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OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
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Forgotten Her es
THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME
AUGUST 5, 2021
Hit! You Sunk My Battleship By Avi Heiligman
The crew of the HMS Hood. Only four survived after it was sunk
S
ome of the largest capital (the most important to a navy at any given time) warships to set sail and participate in battles
during the two World Wars were battleships. Their importance to a fleet was soon overshadowed by aircraft carriers, but battleships still
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The German battleship Tirpitz
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played an important role. Their size and firepower made them a fierce opponent. However, this also made them large targets that opposing navies spent considerable amount of resources trying to neutralize. Many battleships on both sides of conflict were sunk, and each sinking deserves its own story. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), several Russian pre-dreadnought battleships were sunk, including six during the Battle of Tsushima Strait in May 1905. The crucial battle was the first naval battle fought by steel battleships and proved that the larger the ship and the bigger guns it carried would be a decisive factor in future battleship warfare. A decade later, during World War I, it was the British Navy that suffered heavy battleship losses with three lost to German U-boats, one to a destroyer and one to a naval mine. At the start of World War II, it was again a British battleship that was the first of its class sunk during the war. The HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a U-boat while anchored at Scapa Flow, Scotland. Both the Japanese and German navies had formidable battleships during World War II and sinking them became a priority for the allies. Naval treaties after World War I limited the amount and size of warships that nations could build, but these were ignored as it became
increasing clear that Nazi Germany was gearing up for another war. During the interwar years, the Nazis built several large ships, including two that would be the center of enormous efforts to sink by the British. The Bismarck, commissioned in 1940, was the lead ship in her class of two battleships, while the Tirpitz, the only other ship in the class, was completed in 1941. The Bismarck set off in May 1941 with the goal to raid Allied shipping. Accompanying her was a cruiser, and together their mission was to attack convoys in the Atlantic Ocean. Allied intelligence gained valuable information from the Swedish envoy to Berlin, and he revealed to the British some of the Bismarck’s characteristics. Her movements and timetable were provided to the British fleet by code breakers at Bletchley Park. A British fleet consisting of the newly commissioned HMS Prince of Whales and the battlecruiser HMS Hood set off looking for the Bismarck. Early on the morning of May 24, 1941, the Bismarck and the Hood traded salvos 14 miles apart in the Denmark Strait. At 6 a.m., an armor-piercing shell ripped through the Hood and exploded the ammunition magazine. A huge explosion erupted, and the Hood broke in two as it sank in less than a minute. There were only three survivors of
