Had she managed another twelve hours undetected she would have been well within air cover range and pretty much home free and we would not have been so lucky.
Damaging the fuel transfer systems and flooding the bow was pure luck for us as it slowed her down enough to track. The torpedo jamming the rudder was shear chance and the icing on the cake. Had neither thing happened, then Prinz Eugen wouldn't have gone straight back the the fjords to wait for us to sink it... The rest is, as they say, history.
She was within the range of the Luftwaffe, especially their Condor maritime bombers, but Hitler had decided she was a lost cause. Nothing was down to just "luck", as a lot of British effort had eventually brought the
Bismark to her fate, as happens in war. The plucky pilots of the Swordfish torpedo aircraft brought about the hit on her through tremendous bravery, and the "lucky" fact if you like that they were in very slow moving aircraft that the German gunners found difficult to train their modern anti-aircraft guns on.
In fact so much of the eventual victory over Nazi Germany could be simply put down to "luck" and the stupidity of Hitler, but the taking advantage of all those "lucky" moments is what war is often about. It is that the brings Victory, but always at an horric cost, which I am sure the dead of war would not consider as being down to just luck
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Topic: Another piece of history... (Read 2655 times)