustrates, but only if one assumes Yamamoto's meaning to have been these ships will be so mishandled as to be as useful in modern warfare as samurai swords.

25 October 1944 off Samar Island, the Japanese empire is given a gift history presents only once in an age -- precisely the right instrument at precisely the right place at precisely the right moment -- and they blew it.

Ozawa's empty CV's has done their suicidal duty. Halsey, confident of the result in the Sibuyan Sea and obsessed with the total destruction of Japan's carriers, has dashed off on his quixotic mission, leaving MacArthur's lifeline virtually naked to the northeast. To the south the only heavy combatants are Jesse Oldendorf's fleet of old battlewagons. Tasked with shore bombardment duties their magazines are mostly filled with high explosive ordnance, having used up their armor-piercing shells to destroy Fuso and Yamashiro. Their escorting destroyers have expended their torpedoes as well. The only American ships in a position to defend against Kurita's Central Force are totally inadequate to the task, at least on paper.

Historians surmise that Kurtia mistook Taffy 3 for elements of Halsey's TF 34, a terrifying prospect indeed, thus his panicky orders and eventual withdrawal. But Kurita had no reasonable excuse. He had a least a degree of air cover from land-based planes, and he had long-range reconnaissance aircraft on the decks of his cruisers. There is no reason for his ignorance of the situation before him, except that he didn't think to ask for an aerial recce of those ships on his port horizon. If he had known the composition of Clifton Sprague's Carrier Division 25 and the other Task Units well over his southeast horizon, Kurita could have taken an even odds gamble and steamed right past them and on into Leyte Gulf to destroy the troop and supply ships anchored there. Or if he would rather be safe than sorry, Kurita could have divided his force, sending Suzuki's BatDiv3 (battleships Kongo, Haruna) with CruDiv5 (heavy cruisers Harugo, Chokai) and two of the three destroyer divisions in amongst the helpless transports to do bloody execution with gunfire and torpedoes, while retaining BatDiv1 (battleships Yamato, Nagato) and the remaining force (four heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and 7 destroyers) to handle Taffy 3. Properly managed BatDiv1 and company could have slaughtered Taffy 3 and all the Task Units beyond.

But of course, Kurita wasn't up to this task. He f*cked up, to put it bluntly, and not for the first time. Thus he doomed Yamato, the biggest monster in the sea, to die an ignominious death a disgraced semi-virgin, having fired on an enemy ship only once, and that ship was a destroyer escort!

Turkey trots to water, everybody!

 

One of them had used up half of her AP Most of the rest less than a quarter although they only fired at Yamashiro. See: Performance of US Battleships at Surigao Strait

True but there were a lot of other DDs and DEs in the area.

I'm not sure I'd caracterize his orders as "panicky". When he eventually gave the order to withraw it can be argued it made considerable sense.

Whose life expectancy in the area could be measured in minutes. It would be interesting to know how many recon aircrft he had though. I'm pretty sure the Southern Force sent most of theirs off to land bases the day before the battle. Not sure about the center force.

Well he did get a recon plane over them from Yamato. Didn't seem to help much and the plane didn't last long either.

Or not. Getting to the transports would require running a real torpedo guantlet. Leaving the US carriers even jeep carriers alone to continue attacking him wouldn't have helped much either. Then there is the question of whether or not the US BBs could have beat him back to the entrance to Leyte Gulf.

It's pretty clear that Yamato fired on more than a single DE that day and indeed is credited with a first salvo straddle of one of the CVE's.

 

Please explain how, given that the whole point of this, the biggest deployment of the Combined Fleet since Midway, it made sense to withdraw? His fellow officers were so outraged that after returning to Japan Kurita had to be protected from assassination plots. Post-war he offered some excuse that he knew the war was lost and wanted to avoid further loss of life. If that was really true he wouldn't have made that 360 degree turn in the Sibuyan Sea. Kurita ended up losing 3 CAs and and destroyer, at least partly due to his uncoordinated "General Attack" order which masked gunfire from his battleships and put his destroyer screen behind his cruisers. The fact that Taffy 3's destroyers got within torpedo range in daylight is itself a testament to Kurita's misuse of his force. Kurita's actions off Samar Island have all the hallmarks of a commander who's lost his nerve.

Futhermore, your comment doesn't account for Kurita's about face at 1020 hours, which would have taken him back into Leyte Gulf. Evidently he thought better of his earlier retirement and sought to regain a position to attack the invasion fleet. By 1300 he had reversed yet again to the north, probably because he realized his cruisers, gravely damaged by a combination of near-suicidal courage on the American part and ham-handed mishandling on Kurita's part, weren't going to be able to help him.

That was a Mitusbishi FM1 floatplane whose mission was to report fall of shot. The appropriate aircraft for the scouting role was the Aichi E13A "Jake." Tone and Chikuma had about a dozen of these available. Their sole purpose was scouting for the battleline, yet Kurita didn't ask for a recce. Please explain why not?

Based on Yamato's FM1 fall of shot report. The only actual hits are credited to Kurita's cruiser force, Force A.

Oldendorf's cruisers went south down the Surigao Strait to position against an about face by Shima's force, while the battleline retired to a position a few miles north of their "T" position. In the three + hours of the fighting off Samar Island Oldendorf made no attempt to intercept, but kept his station guarding Surigao. To interfere with an attack on the transports Wyler's battleships would have to approach in either a line ahead, in which case Yamato's much greater reach would have pummeled the lead ship into wreckage before the Americans got the range, or a line abreast, a very difficult approach to coordinate in enclosed waters with lots of ships at anchor in one's path. Then there's the shortage of AP. Wyler was concerned about this the night before when they facing a much smaller force, examine the rounds expended data and you'll see that a lot of salvoes were fired to score even a few telling hits on an upgraded WW1 battlecruiser. How much more would be be concerned after that mornings expenditure to go against the much more powerful Central Force. Kurita's BatDiv1 vs. Wyler's bombardment force is not an even fight, even if the Japanese get their T crossed.

I suppose your point is Thomas Sprague's escort carriers and their screens, the bulk of which were further from Leyte Gulf than Kurita at 0635 and then <i>retreated</i> to the east, thus increasing their separation from the transport archorage, were sufficient to prevent the Central Force from devastating the transports and troopships, assuming they held to plan and proceeded SSW at 0635 and thence on into Leyte Gulf then by 1100 at the latest Kurita could have rounded Suluan Point and thus into the anchorage. I'm not convinced.

 

Noticed somebody above still has doubts as to Richthofen's demise. For the record, Brown got a single burst in from ABOVE and to the left of the Baron, whereas the fatal bullet went into Manfred's body from BELOW and to the right. The bulletcame in under his armpit and lodged into the heart. Richthofen had just enough life in him to bring his machine down into a sugar beet field, where an Australian officer reached him moments before he expired. He mumbled "Kaput", and died on the spot.

The verdict is clear. Cedric Popkin was the man.

To be fair to the good Captain Brown, he did not actually submit a 'claim' for the Baron, he merely mentioned his attack in his 'after action report'. He spent the rest of his life avoiding acclaim for the deed for this reason. A modest and unassuming man, Roy Brown fully deserved a medal for the chickenshit he had to put up with for the rest of his life from the media.

The Royal Air Force were losing pilots at a faster rate than they ever had, reminicient of other periods in the Great War when they were copping it, (The Fokker Scourge, Bloody April).
Desperate to improve sagging morale at this crucial stage of the war, and with no other pilot even claiming to have fired on Richthofen, Captain Roy Brown was given credit for the 'kill', much to his suprise. Brown was genuinely remorseful, in the same manner that Rhy-Davies was when Werner Voss was killed. Rhy-Davies exclaimed "OH! If only we'd brought him down alive!" Brown's attitude was remarkably similar, even if his exact words have gone unrecorded. This probably reveals more about Brown's unassuming personality than anything else. (Other RAF pilots were not so chivalrous, with the Great Edward 'Mick' Mannock exclaiming, "I hope the bastard went down in flames!".

Roy Brown was a true Canadian hero, but time and forensics have rendered his 'kill' to someone else.

The Australian troops that discovered the Baron's aircraft stripped it for souveniers. So many pieces of the aircraft appeared post-war that pundits have quipped that Richthofen's aircraft fell from the sky from the sheer weight of the commemorative plaques and other paraphenalia supposedly attached to it!

Sorry, off topic, but it is NOT national pride that brings this conclusion to a head, it's the forensic examination of the Baron's body that solved the mystery.

 

...Is badly flawed.

Well then....

effective enough to neutralize all of Bismarck's guns.

No actually the RN's retribution was to have all 3 of the KM's capital ships either sunk or knocked out of action by the RAF for at least a year, while losing only 2 out of 20 British BBs/BCs.

As TA Gardner mentioned, it wasn't hit by DD torpedoes

No, only 2 of 20 British Battleships/Battlecruisers were started during the 20's.

No it doesn't as all of the QE class, the Renown class & the Nelson class completed refits from 1933 to 1941, so the technology was from the 1930's, same as the KM ships.

And anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of battleships would know that the KGV class were built at the same time as the Bismarck.

Actually one direct hit finished her, and tallboy bombs are not "bunker busters'.

 

I'm not saying his decisions were the best in the world at this point but I still don't see much to indicate panic. Indeed given what had happened to him in the last couple of days and considering that he may have been suffering from dengue fever I don't feel he did all that badly. When Yamato turned away from the torpedos it took her pretty much out of the battle and some time was going to be required to reform the fleet. Given the nature of the weather and the charge of the US escorts I'm not at all convinced that "General Attack" orders were unwarented. If he kept everything in formation and maimized his firepower then there was a good chance the carriers would escape particuarly if they were thought to be fleet carriers.

Perhaps because they didn't think they would last long enough to report anything.

Indeed but you said she only fired on a DE which it quite clearly worng.

Not necessarily. There was another strait that the Japanese would have had to transit to get to the transports. If Oldendorf gets there first there's a good chance for a repeat of the crossing the T at Surigao.

Yamashiro was hit by more than "a few telling hits" almost every salvo was a straddle from what I have been able to tell and she was hit numerous times. They indeed would probably have shot up most of their AP if they had to engage Kurita's forces but HE isn't useless against battleships and given how well they were shooting the odds are that a battle would have left Kurita's forces unable to do much against the transports if they could even reach them.

My understanding is that there were a considerable number of escorts still with the transports. Then of course as long as the CVE's are out there and perhaps even after wards the Japanese are going to be suffering from air attacks.