On May 21st, 1941, during a reconnaissance flight over Nazi-occupied Norway, Flying Officer Michael Suckling piloted his RAF Spitfire to 26,000 feet to investigate reports of German naval activity. From this altitude, he photographed two battleships in the fjords near Bergen: the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the pride of the Kriegsmarine, the battleship Bismarck. The largest and most powerful battleship Germany had ever built, Bismarck, was engineered for speed and devastation, armed with eight 15-inch guns and protected by exceptionally thick armor.
Suckling’s sighting confirmed that Bismarck was underway on Operation Rheinübung, a planned breakout into the Atlantic to attack the merchant convoys supplying Britain. His report triggered the massive Royal Navy response that followed: battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers mobilized to intercept the German threat. From a single photograph taken above the clouds began one of the most dramatic naval pursuits of the Second World War, the hunt for the Bismarck. The Bismarck would sink the HMS Hood in the Battle of the Denmark Strait on the 24th, but a combined 13 Royal Navy ships would sink the Bismarck on the 27th. Of the over 2,200 men aboard, 114 were pulled from the water. If interested, I cover the hunt for the Bismarck as well as two other stories in this article: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-40-ships?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios
by aid2000iscool