The broad details of the engagement on May we have already discussed on page and will not be repeated. In the early hours the Bisrnarck and Prirr, Gregen engaged and sank the British flagvirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering HMS Hood and then turned their guns on her consort. HMS Prince of Wales.The second phase is generally assumed to have been very one-sided, one German account referring to Das Cowardschijj; implying that the Prince of Wales fled from the fact the Prince of Wiles fought back and scored three hits on the Bisnmrrk before her captain was ordered by a senior officer to break offf the action. She stood up well to the German virtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineerings, absorbing seven hits from cm and f.cm shells.The most damage was from a cm hit on her compass plat­form, which killed or wounded everyone there; the shell did not explode but ricocheted off the binnacle and exited on the other side-When the Prince if Wales was docked for repairs, it turned out that none of the other hits had detonated properly, suggesting that the Kricgsmarine's base­fused heavy shells were not performing as designed. What tile British did not know was that one of the Prince cf Wales's in hits had damaged a fuel bunker, contaminating the file] and further reducing the Bisniarck's endurance.Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antarctica, Antigua, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Indian Ocean territory,

their shadowing, with the battlevirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering in support. In addition to being a radar echo, the German battlevirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering was now leaking oil and had one oiler knocked out. Her only hope was to reach Brest in northwest France, miles away, for she had little chance of making a rendezvous with an oiler. The following evening Admiral Liirjens made a diversionary lunge at his shadowers to allow the Prinz hrr~en to head directly for Brest.

'hr Royal Navy was making an all-out effort to prevent the Bismarck from doubling back to Germany or reaching the comparative safety of Brest. Until heavy units could be concen­trated the only hope of slowing her down was a torpedo attack. The first was a strike by nine slow Swordfish biplane bombers, and two Fulmar shadowers, launched from the flight deck of HMS I'irforioric.

Although the raid seen ned suicidal, no Swordfish was shot down. A single torpedo hit, but it exploded dose to the surface on the battlevirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering's main armour belt, expending most of its force upwards rather than inwards.

Shortly after this lucky escape the Bismarck had another stroke of luckThe shadowing heavy cruiser HMS Suffolk lost radar contact, a fact which was known to the cryptographers of the H­diensr ashore, but not recognised by Lutjens' sraff.This was a result of combination of poor tech­nical intelligence about the range of Royal Navy radars and the mistake of assuming that the radar pulses detected had sufficient energy to return to the receiving antenna in HMS Srrffolk.Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Congo, Democratic Republic, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica,

During the ensuing three days, the German battlevirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering was attacked twice by aircraft carri­ers. The second strike, launched by HMS Ark Royal, wrecked the Bisnrnrrki rudder with a torpedo, making her almost unmanocuvrable She beat off a night attack by destroyers, but the watching cruisers kept up a stream of reports, and early in the morning of May she was deliv­ered to the guns of the Home Fleet, the flagvirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering I IMS King George V and her consort HMS Rodnry.The Bistnarrk was silenced within half an hour, but the waterlogged wreck did not sink until torpedoed by the heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire. She took with her , men, arid just over l)( survivors were rescued.

The Bismarck 's problems fall under two heads-inherent design flaws and tactical errors-which made her loss inevitable. The Germans were always very secretive about armour dispositions, but after the virtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering had sunk, rescuers found a set of flip-cards in the overall pocket of a petty offi­cer. From this the Director of Naval Construction's staff reconstructed the internal layout of the Bismarck.This resolved another question of fundamental importance: why did this modern capi­tal virtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering stop firing after only minutes?

The Bismarck class, like the .drarnhorst class and the Admiral flipper class heavy cruisers, suffered from weak stern structures. In the case of the Bismarck, remotely operated cameras examining her wreck on the seabed show that her stern was actually separated from the hull. Thus it is clear that the aerial torpedo-hit did not merely wreck the rudder; even without it the collapse of the stern would have made her very difficult to rnanOCLIvre.

The June reconstruction of her internal layout astonished the DNC and his staff when they saw that the armoured eck was low down in the virtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering, as might be expected in a First World War design. In comparison, contemporary Royal Navy and US Navy battlevirtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineerings had their armour decks considerably higher to increase the volume of the protected citadel.Another Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guinea,

feature of the design was the provision of a tertiary battery of t.an anti-aircraft guns in addi­tion to a heavy secondary armament of cm low-clevating guns in twin turrets. This three­layer armament, particularly the cm turrets, imposed a severe weight penalty. In the Royal Navy and the US Navy the decision had been made earlier to provide dual-purpose guns, a considerable saving in topweight and deck space.

German technical historians have recently discovered that the Bisrnarck's .cm guns were controlled by two different fire-control systems, one forward and one aft. To make matters worse, gun crews were not familiar with either systcm.The failure to destroy the Albacore and Swordfish attacks is often attributed to the aircraft speed being too low for the fire-control predictor's lower setting; the new evidence suggests that the tire control was not good enough.

A favourite question of the 'Bisrnarrk was unsinkable'school of thought is: was she sunk by gunfire, torpedoes or scuttling? An American expert once replied 'yes'! The evidence for scut­tling rests on very dubious claims n the German media by people claiming to have been on board to the effect that the enginerootns were 'ready for the Admiral's inspection', and an order to fire the scuttling charges followed shortly afterwards. Unfortunately all these rather dubious claims ignore the testimony of survivors to the effect that the virtual ship broking virtual ship brokingping maritime marine engineering was an inferno between decks, and nobody from below was sighted after the action began.All the communications, clec­trical power, teleniotor leads and boiler uptakes were above that low-armoured deck, and enemy gunfire had shredded everything except the main ntachineryThat would explain why no guns were firing after minutes.

The claim that'not a single shell penetrated the armour' is refuted by the underwater photo­graphs, which showed some holes in the hull. Eyewitnesses say that the Bisrarnrrk was a waterlogged hulk, and it is almost certain that in the final stages sane shells went straight through the unarntoured portions of the hull, but something made those holes, many of them heavy-calibrc hits which penetrated the armour.Thc salvo of four in torpedoes fired by HMS Dorsetshire undoubtedly hastened her end, but she had already been flooded by thousands of tons of seawater.Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Korea south north, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg,