Boots on Seabed Lead to Grave of Elusive Warship

A quest for the sunken remains of Hitler’s biggest warship finally bore fruit. Remote cameras picked up dozens of sailors’ boots in the depths of the eastern Atlantic.

American oceanographer Robert Ballard had scoured the seabed for weeks before making the find.

Minutes later a huge gun turret emerged and he was certain it was the Bismarck, pride of the Nazi navy, which had been sunk by the British Navy on its maiden voyage almost 50 years before, in May, 1941.

The ship’s great bulk lay halfway down the slope of an extinct volcano 15,700 feet below the surface.

The rusting carcass of the 50,000-ton battleship evoked mixed feelings for Ballard and his crew.

Her guns pointed eerily upward and huge swastikas still emblazoned her decks. Ballard describes in a new book, “The Discovery of the Bismarck,” how the sight moved him.

“We were both amazed at the devastation and impressed by how much of the ship remained,” he wrote.

The Bismarck, which went down with more than 2,300 men, of whom 110 survived, had inflicted great damage on its one and only mission and achieved legendary status.

As long as the Bismarck was at large it threatened to break the Allies’ lifeline--the convoys of ships that carried food, fuel and weapons from the United States.

Ballard shows with photographs and witness accounts how the Bismarck frustrated the British Navy for more than a week as it zigzagged closer and closer to the Allied supply lines.

In the end tiny Swordfish planes flew low over the waves and dropped single torpedoes, known as “kippers,” one of which jammed the Bismarck’s huge twin rudders.

Heavy shelling from the British warship Dorsetshire did the rest. The Bismarck sank at 10:39 a.m. on May 27.

Ballard said the Bismarck was doomed by the time the Germans scuttled it but not before it had shown its fierce firepower.

It destroyed the Hood, cream of the British fleet. Only three men survived out of about 1,400.

Ted Briggs, one of those three, disapproved of Ballard’s mission.

“She put up a bloody good fight, took on half the (British) Navy and went down with honors. She should have been left alone and revered as a war grave,” he told him.

Ballard, who also found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, said he will continue to explore and technology will make the results more and more accessible.

“The deep ocean is a vast unexplored repository of the past,” he said. “It is like a museum that was built but has never opened to the public.”