Text 12354, 64 rader
Skriven 2005-09-20 08:41:14 av Ward Dossche
     Kommentar till en text av Dan Ceppa
Ärende: Re: Katrina
===================
> WD> Ted Briggs at age 82 is the only living survivor in the meantime.
 
> Is he still alive?  The show I saw of him is at least 5 yrs old...
 
He is but at 82 the man is a different person than he was at the time of the
sinking. He is the president of the HMS Hood association whose membership is
composed of former crewmen and relatives of those that perished.
 
There is an excellent website you can visit at "www.hmshood.com". Ted Briggs'
biography can be found at "www.hmshood.com/crew/bios/TedBio.html".
 
> WD> It was a horrible sight. Müllenheim-Rechberg describes Hood just
> WD> cracked in 2 pieces with bow and stern pointing upwards. The
 
> Are you sure of that?  I thought it was 3 pieces, with both the
> bow an stern sections blown off at the powder magazines from
> the center superstructure.
 
Look at the same site, the story is excellently told I think with superb
photography, both old and new, also of the wreck.
 
When discovered the wreck was in 3 portions so it is safe to assume another
explosion must have occured to separate the bow. However, when it went
underwater Müllenheim-Rechberg describes the whole front part as pointing
upward, including A and B turrets, and then sliding backwards in the water in a
timeframe of about 3 minutes.
 
Due to the severity of the battle there were very few look-outs other than
gunnery-officers to report. Even at the HMS Prince of Wales where their
attention was focused on the Bismarck, not on HMS Hood.
 
The three survivors had nothing to add to that story as they were not
"observing" but fighting for their lives. All witnesses aboard HMS Prince of
Wales were killed in the battle when a shell from Bismarck slammed into the
bridge and killed everyone except the captain. It also knocked-out the central
fire-control system and HMS Prince of Wales was left with a single gun-barrel
in one tower without directional control. Subsequently it fled the site and
Bismarck nor Prinz Eugen, which both had superior speed, attempted to pursue
and finish her off. Detail: Prince of Wales came straight from the shipyard,
was brand new, had a lot of civilian staff from the yard aboard and never had
been in a serious gunnery-practice. Another detail is that the Hood
misidentified the adversaries and fired on Prinz Eugen, the accompanying
cruiser, not on Bismarck. Another detail, the explosion of Hood was so powerful
that it rattled windows in Reykjavik (Iceland) a couple of hundred kilometers
away.
 
The battle was also observed by a British Sunderland aircraft based in Iceland
but it had been chased away by anti-aircraft fire so they never observed the
actual break-up.
 
Based on the observations from mostly Bismarck-survivors and crewmen of the
Prinz Eugen, the only German capital ship to survive the war (later it was
towed to Bikini Atol where it sank in the Bravo nuclear test), only one
gigantic explosion took place on the surface and Hood went down in 2 pieces.
 
Most likely an explosion occured more forward at some point which weakened the
structure sufficiently for the bow to detach sub-surface. Such explosion is not
reported anywhere but from wreckage-photography and -layout it is obvious it
occured. So from that angle you most certainly are correct.
 
 \%/@rd

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