A Site to Behold

The Bismarck Revisited: An In-Depth Report

By DON WALSH

Don Walsh served 24 years in the Navy, during which time he was involved in many aspects of Navy oceanographic activity. He now heads International Maritime Inc., which he founded in 1975. The following report discusses his visit this summer to the bottom of the sea to view the German battleship Bismarck, the sinking of which, in the spring of 1941, was a major turning point in the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic.

The active service of the German battleship Bismarck was extremely brief. But it encompassed one of the greatest sea battles of World War II, which ended after an eight-day running fight between the legendary Bismarck and several much smaller but numerically superior ships of the British Royal Navy.

Launched in February 1939 at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, the Bismarck was the most powerful battleship in the world at the time. At 53,000 tons and a top speed of 31 knots she was also the biggest and fastest. Her eight 15-inch guns, mounted in four massive turrets, were slightly smaller than those on the largest British battleships, but any ship the Bismarck could not outfight she could outrun. Her secondary battery was 12 155mm guns in dual gun turrets. Air defense was provided by a formidable battery consisting of 16 105mm, 16 37mm, and 12 20mm guns. After eight months of sea trials and crew training Bismarck left the Baltic on 19 May 1941. On 27 May 1941 she was sunk after three hours of fierce combat with two British battleships and a heavy cruiser. Only 115 of her 2,100-member crew would survive.

Five Decades Later

It would be 48 years before another human would see Bismarck. In early June 1989, Dr. Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who earlier had found the RMS Titanic, located the German ship on his second expedition to the area where she was believed to have sunk. After a week of surveying the sea floor he finally found his target and began photographing it. The sinking positions recorded by both the British and German navies had been off by several miles, as it turned out.

Ballard used the Argo ship-towed sled system to search the sea floor and make a remarkable series of images of a rather well-preserved wreck sitting upright on the sea floor. His photos permitted the construction of a fine photo-mosaic of the wreck. Unlike some of his other famous shipwreck expeditions, he did not use submersibles at the Bismarck site. His exploration and imagery were documented in a National Geographic television special and in several books.

In 1999 Deep Ocean Expeditions (DOE) decided to try to find Bismarck and visit it using two Russian-manned submersibles. DOE was organized in 1998 by Australian adventurer Michael McDowell to offer "adventure diving" experiences for people interested in seeing famous sea floor sites throughout the world. The DOE program started in 1998 with tourist dives to the Titanic at 12,500 feet, and continued with several other expeditions--to the Rainbow (hydrothermal) Vents off the Azores at 8,000 feet, for example, and to ancient shipwrecks off Toulon and Marseilles in France (300­1,000 feet). Finding Bismarck would be a real challenge. Only Ballard and a few close associates knew the exact location--and Ballard wanted to go back, taking with him a high-tech remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to do a much more extensive survey. Understandably, he was not very interested in selling his coordinate information to another party.

DOE began to plan its own survey of the area. Using the position information logged by the warships present at Bismarck's last battle, it seemed highly probable she was inside a 3- by 4-mile box, a huge area for a seabed search.

Difficult Time Constraints

McDowell was in a tight spot. Bismarck had to be found in either April or May, 2001, so a June expedition could take place as advertised. And it could not be later. The Russian research ship Akademik Keldysh that would be used for the survey would not be available later in the year. Moreover, search operations earlier than May risked bad weather, which could cost more time and money, so it would be a close thing.

Fortunately, just before the survey was to be contracted, Ballard's investors decided to sell the coordinates to recover some of their original investment.

The price was considerably less than a survey would cost. The likelihood that DOE could locate the wreck was therefore much more certain.

On 5 June 2001 the DOE expedition sailed from the Irish port of Cobh on the 6,240-ton Akademik Keldysh--which, once clear of Cobh's vast harbor, headed southwest toward its rendezvous with history. The transit time to Bismarck would be about 38 hours. Cradled on the starboard side of the Keldysh's main deck were two 18-ton Mir submersibles, third-generation vehicles that can take a three-man crew to depths as great as 20,000 feet.

The project team consisted of a wide spectrum of individuals united by the singular desire to see Bismarck, and included three television/movie crews--representing IMAX, the National Geographic Society, and German TV stations. Two experts from Woods Hole installed and maintained the special high-definition television (HDTV) cameras carried externally on each of the Mirs. There also were two print media teams embarked, representing Germany's Focus Magazine and Britain's The Mail on Sunday Review.

Two other Germans provided technical expertise on the Bismarck. One had not only developed a complete computer graphic program of the ship but also had spent 22 years building a three-meter-long scale model of it (the Bismarck itself took only three years to build). The other expert was a specialist on technical specifications. Both experts proved to be invaluable in identifying the various ship sections and equipment items seen in the imagery made at the site.

The "stars" of the expedition, though, were Heinrich Kuhnt and Heinz Steeg, survivors of the sinking. A retired naval officer, Dieter Heitmann, director of the Battleship Bismarck Comrades Association, accompanied them.

Sixteen Russian oceanographers also were on board. "People of the night," they would do most of their work while the Mirs were on deck being serviced. They had full access to the imagery, which helped them study the various types of benthic marine life that lived on the wreck. For them the site was a huge and uniquely interesting artificial reef, populated by all sorts of unusual undersea creatures.

Rounding out the cast of diverse shipmates were three private citizens who had paid $37,500 each for the privilege of making a dive to the Bismarck. DOE had hoped for 15 or so paying participants, but the late scheduling of the expedition made it difficult, even for very wealthy people, to plan this unusual sort of "vacation" on short notice.

Preparing for Day One

The Mir technical team used the time en route for equipment repairs, the testing of submersible systems, and the development of dive strategies. The submersibles had not been operated for eight months and these would be the first dives of the 2001 season.

After arriving at the site early in the morning of 7 June, the first priority was to position four acoustic beacons on the sea floor at the corners of a mile-square box, with Ballard's Bismarck coordinates roughly at the center. The beacons would be used to help Keldysh and the Mirs maintain position within the target area. This work took about a day.

There also was a brief German-English memorial ceremony on the first day in honor of the 2,000 German sailors who went down with the Bismarck 60 years ago. The protocol followed was the one used by the German Navy for memorials at sea. [Heitmann and Walsh were the principal speakers at the ceremony.] At the end of the service Kuhnt and Steeg put floral wreaths in the water. All present sang the German song, "I had a comrade," which was followed by a solemn tolling of the ship's bell.

The next day was the first dive day. After three-hour trips to the bottom both submersibles had passed through the wreck coordinates several times. No Bismarck--not even any debris! After five hours of fruitless searching the Mirs prepared to return to the surface. But McDowell and Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch, who were piloting Mir 1, tried one last search leg in a new direction. And found the Bismarck--about 0.9 miles from Ballard's coordinates (but at the depth, 15,800 feet, that he had reported). Considering the differences in navigation systems and the march of technology since 1989, the "error," such as it was, was within reasonable limits. Sagalevitch coached Mir 2 to the wreck, where the two submersibles spent another two hours making the first high-resolution video imagery.

A Precipitous Plunge

It immediately became apparent that Bismarck had plowed into the slope of an underwater mountain after dropping nearly three miles, and had been moving fairly fast when she hit bottom. The hull was right side up, but the four main turrets were nowhere in sight. They had dropped out of the ship when it rolled over. Most of the secondary guns were still in place. All were pointed outward in their final firing positions. It seems likely that those that were missing had been shot away during the last surface action.

The condition of the superstructure clearly showed the heavy pounding Bismarck had received from the three R.N. ships--the battleships Rodney and King George V, and the cruiser Dorsetshire, which were firing at point-blank range. The Bismarck's masts, most of her upper bridge structure, and her stack all had been shot away, and several of the turrets had large-caliber shell holes in them where armor-piercing shells had passed through--with fatal results for those inside.

Bismarck's hull looked remarkably intact and undamaged, though. A few shell holes were visible, but only one torpedo hit (from the six fired by Dorsetshire) was apparent. All of this supports the idea that the primary cause of the sinking might have been scuttling by the Bismarck's own crew. Several of the survivors have said that charges had been set and detonated at critical points in the ship's hull--on the other hand, the Bismarck had been so grievously damaged by the R.N. ships by the time she went under that it seems almost impossible that she could have stayed afloat much longer, scuttling or not.

Visible forward and aft on the ship's main deck were the outline and colors of the giant swastikas that had been painted to identify her from the air. Both anchors were gone, but some of the anchor chain was visible along the forward deck. The last 20 feet of the stern had been cut cleanly away--the unusually even line of the break seemed to be along the welded seam lines and suggests that this area, weakened by the aerial torpedo that struck there, jamming the ship's rudders, probably broke away when the ship sank.

The weather decks still had quite a bit of wood remaining, but there was evident deterioration from the biological action that had eaten much of the weather decks away over the past 60 years. Numerous colonies of different types of sea anemones were clustered on the flat surfaces. There were very few fish, shrimp, or crabs in the area--probably because there is virtually no current at the Bismarck's final resting place, and the lack of a current would greatly reduce the food supply likely to be available.

There also were several areas of "rusticles"--i.e., "metal-eating" bacteria that make rusty pendants of waste products. The extent of such damage on the Bismarck is much less than on the Titanic, a wreck only 30 years older.

Imagery and Appendicitis

A total of 24 people, including the three Mir pilots, made three more double dives to the wreck during the other days on-site. Each dive added to the needle-sharp HDTV imagery and provided additional information about the ship's sinking and its present condition. The submersibles moved not only through the adjacent debris field but also upslope to where the hull had first plowed into the sea floor. It was there that the submarine crews found one of the 15-inch turrets (resting in an inverted position), parts of the bridge and armored conning tower, and one of the masts. All of the latter had been shot away during the surface action.

Each dive lasted about 11-14 hours, including 5-6 hours actually on-site. There were a few mechanical and external light problems but no really serious complications. The outstanding Mir support staff was able to fix all problems with only minor delays. In one case all of the IMAX team's large movie lights failed during a dive. This could have been a serious problem--normal outside lighting is sufficient for most purposes, but not for movies. The repairs needed were quickly made, though, and the next day the team got four hours of good footage, which will be used in a new IMAX film.

Each night, after the submersibles were back on board, the expedition team would gather in the lecture room to review the day's "rushes"--most of which were very clear and very well-lit. Because the filming was digital it was possible to make high-quality still photographs from the footage.

With bottom times of 5-6 hours this meant some very late nights. But being the first to see this remarkable historical record on-site was a special opportunity that no one wanted to miss. The two Bismarck survivors, Kuhnt and Steeg, were particularly moved by the experience of again being at the place where so many of their comrades had died.

With one more dive day at the site remaining, one of the passengers became ill with appendicitis. His appendix was removed on board ship, but he required post-operative care in a hospital. So the expedition was terminated a day and a half early--but it was nonetheless a major historical, technological, and emotional success. And it should be emphasized that, unlike some other seafloor expeditions, this was in no way a treasure hunt. DOE had promised that, except for the visual images, nothing--not even biological samples--would be taken away from the site, and that the wreck would not be disturbed in any way.

A Final Salute

The mighty ship's final resting place was and is a war grave, and all activities conducted at the site were carried out in a respectful and careful manner. It was with this understanding that DOE had received approval for the expedition from the German government.

Bismarck's builder, Blohm + Voss, provided DOE with a commemorative stainless steel plaque embossed with the Bismarck family seal. Engraved on the plaque are the words, "The living salute the dead" and the name of the Battleship Bismarck Comrades Organization. Dr. Sagalevitch piloted Mir 1 to place the memorial near the ship's quarterdeck, where it was photographed for the historical record.

There was a short farewell ceremony before the Keldysh left the site. It was a bit shorter than the arrival ceremony but with the same speakers and generally the same order of service. As Keldysh set course for Cobh, the two German survivors, now in their mid-80s, stood quietly at the stern saying their private goodbyes. Perhaps they were contemplating when they will join their shipmates of such a long time ago.