Schlachtschiff Bismarck, pride of the Kriegsmarine, was a state-of-the-art warship in all respects save one: Battleships were already in their twilight as a dominant offensive naval weapon when the Bismarck slid down the ways at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, although few yet grasped this reality. The advent of carrier-borne aircraft, including dive bombers and torpedo planes, meant that the battleship, despite its bristling array of weaponry, was terribly vulnerable and therefore obsolete.
The British were no more cognizant of this fact than the Germans were when the Bismarck, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, weighed anchor in Norway on May 21 for Operation Rheinübung, its first sortie against enemy merchant shipping. The British Admiralty, made aware of the Germans' departure, alerted its squadrons at sea that Bismarck was breaking out into the North Atlantic.
The hunt was on. The pursuit was one of World War II's great naval epics, inspiring authors and filmmakers.
On board the Bismarck, her skipper, Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann, in consultation with the fleet chief (Flottenchef), Adm. Gunther Lütjens, elected to take his ship and the accompanying Prinz Eugen into the shipping lanes by way of the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. Directly in their path lay the Royal Navy cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk. On the evening of May 23, Suffolk sighted the enemy warships and sent a position report to the Admiralty. Heavy units of the Home Fleet, including the battlecruiser HMS Hood and battleship Prince of Wales, scrambled to intercept the Germans.
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