70 YEARS ON - KMS Bismarck tried to surrender, claims son of tormented Royal Navy sailor - Polidicks

[quote]With her steering jammed and her speed slashed by torpedo attacks, the Bismarck and her crew of 2,200 were a sitting duck for the Royal Navy. And in two hours the German battleship was a helpless wreck of twisted metal, raging fires and dead and dying crew. But the ship’s agony was not over. After the bombardment by British battleships, she was finished off by torpedoes, slipping under the Atlantic with all but 200 of those aboard. [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/26/article-1391220-0C469E0800000578-778_226x327.jpg[/img][img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/26/article-1391220-0C469E1E00000578-711_226x327.jpg[/img] [b]Tommy Byers, pictured left aged 78 and, right, as a young sailor during WWII. He witnessed the attempted surrender of the Bismarck 70 years ago[/b] For the Royal Navy it was a triumph – revenge for the Bismarck’s destruction of the pride of the fleet, HMS Hood, days earlier. But the son of one of the British sailors who saw Bismarck’s end 70 years ago today has come forward to claim that the battle might have ended very differently – because the German crew tried to surrender at the height of the bombardment. Tommy Byers, a sailor on the British battleship Rodney, maintained until he died that the ship hoisted a black flag – the naval sign calling for parley. [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/26/article-1391220-0C469D4800000578-284_468x318.jpg[/img] [b]Tommy served as a gunnery officer on HMS Rodney, whose mighty 16-inch guns destroyed the Bismarck. He told his son that the deaths of 2,000 men on board the Bismarck had tormented him[/b] [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/26/article-1391220-0C469D0000000578-848_468x409.jpg[/img] [b]Bismarck view from astern, before her May 1941 breakout to attack Allied shipping. The stern fell off when she turned over on being sunk, due to poor welding[/b] He and a second seaman also saw a Morse code flash, which they interpreted as surrender, along with a man waving semaphore flags conveying the same message. Royal Navy officers were made aware of the signs but were determined to follow Winston Churchill’s order to "sink the Bismarck". The Prime Minister wanted to avenge the Hood, on which all but three of its 1,418 crew had died. Had the Bismarck been captured, the lives of hundreds of Germans could have been saved, including those of Admiral Günther Lütjens and Captain Ernst Lindemann. The ship would also have been a prized catch, giving Navy engineers an insight into the design of Bismarck’s mighty sistership, Tirpitz. [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/26/article-1391220-0C469CC100000578-940_468x267.jpg[/img] [b]The Bismarck at sea during her doomed May 1941 deployment into the Atlantic[/b] The revelation has been unearthed by author Iain Ballantyne for a book about the Bismarck which has been published 70 years after the sinking on May 27, 1941. [img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/4/4e/20100205200139!Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-2003-0027,_G%C3%BCnter_L%C3%BCtjens.jpg[/img][img]http://rpmedia.ask.com/ts?u=/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101II-MN-1361-21A%2C_Schlachtschiff_Bismarck%2C_Kapit%C3%A4n_Ernst_Lindemann.jpg/200px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_101II-MN-1361-21A%2C_Schlachtschiff_Bismarck%2C_Kapit%C3%A4n_Ernst_Lindemann.jpg[/img] [b]Admiral Lütjens and Captain Lindemann[/b] One account he came across was an interview Mr Byers gave to his son Kevin before he died in 2004 aged 86. Mr Byers, a gunnery officer on Rodney, saw the battle unfold through binoculars at a distance of two miles. The Rodney had closed to what was point-blank range in gunnery terms because the Bismarck was no longer firing back. Mr Byers said: [i]‘Very early on men started jumping over board. They couldn’t stand the heat. One particular fella on top of B turret was waving his arms in semaphore. ‘I saw this and I told the gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Crawford. He said, “I don’t want to know about any signal now”. She then flew a black flag…but he (Crawford) wasn’t having any of it. ‘Then she started blinking with her Morse lamps on the yard arm and he (Crawford) said “Don’t report anything more like that”.’[/i] Kevin Byers, 52, from Portaferry, County Down, said: ‘Dad knew what he saw. He felt guilty he didn’t do more at the time but he wasn’t of high enough rank to be heard. [i]‘Something like 2,000 men died and this nagged away at him for the rest of his life.’[/i] [img]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/26/article-1391220-0C469E0E00000578-710_470x646.jpg[/img] [b]Tommy Byers in 1948 towards the end of his Naval career[/b] The second witness was Lieutenant Donald Campbell, the air defence officer on HMS Rodney. In his account of the sinking he said he saw the morse signal. This was also reported by a sailor on the cruiser HMS Dorsetshire. The Bismarck had been hunted down relentlessly. Crippled by torpedo attacks from the carrier Ark Royal, she tried to limp towards France but was cornered by Rodney and another battleship, King George V. Terry Charman, of the Imperial War Museum, said the admiral on Bismarck had sent telegrams to Hitler that the ship would fight to the end. But he added: ‘It may be some of the crew wanted to surrender, they were in a hopeless position.’ Ian Ballantyne's book Killing The Bismarck is published by Pen and Sword Books.[/quote] [url]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391220/Should-sunk-Bismarck-Tormented-sailor-reveals-German-sailors-tried-surrender-ship-destroyed-costing-2-000-lives.html[/url] Well that's thoroughly depressing. :smith:

I could see why they would want to ignore the signals and sink it. They wanted revenge, and they wanted to send a message to the people of both Germany and England; The Germans aren't invincible. I think however capturing the ship would have been a much better course of action, you can study the ship, copy the design and have one operational at the same time. Plus the amount of intelligence that could have come from that would've been tremendous. However I would assume that the ship and the camp where the men would be held would become top priority for the Nazi war machine, the embarrassing capture of their most grand ship now being used against them, Hitler wouldn't stand for it. tl;dr: Any course of action would have worked.

Isn't that part of the Geneva Convention that if someone wants to surrender the attacker should stop attacking and take the surrenderees as POW's? This is very sad, the Royal Navy should have followed the convention.

With battleships quickly becoming obsolete even then, it wouldn't have been very useful for long if captured.

You probably couldn't capture the ship, while you were busy saving the crew they'd have scuttled it. There's speculation they scuttled it anyway, because it was so badly damaged and they didn't want the Royal Navy to gain a scrap of intelligence from it.

...I like how everyone is so quick to jump and say that THIS is okay. Shooting one surrendering soldier because of adrenaline pumping through you is one thing. COMPLETELY ignore a surrender signal by an enemy ship which has hundreds of wounded and living crewmen left is different. But alas, it was the Allies who won, so they didn't get persecuted for their crimes they committed.

[QUOTE=Mr.T;30075474]Isn't that part of the Geneva Convention that if someone wants to surrender the attacker should stop attacking and take the surrenderees as POW's? This is very sad, the Royal Navy should have followed the convention.[/QUOTE] IIRC, it was against a treaty for Germany to build a battleship of that size. Not saying that has to do anything with taking prisoners, but both parties were equally at fault, that is if they REALLY did try and surrender. War is never a pretty thing.

[QUOTE=Swilly;30075691]...I like how everyone is so quick to jump and say that THIS is okay. Shooting one surrendering soldier because of adreneline pumping through you is one thing, COMPLETELY ignore and surrender signal by an enemy ship which has hundreds of wounded, and living crewmen left is different. But alas, it was the Allies who won, so they didn't get persecuted for their crimes they committed.[/QUOTE] Aye, winners makes the rules.

[QUOTE=Mr.T;30075474]Isn't that part of the Geneva Convention that if someone wants to surrender the attacker should stop attacking and take the surrenderees as POW's? This is very sad, the Royal Navy should have followed the convention.[/QUOTE] The germans followed Geneva convention to the letter when fighting against allieds up until Churchill decided it would be hilarious to bomb Berlin after the accident involving three stray He-111's. [editline]27th May 2011[/editline] Well okay, there was this incident in the norway where an surrounded army group refused to surrender and the city they were fortified in was razed to the ground, mostly due to the miscoordination between heer and luftwaffe thought. But I guess that can't be counted given how germans told them numerous times to surrender. *edit* hahahaha everyone rating me boxes just because the guy next to him is

[QUOTE=Mr.T;30075474]Isn't that part of the Geneva Convention that if someone wants to surrender the attacker should stop attacking and take the surrenderees as POW's? This is very sad, the Royal Navy should have followed the convention.[/QUOTE] Neither side fallowed conventions. The Americans fired on surrendering Germans just like the British, and the Germans fired on prisoners of war. By sinking the ship you corrupted the moral of 2000 families. The point of war is to force your opponent to submit.

[QUOTE=Bluesummers;30075830]Neither side fallowed conventions. The Americans fired on surrendering Germans just like the British, and the Germans fired on prisoners of war. By sinking the ship you corrupted the moral of 2000 families. The point of war is to force your opponent to submit.[/QUOTE] Ontop this, it was a revenge killing for the Hood. You're also not going to haul the pride of the enemies fleet back to your port, then haul it back out and sink it.

[quote]Royal Navy officers were made aware of the signs but were determined to follow Winston Churchill’s order to "sink the Bismarck". [/quote] One of many reasons I hate Winston Churchill. Stubborn old bastard.

[QUOTE=Raiskauskone V2;30075777]The germans followed Geneva convention to the letter when fighting against allieds up until Churchill decided it would be hilarious to bomb Berlin after the accident involving three stray He-111's. [/QUOTE] Yeah, right to the part where the Germans started massacring people after forcing them to dig their own graves. Or when they stopped sending POW's to POW camps and started sending them straight to concentration camps or death camps.

[QUOTE=Raiskauskone V2;30075777]The germans followed Geneva convention to the letter when fighting against allieds up until Churchill decided it would be hilarious to bomb Berlin after the accident involving three stray He-111's. [/QUOTE] Meanwhile in [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_%28painting%29]Guernica...[/url]

[QUOTE=Raiskauskone V2;30075777]The germans followed Geneva convention to the letter when fighting against allieds up until Churchill decided it would be hilarious to bomb Berlin after the accident involving three stray He-111's. [/QUOTE] [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Concentration_and_labor_camps_.281933.E2.80.931945.29"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp[/URL] :raise:

It is very easy when you're sat on a seat behind a PC screen to pontificate how people should have acted in a battle situation. I wouldn't make judgements on situations which you were never at, and could never possibly imagine being at.

[QUOTE=BrokenSanity;30076459][URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Concentration_and_labor_camps_.281933.E2.80.931945.29"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp[/URL] :raise:[/QUOTE] Holocaust wasn't a war/conflict so it doesn't have to follow the Geneva Convention.

contrary to popular belief, POWs were treated extremely well by the Germans. The followed the Geneva conventions for combat up until the Battle of the Bulge, once their land was in trouble though. They started pulling every trick they could think of.

[QUOTE=Coffee;30089402]Holocaust wasn't a war/conflict so it doesn't have to follow the Geneva Convention.[/QUOTE] Actually [quote]After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.[/quote] If the POWs were treated like that, it breaks the Geneva Convention.

[QUOTE=BrokenSanity;30089701]Actually If the POWs were treated like that, it breaks the Geneva Convention.[/QUOTE] I think Russians were sent there, Americans, french, polish and western POWs were kept in their own camp and treated fairly.

[QUOTE=BrokenSanity;30089701]Actually If the POWs were treated like that, it breaks the Geneva Convention.[/QUOTE] The POWs you speak of were Soviets only, and that's because of the fervent hatred the Germans had for the Communists... and because Russians were viewed as being untermenschen. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Soviet_POWs[/url] 'Course the Soviets did the same thing to the Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, and Baltic soldiers they captured during the course of the Eastern Front Campaign because of their fervent hatred for the Fascists.

Either way, only the Germans were charged with any of the crimes they committed. It's full of bullshit.

[QUOTE=Swilly;30089834]Either way, only the Germans were charged with any of the crimes they committed. It's full of bullshit.[/QUOTE] Pretty much. Bullshit and politics go together.

[QUOTE=SwissArmyKnife;30076277]One of many reasons I hate Winston Churchill. Stubborn old bastard.[/QUOTE] you hate the greatest British man to ever live? :-/ [editline]28th May 2011[/editline] also, you have to put this into historical context im not saying that its right im just saying that i understand why they did it

[QUOTE=Swilly;30089492]contrary to popular belief, POWs were treated extremely well by the Germans.[/QUOTE] Unless the SS got hold of prisoners. Like the time SS officers found it lulzy to throw grenades into sheds full of British PoW's

[QUOTE=Swilly;30089834]Either way, only the Germans were charged with any of the crimes they committed. It's full of bullshit.[/QUOTE] History is written by the victors, the government will only tell the citizens what they want them to know. This is becoming increasingly difficult for them to do in today's society with social media and alike.

You know who else tried to surrender? The Jews. rip

You are now aware thousands and thousands of soldiers who emptied their weapons and then tried to surrender were generally killed on the spot.

long story short: Bismarck wants to surrender fairly but British are still butthurt because it handed their top Battleship its ass on a gilded platter.

[QUOTE=OrionChronicles;30093870]long story short: Bismarck wants to surrender fairly but British are still butthurt because it handed their top Battleship its ass on a gilded platter.[/QUOTE] IIRC The HMS Hood was a refitted First World War dreadnought. No wonder it sucked so hard.