Bismarck: From Glory to the Abyss

In May 1941, the most powerful warship ever built by the German Navy broke out into the North Atlantic on a mission to strangle Britain's lifeline. Eight days later, she lay on the bottom of the ocean, three miles beneath the waves. In those eight extraordinary days, the battleship Bismarck sank HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, in a single devastating salvo, survived a fourteen-inch shell strike that would have crippled a lesser vessel, eluded the combined forces of the world's most powerful navy for thirty-one hours, and endured the most concentrated bombardment in naval history before her own crew sent her to the bottom rather than surrender. Of her 2,106 men, only 115 survived.Bismarck: From Glory to the Abyss tells the complete story, from the secret laying of her keel in a Hamburg shipyard in 1936 to the discovery of her wreck by Robert Ballard in 1989. Drawing on primary sources, survivor accounts, and the latest deep-sea exploration, Tyler Carr brings to life the men who built her, the officers who commanded her, the sailors who fought and died aboard her, and the scientists who found her resting place on the slope of an extinct underwater volcano.This is the story of a ship that packed more history into one week than most vessels see in a lifetime, and whose legend has only grown in the decades since she disappeared beneath the North Atlantic. Read more