Why didn't Bismarck sink the Prince of Wales?

After sinking Hood, why didn't Bismarck fight Prince of Wales to the finish? Apparently both the PoW's 4-gun turrets (A & Y) jammed in the brief engagement, leaving only the 2-gun B turret which would train.

With this in mind, it seems that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen could have defeated and probably the Prince of Wales before any other British battleships could arrive. And the PoW couldn't get away because Bismarck was faster.

Since one of Bismarck's oil tanks was holed below the waterline and she was leaking fuel all over the ocean, didn't that mean that continuing the long-range commerce raiding mission was a no-go for Bismarck anyway? Surely that damage could not be repaired at sea.

Why not give up on the commerce raiding mission immediately, finish off the PoW and then run for home?

Even if the Bismarck had still been sunk on the way home, this would have been a German victory - two British capital ships sunk for the loss of one German. As it is the Germans exchanged the modern Bismarck for the ageing battlecruiser Hood - definitely a British victory.

 

The orders were to break out into the Atlantic and attack shipping-any furthur damage to Bismarck or the damage/loss of the Prinz would have compromised that plan. You also forgot the heavy crusiers that were still trailing Bismarck, they would have been a "problem" in a gun battle, and could have turned an easy victory perhaps into a bad situation for the Germans.

 

I agree with and would like to add to Wolfpack's comments. Although PoW had been struck many times by Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, the extent of that damage would have been unknown to Lütjens unlike the 20/20 hindsight that we have. Also, the shadowing heavy cruisers and other capital ships that could be looming just beyond the horizon made for extreme uncertainty.

Lütjens was also worried about the damage that was inflicted upon Bismarck in the exchange. 2000 tons of seawater forward and 1000 tons of fuel oil inaccessible weighed heavily on his mind. Granted this knowledge was not immediately known to him, but he could tell that Bismarck was wounded to a point that further hits could lead to not being able to follow his primary directive.

The true nature of the decision process will never fully be known or understood. Lütjens was of keen intellect, but would not allow anyone to know what drove his thought processes. And if he did share his reasonings, they are lost forever in the cold North Atlantic.

 

I think Lütjens did the right thing. He had orders and had to obbey them. He had also his own problems and fighting the Prince of Wales would have made the situation worse. And even if he sank it. There were many more ships coming after it, so would the Bismarck have sunk them all? I don't think so. Besides, even if ten British battleships would have been sunk along with the Bismarck, Great Britain had another 30 battleships available. Germany didn't.

 

Right.The only objective of german navy was to disrupt ally communications and not to fight desperately stronger british fleet.So if Bismark sunk both Hood and PoW it would not have been a victory.

 

I agree on this. Bismarck´s best way at that point was going on. Fighting enemies the number of which is unknown does not sound good. So the answer to why I think is because it was the most clever thing to do at the time.

 

Some nice pics I suddenly found in the net:



Bismarck after being hit by HMS Prince of Wales



View from HMS Dorsetshire:Bismarck sinking...

 

Flottenchef Admiral Lütjens requested an U-boat to recover the logbook. The other subs Lütjens called after the sinking of Hood to lead the following British forces into a trap hadn't been successful. Only U-556 had the whole Task Force H in its Sehrohr, the battleship Renown and the carrier Ark Royal that had started the fatal attack on Bismarck, but U-556 did not have a single torpedo left in its tubes; all had been used up in a convoy battle.

Also U-74, Kapitänleutnant Kentrat, had the order to attack the British forces in this area. In the evening Kentrat dived in order to listen and they detected another U-boat. Kentrat returned to the surface and a mere hundred meters a bow of a German sub appeared out of the stormy sea.

It turned out to be U-556, Kapitänleutnant Wohlfarth. After some communication problems, using a megaphone in this heavy weather, Wohlfarth passed on to Kentrat the order to get Bismarck's log, because he was short of fuel and had to return to his base. Wohlfarth had hardly disappeared, when an aircraft sighting forced U-74 to crash dive, but the crew later assumed that it was a German Fw-200 Condor.

At 10.36 am the sonar crew heard sinking sounds but they weren't certain whether it was Bismarck or a British ship. Detonations were also audible. Later U-74 went to periscope depth and Kentrat saw battleships and cruisers directly in front of him. He tried to get into an attack position but the weather was too bad, the seas too high to remain on periscope depth or to shoot a torpedo. But then there was the wreckage and sometimes yellow life-vests visible.

After the disappearance of the British ships Kentrat surfaced. The picture he saw was a cruel one. Everywhere he looked he saw dead bodies hanging their heads down in their live-vests and tons of wreckage. They searched the whole day but they didn't find anybody alive. The day was near its end when they finally discovered a yellow raft in which three sailors, Georg Herzog, Otto Höntzsch and Herbert Manthey, struggled for life. The three jumped into the roaring sea to drift to the submarine. All three, one of them a non-swimmer, were happily rescued, but then an aircraft alert forced the crew to hurry up and the partially unconscious survivors were nearly thrown through the hatch and the U-boat submerged.

U-74 cruised another day but everybody they found was dead and then it got the order to return immediately to Lorient. On its way back, the three rescued men slowly recovered from the shock of the disaster and they could give first statements of the end of the Bismarck and their own fate, which were promptly written down by a crew member. At the end of the battle the three and some others used turret D as a protection shield against the incoming projectiles and tried to float some of the rescue rafts but a close impact washed most of the rafts and the people away but they managed to get another ready and jumped into the sea after the last turret ceased fire. With them was a war correspondent with all of his film records but after the raft capsized were first the films gone and later the war correspondent. Around noon a Condor passed by but they weren't seen. In the evening they nearly gave up hope because there wasn't anything to eat in the raft, then U-74 suddenly appeared.

Half way back extreme manoeuvres commands went through the boat; the IWO stumbled upon an incoming torpedo and barely managed to escape. Shortly after that they saw the British submarine that had launched the attack and vanished into the dark. Arriving in Lorient the survivors were met by a delegation of Group West and instantly taken to Paris.

http://www.kbismarck.com/archives/u556log.html

http://www.bismarck-class.dk/bismarck/miscellaneous/special_bond/specialbond.html

 

What I have gotten from Bismarck: The Epic Chase by Jim Crossley, page 68 & 69;

 

It's by no means clear to me that he could have sunk POW and by chasing her Bismarck and Prince Eugen may have found themselves engaged not only with POW but the British cruisers, the escroting DDs, and possibly even Rodney and KGV and company which included an aircraft carrier.

 

The author points out the errors in his own analysis, and he can't be helped by citing Hitler's opinion as some sort of expert testimony. Leach did indeed strike a fatal blow, and this was the very thing that Lutjens hoped to avoid by reducing to a minimum his encounter with enemy capital ships. This is not a mystery and never has been. In Denmark Strait, PoW achieved roughly the same hit rate as Bismarck, despite all the tactical disadvantages the British were under. In fact, the hits PoW scored were more damaging than the ones she suffered. Why would Lutjens suppose he would not only get the best of PoW but also sink her without suffering critical damage? And then there's the question of how Bismarck was supposed to prevent PoW from disengaging. Campaigns are not won by achieving a higher score, like some sort of video game; they are won by setting goals and achieving them.

 

I Don't know how true it is, but I watched a documentary about the Bismark, where one of the survivors says it was Captain Lindemann who ordered the Bismark to open fire . When the Admiral hesitated to give the order according to the survivor Lindemann told him, " I will not have my ship shot out from under my ass, OPEN FIRE "

 

Hi; This is one of 3 flyable Swordfish torpedo bombers in the world it sits today in the Shearwater Aviation Museum in Dartmouth Nova Scotia. View attachment 12920