by Michael Fassbender

Created on: September 22, 2011   Last Updated: September 23, 2011

KMS Bismarck was one of the most powerful battleships ever made when it took to sea in May, 1941.  The product of forty years of capital ship development, and also of forty years of Anglo-German naval rivalry, it was still far too little to pose a credible threat to British naval supremacy.  It was employed only once, and on that journey, its real target was commercial shipping.  Within days, it was sunk.

The experience of World War I had taught the German Navy that it would never build up enough power to decisively defeat the Royal Navy in a direct fight.  Here, the Battle of Jutland was instructive: the outnumbered Germans caused slightly more damage than they received, but it remained damage that they could not repair or replace as easily as the British could.  Faced with the certainty that they could not effectively challenge the Royal Navy on such a scale, the Germans of the interwar period chose not to waste their resources in trying to do so.

Far more successful had been the German effort at economic warfare on the seas, between the submarine threat and the use of cruisers as commerce raiders.  These two tactics worked well in tandem, because each demanded very different countermeasures from the enemy.  The grouping of ships into convoys, shepherded by destroyers, works well against submarines, but it would pose easy prey for a heavy cruiser or a battleship acting as a raider.  Also, these techniques required the expenditure of significant resources on the enemy’s part in response.  Therefore, the Germans built the pocket battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, with which they hoped to employ the same tactics in a future war.

Hitler’s rise to power changed the priorities of the German Navy.  Hitler wanted his navy to have vessels that were qualitatively superior to British ships, even if there were not enough of them to challenge British naval hegemony as a whole.  Specifically, two new vessels laid in 1936 were intended to be the foundation of a new, world-class navy: Schiff F and Schiff G, later to be christened as the Bismarck and Tirpitz.

These vessels were built by Blohm & Voss at Wilhelmshaven.  Schiff F, the first of the two vessels (also known as the Ersatz Hannover), was christened as the Bismarck on February 14, 1939; Dorothea von Loewenfeld, granddaughter of the Chancellor for whom the ship was named, launched it at the ceremony.  The ship still lacked its superstructure

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>