'Bismarck' escapes into the Atlantic??

The site gives the same figure I had of 7900 in the comparison table agaist other battleships. Bismarck Technical Data and Battleship Comparison - KBismarck.com
Another interesting comparison table on the net (with different data but still giving Tirpitz more bunkerage) is at
Technical Layout - General Details

Both my figures come from the same book so I doubt one was metric and the other not. Still my book was published in 1966 so there well may be more recent info.

I expect that if I look up at a couple of other sources I have I would turn up even more different figures .

 

Ok there was some very good points.

Try swaping the 2 boats around,would the graf spee have sunk the hood?that might have been a one off lucky hit.

How would the bismark have done at the battle of the river plate?no luck needed ,it would have won.
At the very least it would have come out fighting.

Good site
http://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/zplan/index.html

 

Hmmm. I sincerely doubt the Graf Spee would have managed to do very much against two grown-up capital ships. 6x28 cm on a heavy cruiser that most likely would be slower versus 10x36cm and 8x38 cm on two big ships. Very tall odds indeed, but you never know.

If there had been a proper BB running about in the South Atlantic, it's entirely possible that there wouldn't just have been cruisers in the fray. If not then three cruisers versus a BB would have been a turkey shoot - one would hope the cruisers would be smart enough to shadow out of range and shout for help.

 

The KBismarck.com site gives the fuel capacity I quoted; 8,294, and 8,297 respectively with the Tirpitz having 3 metric tons more than the Bismarck.

Where did you see 7900 on that site? Perhaps that is the amount they left with? That would almost tally up with the 200 tons short mentioned in another spot. Admittedly not precisely, but close enough for it to have a chance of being the truth. It left Norway with 7900 tons, short of full capacity? And that reduces its range by what, about 2.5 or 3%? Not a great deal, but perhaps enough to limit its ability to "range around" as a commerce raider for very long.

 

They're NOT "boats", they're "ships", or more properly "war ships"!

The Graf Spee was essentially a large cruiser with 11" guns; it would not be expected to prevail against two capital ships like the Hood and Prince of Wales. With extreme good fortune on it's side, the Graf Spee could have conceivably scored a hit on the Hood with similar results to that of the Bismarck's hits. One must remember that Bismarck's historical results were arguably "lucky" in that capital ships sometimes pounded away at each other for hours without achieving a magazine explosion on either side.

Had the Bismarck been at the Battle of the Plate, it's unlikely that the cruisers would have engaged her, they would simply have shadowed her and attempted to call up reinforcements much like the British cruisers at the Denmark Straits. But if the Bismarck had been cornered like the Graf Spee was at River Plate, the outcome probably would have been similar. The Germans were outhought at River Plate, not outfought; they were deceived into believing that a massively superior force awaited them at sea. Bismarck's gun power was of no use under those circumstances.

 

The value in the first table is 8,294 but If you look further down the page on the Characteristics of the Bismarck and other British capital ships in May 1941. table the line for "fuel capacity" gives 7900 for Bismark, and [SIZE=-1]8,297 mt metric tonns for Tirpitz in 1944.[/SIZE]

The Bismark has one advantage over Graf Spee as the Royal Navy can only scrape together two or three battlegroups with enough speed and firepower to face her, and if the bunkerage for Hood and KGV on that site is true possibly none at all if she breaks out into the Atlantic unadamaged. Against Graf Spee the RN had no trouble putting together half a dozen chasing groups though one was composed of Dunquerque and Strasbourg.
Bismark is a big threat to any convoy without a BB escort and a BB keeping station with an 8 knots slow convoy is an U-Boat commander's dream, historically many convoys sailed with an escort of half a dozen corvettes and old destroyers or even less, this could scare off a Hipper or Graf Spee long enough for a support cruiser squadron to arrive but not Bismark when there are only 3task forces to cover the whole Atlantic of which only 1 is likely to be at sea with enough fuel for a high speed chase. The RN will need lots of luck to find Bismark rather than Bismark finding a poorly protected convoy. It's far from sure the RN will catch her, of the Atlantic raiders Graf Spee was caught but Sharnhorst and Geisenau , Scheer and Hipper were not, Prinz Eugen doesn't count as she broke down and had to turn back before achieving anything. IMO their results were not impressive in terms of tonnage sunk but the strain they imposed on the RN to try to catch them more than justifies their existence.

 

I'm not so sure I agree. Bunkerage is largely a non-issue for the RN since they can RAS or pop into any neutral/friendly port for oil if necessary. I believe that after the Jarvis Bay incident most major convoys had a BB or BL in escort until the KM surface threat was gone, in in all that time only two capital ships were lost to U-boats, neither on escort duty.
On the other hand, raiders have to stay hidden, have very limited opportunities to RAS, have to chug slowly to save fuel, have to fear any vessel capable of carrying a decent gun or a torpedo, and when they do encounter a convoy know they will have a task force headed their way immediately.
The only raider that managed to score significantly was the Scheer, and that was with the help of the Nordmark to RAS from and operating against single unescorted vessels it could nobble before they squealed for help. Scheer and Hipper each managed a couple of sorties, the twins did one together before Gneisenau was crippled by the RAF and Scharnhorst killed by the RN on her next sortie. If you look at Operation Berlin (more detail here) you can see the difficulties - rusty old RN BB's getting in the way, stroppy little 1,800 ton steamers taking pot-shots at them. Total results achieved by two battlecruisers supported by four tankers over two months, burning a lot of oil and expensive ammunition - not quite 114,000 tons sunk. In my book that's a pretty poor result given that the U-boats scored 196,783 tons in Feb and 243,020 in Mar.

 

AFAIK Berlin was the only instance were heavy ship protection was attempted for a number of convoys, and the RN could not keep at it indefinetly, Lutjens's attempt to vector an U-Boat on HMS Malaya failed but he could have gotten lucky.

Most convoys only had a single Armed Merchant Cruiser (AMC) for escort even after H.X. 84/Jervis Bay, some had just a single sloop, no match for Scheer far less Bismark. In late 1940 early 1941 the RN lost the AMC Laurentic, Patroclus and Forfar and the cruiser Dundee to U-Boats, had BBs been there instead it's not sure they would have fared better, the old WW1 BBs didn't have great underwater protection.

Only the troop convoys had heavy escort as a rule, the RN had only 15 battleships (new construction basically matched losses) and plenty of other commitments, even assuming no ship on repairs that's not enough.
There were on average four inbound H.X. (Halifax) convoys at sea at any one time plus the S.C. (Sydney) and S.L. (Freetown), HG (Gibraltar) and all the outbound ones.

After Denmark Straits it's doubtful that a single battleship would be considered enough to stop Bismark drastically reducing the number of groups that can be formed.
Even with faster ships keeping contact is hard, Scheer was spotted by HMS Glasgow's aircraft but got away. As no British BB could match an undamaged Bismark's speed it's up to the raider to decide if to engage, all Rodney, Ramilles and Malaya did during Berlin was watch S&G get away (and mistaking Scharhorst for Hipper) .

IMO the Bismark at large would have caused a disruption to the convoy system far worse than either Jervis Bay (that lasted a couple of weeks) or operation Berlin and the RN catching it is no sure thing with what it had in 1941.

1942 with many more long range aircraft and US help would be a different story.

 

It would have been obliterated. PBY Catalina flying boats, as they did in real life, would have found it, called in Force H and such, and the exact same thing would have happened. Maybe it would have run into a convoy, but they would have run away as soon as they detected the Bismarck.