Force H - "Sink The Bismarck!"

"Sink The Bismarck!"

The most famous incident involving Force H in 1941 did not occur in the Mediterranean, but in the Atlantic Ocean. The battleship Bismarck had sailed in company with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from Germany to commerce raid in the Atlantic. She went round far to the north of the UK, passing through the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. There, she was intercepted by a powerful British force made up of the new battleship Prince of Wales and the old battlecruiser Hood. The engagement was a disaster for the Royal Navy, with Prince of Wales being damaged and Hood blowing up. Only three out of the crew of 1,400 aboard Hood survived. Every Royal Navy unit available was then given the task of destroying the Bismarck.

Force H set sail from Gibraltar to intercept the Bismarck with the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, battlecruiser Renown and light cruiser Sheffield. Despite the loss of Hood, Bismarck did not come out of the Denmark Strait engagement completely unscathed. A shell from Prince of Wales had ruptured the ship's fuel tanks, causing her to lose oil. The commerce raiding cruise was thus cut short, and the ship headed for the French port of Brest. Bismarck was temporarily lost to the Royal Navy after she evaded the radar of the shadowing cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk. She was found again, but the only way of stopping her was if something slowed the ship down. To try to do this, Ark Royal launched a strike with her Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers. However, the aircrews were wrongly informed of the location of Sheffield and attacked her instead, thinking her to be Bismarck. The torpedoes that the Swordfish had dropped carried a new type of magnetic detonator which proved too unreliable. A second strike was flown carrying the older, and totally reliable, contact detonator. Bismarck was found and a torpedo wrecked her steering gear. Unable to evade the British ships closing in, the German battleship was destroyed by a force including King George V and Rodney.