On February 14, 1939,
the massive hull of au unfinished German warship
slid into the water at Hamburg.
For the Nazi party,
it was a day to celebrate the country's resurgent military power...
a moment to be savored by the Fuhrer himself.
Two years later, the ship was finally ready for action.
When she left port in the spring of 1941,
She was widely regarded as the most elegant
and the most dangerous battleship ever built.
She would never return.
Her name was the Bismarck,
and she was about to become a legend.
Summer, 1988.
A converted trawler named Starella leaves Spain,
bound for the North Atlantic...
where the Bismarck sank nearly half a century ago.
The story of what happened to the battleship during her brief moment
on the world's stage has captured the imagination of almost
everyone who's heard it including Bob Ballard,
the man who found the Titanic.
Now he's looking for the Bismarck.
Come around... one, five, three.
One, five, three.
I knew the story of the Bismarck, as a child.
It was an elegant ship, a warship.
It was very much like the Titanic, in the sense it was on a maiden voyage.
It had such a short life and a very exciting and violent life.
I mean, it was alive for less than two weeks at sea.
It's an exciting story.
To find it gives you the opportunity to retell it to
a new generation of people.
Even before the search begins, Ballard is feeling the pressure.
Well, if I don't find it, I'll be disappointed, obviously.
So will a lot of other people.
But, it was sort of interesting on this one.
When I did the Titanic, on one believed I would find it.
Now, on one believes I won't find the Bismarck.
And I don't... I think I preferred when they didn't think I would find it.
If the Bismarck is as elusive today as she was half a century ago,
Ballard has his work cut out for him.
Nineteen forty one. Monday, May 19th.
The Bismarck leaves German waters on her first mission
What her commanders hope will be a three-month reign of terror
on British shipping in the North Atlantic.
She is a monumental weapon
a sixth of a-mile long, displacing 53,000 tons.
Her 15-inch guns are aimed with the help of stereoscopic range finders
and can hurl a one-ton shell 20 miles with ease.
Her crew of over 2,000 men has been hand-picked
for duty on a ship rumored to be unsinkable.
Many are 18 or 19 years old, about to see combat for the first time.
The Bismarck is like a huge cat waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey.
But first she must prowl into enemy territory without being seen.
Two days out of port the Starella approaches the Bismarck's
last known position, 600 miles west of France.
Because no one knows exactly where she sank,
the search could cover nearly a hundred square miles.
As far as the location of where the Bismarck was lost,
we have four separate positions.
One was by the Dorsetshire,
which was the ship that dogged the Bismarck
and then actually dealt the final blow when it torpedoed it from both sides.
It gives its position over here in the eastern search area.
Then there's the position of one of the destroyers
which was over in the western area.
A published report also puts it in the same area.
Then we have a secret document that puts it even yet in a fourth area.
Ballard is a pioneer in the use of sophisticated technology
to explore the deep sea.
Over. This is bridge... three, four, zero, now.
All right. Let's put it in. Take over the control.
Okay, bridge... one, eight, five, three
These transponders will sink to the seabed and begin to emit
powerful acoustic signals,
allowing Ballard to pinpoint his position on the surface.
Sonar provides his first glimpse of the terrain lying
three miles beneath the ship.
I should pick up bottom right here.
Got a helluva long ways to go.
Looks pretty gruesome... real gruesome.
I don't know. The worst is looking like it's with us.
It's horrible topography. Huge mountains. Solid rock.
Hand to hand combat.
Where we dropped the first transponder it was nice and flat,
but the second transponder went in near a mountain and trying to get
go the third we're in solid mountains,
which is just, you know, horrible.
Ballard is worried that the rugged topography
below will make it dangerous to maneuver Argo,
an underwater sled carrying video cameras,
lights, and sonar equipment.
Argo is designed to photograph the bottom while skimming
just above the pitch dark seabed... at the end of miles of cable.
Our biggest fear is losing the vehicle
because that's the biggest fear you've got.
Hanging up on a cliff and cutting your cable and then losing it.
I've come close before. I don't want to do that again.
Ballard decides to avoid the mountains and focus his search
on the flat mud plains to the west.
For the men who operate Argo like Ballard's son,
Todd the long watch is just beginning.
Nineteen forty one. Tuesday, May 20th.
The Bismarck steams north and west through Danish waters.
With her is a heavy cruiser, the Prinz Eugen.
For the men aboard the Bismarck, the times couldn't be better.
The war is Europe is nearly two years old,
and Germany still hasn't suffered a significant military defeat.
Hitler's troops occupy most of Europe.
The German Luftwaffe is carrying out bombing raids against Britain,
which stands alone against the Nazi advance.
Only England and her legendary sea power stand between Germany and victory.
But even the Royal Navy has never done battle
with a ship quite like the Bismarck.
And the idea was that the Bismarck would break out into the Atlantic
with the cruiser Prince Eugen.
And she would spend a three-months cruise going up and down
the Atlantic sinking all the ships bringing from America the food,
the petrol, the ammunition, that was keeping us going,
keeping the war going.
Although the United States won't enter the war for another six months,
supply convoys from America are already being
hit hard by the German navy.
If the Bismarck had cut out onto the Atlantic sea routes,
she could have done an enormous amount of damage.
I think that if she had done that,
she could've altered the course of the war.
So it was very, very critical. She had to be sunk.
But first, she has to be found.
As far as British intelligence knows, the Bismarck is still safely
in German waters, finishing her sea trials.
In fact, she is already making her escape
from the confined waters of the Baltic.
The German plan is simple, bold... and risky.
First they hope to slip through the narrow waters off Sweden and Norway
and break through to the North sea.
If the Bismarck hasn't been detected, it should be no problem
to sail into the Atlantic-perhaps through the Denmark Strait.
But the Bismarck is detected.
On a sunny Wednesday afternoon,
a British Spitfire snaps this photograph,
showing the Bismarck nestled in a Norwegian Fjord.
The report that Bismarck is trying to break out is confirmed.
Now all the Royal Navy has to do is catch her.
Summer, 1988. Aboard the Starella,
only two days have passed since the hunt for Bismarck began,
and already Ballard believes he's picked up the scent.
Argo is sending back images of a debris trail left by a sinking ship.
That trail should lead Ballard to the wreck.
Coming in.
Come up, Todd...
20 meters.
Something was buried here. There's something right there.
Going down, down...
Keep going...
Down...
On the down swing, on the down. Now. Bang!
The sinking should have been up in here.
I mean that's the best guess.
And that's where we're headed.
So we're gonna head up there,
but stay visual and try to stay in debris... sort of smell our way up.
For the next three days,
Ballard follows the meandering trail of wood and metal.
On the fourth day, Argo finds something larger.
Got a good object coming.
Look at the brightness of that sucker.
Wow, it's awesome.
Whatever it is, it's a big thing. Hold on this altitude.
Woah, what's this? Look at this!
This is what we've come for. Look at that strike.
There's some hull section right here.
All right, down, down, to about seven meters.
Yeah. Kuhboom.
What Ballard has found
is an impact crater where some large object appears to lie buried.
But what kind of object?
You can see the debris trail.
Very light stuff getting bigger, bigger,
bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, splat.
So I think it went down to the bottom and went right in.
I'm pretty confident that it's the Bismarck.
We have total coverage of the area and I think as we produce our data
and process it our case will get stronger, not weaker.
Believing that he has found the Bismarck,
Ballard has Argo hoisted from the water and the Starella turns for home.
What we gotta do now is to go home and take a closer look at the photographs
and see if we can spot something that says:
"Yes, this is the Bismarck," or "No, it's not".
The photographs give Ballard the definitive answer
he's been looking for
but not the one he wanted.
And then there was a teak rudder.
I mean, a brand new, beautifully preserved teak rudder.
Now, I know that Bismarck was hit in the rudder.
Maybe that's teak rudder.
But obviously it wasn't the Bismarck.
And that image was sort of like a stake in your heart.
I mean I just looked at that and there was no way
I could rationalize around that.
It was clearly, belonged to a sailing ship.
Instead of the Bismarck,
Ballard has stumbled upon the wreck of a 19th century schooner.
Round one to the Bismarck.
Fifty years ago,
the Bismarck was proving to be just as elusive to the Royal Navy.
On Friday, May 23rd, the battleship is spotted by a patrolling
British cruiser as she prepares to pass through the narrow strait
between Greenland and Iceland.
Two hundred and fifty miles away,
the British warships Prince of Wales and Hood are alerted.
They begin steering a course to intercept Bismarck
before she reaches open water.
Leading the attack will be the largest ship in the British fleet.
Now the hold was the epitome of everything that was marvelous
about the Royal Navy before the war.
She was a wonderful ship.
She was built during the First World War & unfortunately,
she had very poor armor,
very lightly covered armor on her decks.
And she shouldn't have been there unarmored as she was.
Now the Hood was a name all of us knew and hated.
Our commanders tried to scare us with the name when we were on maneuvers.
In every exercise, they'd say:
"Our ship is in a battle with the battleship Hood".
Saturday morning, May 24th. The two titans spot each other.
At a distance of about 14 miles, the Hood opens fire.
Bismarck responds with a series of salvos.
One of Bismarck's shells penetrates the Hood's thinly armored decks
and ignites her aft powder magazines.
The resulting firestorm rips the Hood in half.
All I saw was a gigantic sheet of flame which shot around the
front of the compass platform.
And the ship started to list to starboard.
We were all thrown off our feet.
There was no order given to abandon ship.
It wasn't necessary.
And the news spread immediately.
It was passed on to every body in the ship, However deep.
Somewhere posted inside the ship.
It was jubilation, but almost undescribable.
And it was difficult to get the men really back to their stations
because of all that elation...
I managed to get on one of these ropes and I turned and looked
round again and she'd gone.
And there was a fire on the water where she'd been.
And I'd say the water was about five inches thick with oil.
And again, I panicked.
I turned and swam away again as fast as I could.
And when I looked round again the fire had gone out.
And over on the other side were the other two.
There was no one else that came up.
Just the three of us.
In less than ten minutes of battle, the Hood is gone.
Only three men from a crew of 1,400 survive.
When this news was received in England
it was received with the greatest shock.
It was as much of a shock to us in England as Pearl Harbor was to America.
We couldn't believe that a ship which epitomized the Royal Navy
in all our successes in the past could end,
within a few minutes, could end her life.
And people said, well, what next?
I mean if the Bismarck can sink the Hood in six minutes,
what else can she do?
Summer, 1989. A year after coming up empty-handed,
Ballard prepares to renew his search aboard the Star Hercules.
Well, we learned a lot last year, mostly where the Bismarck wasn't.
We've got a better ship, a better winch system
and we can finally take on the mountains.
It was just too dangerous last year.
I'm not too excited about going into the mountains even now,
But I've run out of choices.
This is the one of the reported positions here,
Another one here, and then here.
So the new search area for this year
is roughly six miles east-west by five miles.
Now the transponders, Kathy, are where right now?
We've got A here...
A there.
B out here...
Yeah.
And C up here.
So running throughout this area is a tremendous wall
that we have to worry about.
In fact, this shows the wall and it's fairly dramatic.
It rises a thousand feet from here all the way up to the top.
So we have to worry about coming in and crashing into that wall.
The winch we have is very powerful and it's capable of breaking the cable.
If you get it up and you get it trapped think of it as a
20-pund trout on a 5-pound test line.
Do not try to reel it in because the trout will just break
that five-pound test line
and the winch will just break the cable.
So pay it out give it line.
It takes Argo over two hours to reach the ocean floor, three miles down.
Its only connection to the surface ship is a length of cable,
less than an inch thick.
Once in position, Argo can search the bottom for days
But first it must drop through realms of unimaginable darkness
under the full weight of the sea.
Although the sled performs flawlessly, the first week ends without
Ballard finding any trace of the Bismarck.
Well, the good news is the area we were o terrified of last year
to the east isn't so bad.
The bad news is we haven't found it.
We've covered over 40 miles now along the bottom
in an area of 30 square miles
and we haven't picked up any other than mud and rocks.
I mean it's an interesting geologic feature,
but that's not why I'm here.
You guys are really milking this one, huh?
Why don't you guys find this thing?
Nothing yet.
Todd? See anything?
Naw. Nothing...
You almost want to throw a trash over just to have something to look at.
Anything that's more fruitful than this.
This is boring.
A little mud watching.
I don't think the world realizes that most of the planet is mud.
And I think I've looked at more mud than anyone else.
Yeah, I think that's the worst part of any search is just the boredom.
And hours and hours and hours of mud.
And that's what I'm worried about is fatigue setting in and people
just going right by it and not seeing it.
The watch is maintained day and night by shifts that change every four hours.
So far, there's been nothing of interest to report.
Ready for some mud crawling? Good. Well, we saw nothing?
Right. You want to be 200 meters south...
...South of that position.
Program 12?
Program 12.
I'll relieve you.
I'm relieved. Thank you. Have fun.
The area we're searching is quickly exceeding the size of the
area we searched for the Titanic.
So they were really evidently very busy shooting at one another
and not very busy at being navigators.
Because the positions that have been issued so far,
there's nothing there.
Saturday, May 24th, 1941.
One hour after sinking the Hood, the Bismarck's commanders decide to
return the ship to occupied France to repair damage suffered in the battle.
But Bismarck is being shadowed by three British warships,
while another battle group moves into position for an ambush.
Aboard the Bismarck the officers decide the time
is ripe to lose their pursuers.
And then came this dramatic event in the middle of the night
when the captain of the Bismarck put the wheel hard to starboard
and did a tremendous loop right out to the west and right back,
crossed his own track,
crossed the track of the Prince of Whales and the cruisers
that were following him and disappeared.
Bismarck's maneuver takes the British completely by surprise.
While they search a hundred miles to the north,
the Bismarck sails closer and closer to safety.
Thirty one hours pass as the distance between Bismarck
and the ships frantically looking for her widens.
Then, on Monday morning,
there is a sudden change in the fortunes of war.
A Catalina flying boat,
cruising just below the low-hanging clouds,
spots a dull black shape on the choppy seas.
It is the Bismarck.
She is less than a day's sail from the protection of
Luftwaffe bombers stationed in France.
Most of the British ships are well to the northwest,
while others lie south all too far away to catch up.
Only one ship has a chance to slow the Bismarck down before
she reaches port the aircraft carrier Ark Royal.
But the Ark Royal is less than an ideal weapon
to pit against the Bismarck.
Her aging Swordfish torpedo planes have wings made of fabric,
an attack speed of less than a hundred miles an hour,
and carry only one torpedo apiece.
Yet they are the only weapon the British have left.
If the Swordfish can't slow the Bismarck down,
she'll be in friendly waters by morning.
With night closing in,
the tiny Swordfish race across the darkening skies.
At 8:53 PM they spot the Bismarck, and attack.
They came in the evening, in the twilight.
The sea was rough when we opened fire.
We shot and shot, but what good did it do?
We fired so much our gun barrels had to be cooled down.
One of the Swordfish torpedoes hits Bismarck amidships,
causing minor damage.
But another strikes the battleship in the only place she is
vulnerable her rudders.
Bismarck's steering gear jams.
Now she can only move in one direction northwest directly toward the
onrushing British fleet.
We couldn't understand it when we got a signal from
the Ark Royal and the chef who was saying:
"Course of Bismarck is due north",
when up to that point it had been due south, or at least southeast.
And we thought: "They made a mistake".
It's very easy when you see a ship in the distance,
in the haze awfully uncertain whether it's going from
left to right or right to left.
And we thought: "Oh, they made a mistake.
Silly ol' thing. They should know better than that".
And when it was repeated two or three times,
we suddenly realize that the Bismarck had been delivered into our hands.
Summer, 1989.
The Star Hercules has been criss-crossing the seabed
for over 200 hours without finding a trace of wreckage.
On the ninth day of the hunt, that begins to change.
This whole area is like someone really disrupted it
We're just getting little snippets.
There's some little stuff.
Forward, Oops, look at that. Look at that right there. Forward.
That's obviously man-made.
No doubt about that.
Light stuff. What did that one off to the right look like, on the?
It wasn't...
Yeah, but it could be an impact crater
Could be.
We came in on the debris about 17 hours ago
and we found a big section of wreckage
And we got burnt last year and we don't want to repeat that.
We want a definitive,
you know, Bismarck, okay?
We're not getting that and it's frustrating.
It takes hours and hours and hours.
And I haven't slept for 17 hours and I'm getting tired.
The trail of clues on the ocean floor is tantalizingly human...
A boot... a lantern... torn from a sinking ship.
But was it the Bismarck?
G' morning.
Just junk... ready? Fire.
Each hour brings new discoveries,
and a renewed sense that they're closing in on the quarry.
There's a circles.
Go down.
Yet nothing they have found can positively be linked to the Bismarck
until just before midnight,
when Argo passes over what appears to be part of a turret
that once housed Bismarck's 15 inch guns.
There, back up. No, no... reverse it.
Back, back, back. Right there!
All right. Now!
That's it. You got it... No, they did not have those
on 18th century sailing ships... it's decisive.
Ballard knows he's getting closer. But he's not there yet.
We haven't found the ship.
I don't think it was buried.
I don't think it slid down that hill.
I don't think it's there.
I think it's somewhere else, but nearby.
Here's more debris coming up.
And it's that debris the debris trail is going to lead us to the ship.
We just have to pick up the scent again.
Tuesday, May 27th, between midnight and dawn.
Over a dozen British warships close on the crippled Bismarck,
waiting for first light to deliver the final blow.
They know their quarry is wounded, but no one can guess how badly.
At about midnight, or shortly after, the conclusion had to be drawn:
It was impossible to do useful repair.
And was just giving up at next morning after we waited.
We ate our meals at our guns.
There was no more warm food just bread with something on it,
And once we had boiled potatoes.
And we stayed at our guns the whole time.
And this was perhaps the most difficult,
the most dreadful part of the entire operation, as far as I remember:
The certainty you could not escape anymore.
You couldn't do anything.
And you could probably not do anything equal up to the battle
that would be shaping up next morning.
It was like sentence of death.
Tuesday, May 27th.
Two hors after sunrise, the Rodney and King George
finally spot the Bismarck emerging from a rain squall.
Battle stations are called.
At 8:47 am the British warships open fire.
The only thing that struck me when the battle started
was all the color contrasts.
The Bismarck was black.
The British ships were grey.
The seas were green with the wind creaming the tops, creamy tops.
There was the brown of the cordite when the guns fired on both sides;
there was the brown puffs of cordite smoke.
Then there was the flash, the orange flash of the guns.
And then these enormous shells splashes-high as houses,
white as shrouds.
And it was majestic. It was a majestic scene.
It was an awesome scene.
And I can see it today as clearly as I saw it then.
For one full hour the relentless British salvos continue.
She'd had a lot of damage on the forecastle forward the right side.
And every time she plunged in the sea the plates on her port bow,
extending over a large area, were red hot as she came out.
And then when she went into the sea there was a cloud of steam.
What I saw made me sick.
There were mountains of dead people in pieces.
There was one crazy man still at his gun still firing.
Ammunition was exploding.
The entire upper deck was on fire.
It looked like a heap of rubble. The beauty of the ship was gone.
Then eventually we saw men trickling down,
running down the quarter deck and then jumping into the sea
because it was all over.
It was finished. It was a dreadful light, you know.
No sailor likes to see another ship sunk even if it's an enemy.
This piece of film,
showing the Bismarck burning on the far horizon,
is the last view of the battleship before she began to sink.
I thought about what to do. I was no longer needed.
What good is antiaircraft in a sea battle?
And we were almost out of ammunition.
So I left with some others and we drifted away from
the Bismarck on a life boat.
The admiral decided the only way to sink her was to torpedo.
So we went in close and fired our torpedoes.
And then we watched her sink.
Thursday, June 8th, 1989.
A rainy, overcast morning very much like Bismarck's last hours at sea.
And once we've established that, we're gonna turn around,
come back west of that line...
Looks like we have a big target coming up on the port side,
about 45 meters out.
Closing on the target it's about 30 meters ahead.
All right!
Still closing.
Staying strong... lot of debris port starboard.
This is a strong one guys.
This could be it.
This is incredible.
Gun decks right across the bridge.
Look at that baby!
Our ship was at the very spot that the Bismarck must have been.
With all of the rounds coming, the total chaos, confusion,
splashes, the impacting, rounds, explosions going off,
A fire burning just the tremendous carnage that took place.
And then to realize that the ship sank
and then there were all these people in the water around you.
You can almost see them swimming in this churning sea
full of oil and relate to that.
How awful that would be.
We swam for a little while,
just to keep moving so we wouldn't freeze.
The water was about 10 degrees Celsius.
And it was so difficult to swim in the oil that had assembled on the
surface of the ocean from the sanked ship.
It penetrated our faces and ears. It was terrible.
It made everything most difficult.
We were ordered to go and rescue them in the ship I was in.
So we came up slowly to them and tried to pull them up
the ship's side on ropes.
I remember a story that spread right away on the Dorsetshire.
A British seaman saw a German sailor who had no arms trying to swim.
So he climbed down into the sea
and fastened a rope around the man's body.
I reached one of the ropes to help them pull this survivor up
and then we noticed that he had both his arms shot off
and was holding the rope with his teeth.
And he fell off just as we got him to the upper deck.
And I went over the side to tie a bowline around him.
So I did that. Then I lost him.
For those of us on the Dorsetshire, the name Joe Brooks means something.
Our government should give that man a medal for humaneness.
In the days following the discovery of the Bismarck,
Argo maneuvers slowly around the half-buried hull,
trying to determine the extent of the damage.
Well, I think any time you retell a story,
particularly World War II people aren't from it.
I mean, the futileness of it, the stupidity of it.
The wastefulness of it. I think we need to be reminded of that.
And I think one needs to be reminded of all that happened
during World War II.
I think it's very critical that people reflect back
so we don't repeat these things.
All right.
All right, Martin, sequence through.
Okay... stop. What's that?
It's a swastika. Look at it.
Is it a swastika? A cross.
No, that's not a cross... It's a swastika.
Part of it is covered up by the sediment and the
other part is chopped off.
All right, down look.
Now the ship that Hitler called
"this majestic giant of the sea" can only be glimpsed in fragments.
A ghostly section of the bow with decks of polished teak.
Bismarck's 15-inch guns,
once held in place by their own weight fell free when she rolled underwater.
Only empty holes remain.
Across one of the four turret holes, a crane lies toppled.
Much of the forward superstructure was destroyed.
But the open bridge and conning tower still remain.
A moment's glory... then 50 years of darkness.
We've got it all. I mean, the whole ship is here.
We're missing, it looks like, all the big turrets.
But almost all the other armament is present on the ship.
We're only missing the big guns...
Although the four main turrets are gone,
Bismarck's smaller guns remain in place,
as if still menacing the sea.
That's gone. I'm sure the stack's gone
this gun is lost...
little anti-aircraft guns... zoom down.
There's an anti-aircraft gun. See him?
That guy's pointed...
The fact that the ship is in one piece seems to confirm
German reports that it was scuttled,
though the issue is still being debated.
I'm sure that it was a combination of scuttling and all the damage it took.
I just find it difficult to understand why they're so concerned about it
and I guess it boils down to pride:
Germans wanting to be proud that the British couldn't sink it,
and the British wanting to be proud that they could.
I'm just shocked that there's hardly that much apparent damage other
than the loss of those four turrets, the loss of some of the superstructure.
I thought it was going to be an awful sight and it's strangely...
sitting upright and proud.
The Bismarck survivors have been in the water over an hour
when the British crusier Dorsetshire arrives to pull them from the sea.
The rescue effort has hardly begun when the Dorsetshire's captain
gets a report that a German U-boat has been spotted.
In an action that remains controversial to this day,
he orders a retreat.
The question runs through my head all the time:
Why did Captain Martin stop the rescuer while so many hundreds
of men were still in the water?
I can only interpret it as an act of revenge for what happened to the Hood,
which sank with all her crew except for the three men who were rescued.
Hardly had I been taken underneath on board the Dorsetshire that I felt,
by the vibrations of the ship, that she had gone with utmost speed.
And I had been one of the last to be rescued without ever having a notion
of it so far. It was a terrible thing.
The water around Dorsetshire's stern foamed and bubbled with the
sudden exertion of the screws.
Slowly, then faster, the ship moved ahead.
Bismarck survivors who were almost on board
were bundled over the guard rails onto the deck.
Those halfway up the ropes found themselves trailing the stern,
hung on as long as they could against the forward movement of the ship,
dropped off one by one.
Others in the water clawed frantically at the paintwork
as the sides slipped by.
In Dorsetshire they heard the thin cries of hundreds of Germans
who had come within an inch of rescue,
had believed that their long ordeal was at last over;
cries that the British sailors no less than survivors already
on board would always remember.
From the water Bismarck's men watched appalled
as the cruiser's grey side swept past them,
believed then the tales they'd heard about the British not caring much
about survivors were true after all,
presently found themselves alone in the sunshine on the empty tossing sea.
And during the day as they floated about the Atlantic
with only lifebelts between them and eternity,
the cold came to their testicles and hands and feet and heads.
And one by one they lost consciousness
And one by one they died.
One of the German sailors rescued by the Dorsetshire died the following day,
and is buried at sea.
The chaplain was there with some British crew members
and we stood across from them face to face,
just staring at each other not sure what was happening.
Then we heard a military signal, and then I realized
it was a funeral for my friend.
One of us borrowed h harmonica and played: "I once had a Camarade".
The British had tears in their eyes, just like us.
He had stood next to me,
he had marched by my side.
It is sometimes difficult
to be reminded all the time.
It's hard to explain.
On one hand you're glad you survived,
but then you are pulled back into the past again.
It's inevitable that all great ships in the sea will be found some day.
I think the key thing is how do we treat it.
I mean, what's our reaction to it? Do we treat it respectfully?
Do we not touch it, not disturb it? Do it with respect?
To me the Bismarck's the war grave.
The chase and sinking of the Bismarck was without doubt one of the
great sea epics of all time.
And it was because of the changing fortunes of either side.
It was this great, vast, huge monster come out of its lair.
And then in a flash it sinks the big British monster, disappears.
We look for it, we can't find it.
A little tiny airplane suddenly finds it, reports where it is.
Another little, tiny airplane sends a torpedo which cripples it.
And then the big British ships can come up and sink it.
It's an extraordinary story. And it's full of heroism.
And it's full of pride on both sides.
I mean, these were wonderful ships and the impersonality of it all.
You see, we all fired at each other without seeing the enemy.
We never saw the enemy at all.
The only time I ever saw the enemy was when this little trickle of men
ran down in the Bismarck's quarter deck and jumped into the sea.
Apart from that I could've been firing or we could've been
we weren't firing ourselves,
but the British could've been firing at castles.
A sea battle is a very impersonal thing.
It won't happen again.
No like that.