The Eight Day Hunt for the Bismarck | True WW2 Story

In May 1941 the German battleship Bismarck sailed into the North Atlantic. Fifty thousand tons of steel, the most powerful warship afloat, sent to cut the convoy routes Britain depended on for food, fuel and ammunition. On 24 May she was intercepted in the Denmark Strait by HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. Eight minutes into the battle a German shell reached one of Hood's magazines. The explosion tore the most famous warship in the world in half. She sank in about three minutes. Of 1,418 men aboard, three survived. Bismarck was damaged too, leaking oil and losing speed, and turned for the French coast where repairs and air cover waited. British cruisers shadowed her by radar through the night, and then, just after three in the morning, the contact simply disappeared. For thirty-one hours nobody in the Royal Navy knew where she was. She was found again by a patrolling flying boat, seven hundred miles from safety. The only thing that could still reach her was a squadron of Fairey Swordfish, open cockpit biplanes made of fabric and wire that were obsolete before the war began. They launched at dusk into a full gale. Most of their torpedoes missed. One struck her stern and jammed her rudders, and the largest battleship in the world could no longer steer. The next morning HMS Rodney and HMS King George V closed in. Bismarck was hit an estimated four hundred times and would not sink. When the wreck was found in 1989, the damage raised a question that has never been settled: did British shells sink her, or did her own crew scuttle her? More than eighty years later, both sides still disagree. This is the true story of the hunt for the Bismarck. Subscribe for more true WW2 stories.