H/T to reader John who sent a link to a very good article with lots of good information and photos pertaining to the USS Prinz Eugen . LINK
The German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen at Boston Harbor 1946
The ship was laid down in 1936. In May of 1941, with the Bismarck, sank the mighty HMS Hood. The ship saw extensive service during WW2 and near the end of the war Prinz Eugen was used in assisting with the transport of German soldiers from the bad side of 'ol Mother Russia. Surrendered in May of 1945, the heavy cruiser eventually ended up being manned by a crew of 600 Germans and 88 Americans and sailed to Boston. From there the ship was used in early atomic tests near the Bikini Atol. Read more of about ship and its naval history, click HERE and HERE.
Bismark's only sister ship was Tirpitz. Prinz Eugen was a cruiser, not a battleship.
ReplyDeleteCorrect. The Tirpitz was air bombed in port. The Bismark was a different Epic battle. My great Uncle went down with the Bismark.
DeleteNot the sister to Bismarck, that would be Tirpitz. She did bear a striking resemblance to Bismarck.
ReplyDelete.....so hit the decks a runnin lads and spin those guns around, we got sink the Bismarck we gotta put her down!!!......
ReplyDeleteAlso, it just proves my point that Hitler was no tactical genius, a great orator yes, but a genius no way.
ReplyDeleteHe was so afraid of losing his big ships he never really used them. If he would have sortied Eugen, Tirpitz, and Bismarck together we would have a very different world map today.
Moron took the third biggest air force at the start of the war (Luftwaffe) and tried to beat England by air. England, who had the biggest airforce at the war's start combined with remnants of the second biggest (France) stationed on an island the size of a postage stamp!
Brilliant, send the only units of your luftwaffe you can muster because they are spread thin over multiple fronts and attack a tiny island where every fighter in the theater can scramble to meet you in minutes....Brilliant!!!!
People forget that unlike their land and air units Italy had a formidable Navy. If he would have put his ships together with them he would have blown the Royal Navy out of the water.
Instead he hid them up his ass and tried to cut England off by water who supplied by..wait for it...the United States, who had the biggest Merchant fleet the world has ever known and vast resources and industry beyond your range.
Again, Brilliant!!
That’s the reason the brits called off their sniper team from blowing his heart out. He was doing more damage to his military by being a dipshit.
DeleteHis generals probably would have agreed to a negotiated peace deal or surrendered outright to save what was left of the country.
"If he would have sortied Eugen, Tirpitz, and Bismarck together", along with a screen of say 15 subs it would have been hell for the Brits.
DeleteEarly on in Hitler's rise to power, the leaders of the German Navy had been told to be prepared for war to start in 1943. The plan was to have 200+ U-boats, both battleships completed, a number of heavy cruisers/pocket battleships, and even an aircraft carrier based on the Bismark hull. They weren't intended to defeat the British fleet, but to perform commerce raiding in an attempt to be able to starve England out of the war. They'd have all been out at sea when hostilities started, eliminating the problem of breaking out of the Denmark Strait and the North Sea. The start of the war in Sep 1939, 3+ years sooner than the building plan was expecting, was the primary reason for the ineffectiveness of Germany's surface fleet.
DeleteA family friend on my father's side served on the Prinz Eugen during the Battle of the Denmark Strait in which HMS Hood was sunk. Prinz Eugen was detached from the Bismarck after that engagement, so she wasn't sailing with Bismarck when she was sunk several days later. I have a 12 page commemorative publication, printed in Germany in 1943, about the Denmark Strait battle; and a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Tribune dated January 24, 1946 about the Prinz Eugen's arrival in Boston as a war prize. Thanks for the article.
ReplyDeleteLol, she was so complicated to run, the Americans had to have a German crew to get her to our port.
ReplyDeleteYou mean we needed sailors that could read German, not that the Americans couldn't understand how to run the ship...right?
DeleteYou do know prior to the destruction of the United States Merchant Marine at the hands of our traitorous government we were the finest sailors in the world! An American Captain was often paid more than the entire crew of comparable ship!
When I went on the water we were 80 percent of the world's fleet, when I left the water we were less than three. OPA 90, and ISO 9000 were just many of the rules implemented to make it too costly to flag vessels here.
At the same time we would 'tank' ships coming into our ports whose engineering departments looked like a mechanical representation of Dante's last ring of the inferno. Our standards and abilities far outstripped theirs. The only reason regs were changed was not to force them up to our level, but push us down to theirs with arbitrary safety changes that proved to costly for our greedy captains of industry.
Uh, according to the 2nd article referenced above, when the Germans aboard the ship were sent back to Germany, the Americans blew 11 of 12 boilers aboard which obviously disabled the ship. Hybo
Deletewant to solve an actual naval mystery? find PG89 USS Marathon. decommissioned 31january1977, signed for by my dad and the rest of "buckley's raiders" from the reserve group MIUW-201. taken from portsmouth,VA to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy...and there is no record anywhere of it being scrapped and the MMA doesn't have it.
ReplyDeleteso where did it go?
According to www.navsource.org it was last seen on May 21, 1977 when it toured boston harbour as part of Maritime Celebration day. Was officially transferred to the academy on April 1 1977 and fate is listed as unknown
DeleteExile1981
exactly...unknown. the MMA won't talk about it, and some sites say "presumed scrapped" but if it were scrapped, there would be a record.
Deleteso, who has the boat? did admiral Buckley, former CO of MIUW-201 and the commander of the MMA at the time, turn it into his own private yacht or something? it can't just disappear. and if the MMA people sank it somehow, there would be a record of it.
before my dad passed on he wanted me to figure out where it went, because he signed for it. I've come to nothing but dead ends.
Prinz Eugen sank the Hood on her own, although Bismark was present. Prinz Eugen, as stated above, looked enough like the Bismark that some British ships at the battle where Hood was lost opened fire on Prinz Eugen first, before realizing their mistake and shifting fire to Bismark.. But according to a surviving member of Bismark's fire direction crew, Bismark never hit the Hood, and hadn't even straddled Hood prior to Hood's destruction. Prinz Eugen had hit Hood many times, starting fires near AA ammunition stores, and near Hood's torpedo storage.
ReplyDeleteI've actually touched the hull, upside down off the beach-side of Carlson Island. Such a beautiful ship in life, a nice wreck to swim near or dive on.
ReplyDeleteMy first open water dive was on that ship, back in '92, if I recall correctly.
DeleteGrammar Nazi here. It's is a contrction of it is; its is the possessive of it. We've all made the mistake.
ReplyDeletepsssst, you misspelled contraction.
DeleteIrish
Psssst..you failed to capitaize 'Psssst'
DeleteI was trying to be quiet
Deletethe difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit!
DeleteNot a misspell. Fat fingers.
Deletethat ship was my first open water dive after certification. Hard to fathom just how much of a ship it is, even being right next to it.
ReplyDeleteSo, the US decides to use the ship in atomic bomb tests, OK so far. Now the intention here is to destroy the ship, got that. Should wr empty the heavy oil fuel bunkers, naw, it won't be a problem, until it is one. Now we have to go cut holes in a radioactive ships hull to suck out the contaminated oil. Brilliant military minds at work!
ReplyDeleteThe radiation is at a minimum level, safe. The oil issue is what we're facing worldwide, like in Pearl Harbor.
DeleteThough I think the environmental freakout is a tad overblown. Mother Nature has a way of handling small oil spills. And I've noticed nobody is freaking out over the 20+ IJN wrecks in the whole atoll, including one full of oil and explosives that's within an easy swim from the 'family beach' at Kwajalein Island.
But why not just drain the tanks BEFORE you use them for target practice
DeleteIt is way overblown to worry about anything from ship this causing any more than local problems , which mother nature will address. Apparently OP you aren't even thinking about the many hundreds of ships sunk during the war in all the world s oceans.
DeleteThink of the Deepwater Horizon (BP oil spill) debacle in the Gulf just off the Alabama coast. I had one of the inspectors from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Agency that it would be "years" before the area of the disaster would return to the pre-spill days. The oyster beds were back open within a year. The Earth has a way of dealing with such things in its on way and on time.
ReplyDelete"What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Jeffrey,
DeleteMuch respect for your contributions hereabouts, and yet, I am leary of selectively using a tiny sample of time/space to extrapolate the health of billions of years and thousands of cubic miles of our planet...
... especially if the press-release is from a government agent.
.
Particularly if the press-release is from a government agent.
.
Psalm 137:9
Happiness is bashing their baby heads against a rock.
isn't the gulf of mexico used to natural oil seeps? deepwater horizon was just a bit more of what the environment was already used to dealing with. not more than it could actually handle.
DeleteBTW, deepwater horizon was methane hydrate plugs...as was nordstream.
https://petrowiki.spe.org/Hydrate_plug_removal
oh and the cap they put on it has a Three Percenter sticker...
https://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2010/08/no-really-we-are-everywhere-even-at.html
Noted and thanks for the kind words. I was only trying to imply that the Earth is a very good healer and merely blinks at the tiny "impacts" inflicted by mankind in the grand scheme of things.
ReplyDelete