National Geographic: The Search For the Battleship Bismark Page #2

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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...

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 indescribable.

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

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

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.

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