National Geographic: The Search For the Battleship Bismark Page #3

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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

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