Underwater Drone Sent Toward the Bismarck Wreck —What it captured terrified the world

[00:00:00]The vehicle slipped beneath the surface of the North Atlantic and began to fall, not dive, fall. There is no other word for a descent of nearly 3 miles into water so dark it has never known a photon of sunlight. On the ship above, in a room lined with glowing monitors, a group of pilots watched the depth counter begin to climb, and they knew that somewhere far below them, resting in the crushing cold, sat the most famous battleship of the Second World War. They also knew something else. They knew that when their cameras finally reached her, the steel of that wreck might settle an argument that two navies had been having, [music] bitterly and without resolution, for nearly 50 years.

[00:00:47]An argument about how she really died, and what the cameras eventually found down there did not fully agree with either side. This is the story of a machine sent to a place where no human being will ever go, to look at a ship that took more than 2,000 men to the bottom with her, and to read the wounds on her hull the way a coroner reads a body, because that is what a wreck at this depth becomes. It is not just twisted metal, it is testimony.

[00:01:18]It is the last witness to what happened in the final minutes, and it has been sitting in the dark, silent, waiting for someone to build a camera brave enough to ask it questions. To understand why this took so long, you have to understand where the Bismarck actually lies. She rests roughly 4,800 m beneath the surface of the open Atlantic, about 650 km west of the French coast, out past the edge of the continental shelf, where the seabed drops away into the abyssal plain. This is not a place you can swim to.

[00:01:57]This is not a place a diver in any suit ever built could survive. At that depth, the water bears down with a force of around 480 atmospheres, somewhere near 6,000 lb pressing on every single square inch. To put that in terms a body can imagine, [music] that pressure would crumple a modern steel submarine the way a boot flattens an empty drink can, [music] folding it inward in an instant with a sound no one would live to hear. A human being exposed to it would not drown in the ordinary sense. The water alone would kill in the time it takes [music] to read this sentence aloud. And it is cold, just above freezing, a lightless, motionless cold that never changes [music] with the seasons because no season reaches down there. There is no current to speak of, no warmth, no glow.

[00:02:54]It is one of the most hostile environments on the surface of this planet, and the Bismarck has been lying in it since May of 1941, sitting not on flat mud but on the sloping flank of an undersea mountain, an extinct volcano [music] rising from the abyssal plain. When she came down, she did not simply settle. She struck the upper slope and then began to slide, carving a long scar into the sediment, shedding pieces of herself along the way until she finally came to rest more than a mile down that incline. The debris she left behind stretches out across the seabed like the trail of some enormous wounded animal that dragged itself into the dark to die. That is the place.

[00:03:41]Remember it because everything that follows is shaped by it, by the pressure that keeps humans out, by the darkness that keeps [music] the wreck hidden, and by the slope that would later confuse the very evidence the cameras were sent to gather.

[00:03:57]But before the machine, you need the ship, and you need to [music] understand why a rusting hole in the middle of the ocean was worth the enormous cost and risk of reaching it at all. Because the Bismarck is not famous the way most warships are famous. She is famous for 9 days in the spring of 1941, >> [music] >> and for the things she did in the first four of them.

[00:04:21]In May of that year, she broke out into the Atlantic, a brand new battleship, one of the largest and most powerful warships in the world sent to prey on the convoys that were keeping Britain alive. She did not slip out quietly. She was spotted, and the Royal Navy scrambled to intercept [music] her. And on the morning of the 24th of May, the two forces met in the icy waters near the Denmark Strait. Facing the Bismarck was the pride of the British fleet, the battle cruiser HMS Hood, a ship that for 20 years had been the very symbol of British naval power. The ship children drew pictures of, the ship that meant the ocean belonged to the crown. The battle lasted only minutes. A shell from the Bismarck found its way into the Hood, and something deep inside the great ship detonated.

[00:05:14]She broke apart and went down almost at once, [music] so fast that the men aboard had no chance at all. Of 1,418, three survived. Three.

[00:05:27]The rest of them went down in seconds in the freezing northern water, and the shock of it ran through Britain like a physical blow.

[00:05:35]The unsinkable symbol of the Navy had been shattered in the time it takes to boil a kettle, and the ship that did it was still out there, >> [music] >> loose in the Atlantic.

[00:05:47]What followed was one of the great sea chases in history. The order that came down was blunt and absolute. Find her and sink her. Whatever it took, however many ships it required, the Bismarck was not to be allowed to reach a friendly port and repair.

[00:06:02]And for a while it looked as though she might slip away entirely, vanishing into the vastness of the ocean while her pursuers searched empty water. [music] Then came the aircraft, slow, fragile biplanes launched from a carrier, lumbering out over the waves with torpedoes slung beneath them. Most of their attacks achieved little against the great ship's armor, but one torpedo in the fading light struck her far astern and jammed her rudders hard over.

[00:06:27]That single hit was the end of her freedom. A ship that cannot steer cannot run. The Bismarck could no longer make for port. She could only turn in a slow, helpless circle, dragging her ruined stern through the swell while the ships hunting her closed in from every direction through the night. And as dawn broke on the 27th of May, she sat there in the gray Atlantic waiting for the guns that everyone knew were coming, unable to do anything at all but face them.

[00:06:53]What happened in the hours after that dawn is exactly the thing the cameras were built half a century later to investigate. The battle that finished her was not really a battle at all. It was an execution. And the men aboard both fleets seemed to understand that from the first salvo.

[00:07:10]Two British battleships closed the range in the pale morning light. One of them the same class of vessel the Bismarck had faced days before. The other older, heavier, slower, but carrying guns that could open a warship's belly at [music] a distance most men could not even see across. They came in from opposing angles, and at just past 8:00 in the morning [music] they began to fire. And the German ship fired back. And for a little while the exchange had the shape of a fight between equals. It did not last. [music] The Bismarck could not steer, and a ship that cannot steer cannot dodge, cannot present her thickest armor to the incoming shells, [music] cannot do any of the thousand small things a gunnery officer does to stay alive in a duel.

[00:07:50]>> [music] >> She could only sit in the swell and take it. Within 20 minutes her forward gun directors had [music] been smashed and the men aiming her great turrets were left half blind, working by local control, firing at shapes on the horizon while the British salvos walked steadily across her decks. [music] Within half an hour her main batteries had fallen silent one after another. And still the shells came, hundreds [snorts] of them.

[00:08:12]The two battleships pouring fire into a target that could no longer meaningfully fire back. The numbers historians would later assemble are almost hard to absorb. Over the course of that final action, the British ships hurled more than 700 large caliber shells at the Bismarck. [music] The kind of projectile that weighs as much as a small car and arrives faster than sound. Smaller guns added thousands more. It was one of the most concentrated bombardments ever directed [music] at a single ship. Her superstructure was torn open. Her upper decks became a landscape [music] of fire and buckled steel. And by the end of it, observers on the British ships described a vessel that looked less like a warship than a burning [music] ruin drifting on the sea. And yet, and this is the detail that would matter half a century later, the detail the cameras were sent to test, she did not sink. Not from the guns. Battered, aflame, her guns dead and her decks ablaze, the great hull stayed [music] on the surface. So, the British sent in torpedoes as well from a cruiser that came in close [music] to finish the work. And shortly after 10:00 in the morning, the Bismarck finally went down, [music] bow rising, stern already gone, sliding beneath the gray water into a dark that no light from the surface would ever reach again.

[00:09:26]Of a crew that had numbered more than 2,000, only a little over a hundred were pulled from the water. The rest went down with her or died in the swell before rescue could reach them. And the recovery was cut short when a submarine alarm scattered the British ships and left men still swimming in the cold.

[00:09:46]Roughly 2,000 sailors died in that stretch of the North Atlantic that morning. It is not a battlefield in any ordinary sense. It is a grave. And everything that follows has to be held against that fact.

[00:10:01]And here is where the story stops being simple. Because the survivors who were pulled from the water told a version of events that did not match the one the Royal Navy carried home.

[00:10:13]The British account was straightforward and proud. They had hunted the most dangerous ship in the world across half an ocean. They [music] had cornered her and they had sunk her with shell and torpedo and that was the end of it.

[00:10:27]But the German sailors who lived told a different story. They said the ship had not been sunk by the enemy at all, not really.

[00:10:36]They said that while the shells were still falling, the order had gone through the burning hole to scuttle her, to open the great sea valves deep below the waterline, to set demolition charges against the engine rooms, to fling open the watertight doors and let the Atlantic in on their own terms rather than surrender the ship or let her be taken as a prize. They said the crew had sunk their own ship in her final minutes [music] and that the British had merely been present while she died. Both sides believed their version completely. Both carried it home and told it and wrote it down and passed it to the next generation.

[00:11:16]And for decades there was no way to reconcile them because the only witness that could settle the argument was the ship herself and the ship was gone. Not lost in shallow water where divers could reach her. Not resting somewhere a salvage crew could reach with cables and cranes, but fallen nearly 3 miles into the abyss, into a dark so total and a pressure so lethal that no human being would ever stand beside her hull. The evidence existed. [music] The steel remembered exactly what had happened to it in those final minutes. It was simply somewhere no person could ever go to read it. That is the problem the deep poses, >> [music] >> and it is worth understanding just how absolute the barrier is.

[00:12:03]Down where the Bismarck came to rest, the water sits at around 4,800 m, [music] close to 3 miles beneath the waves. At that depth, the weight of the ocean overhead presses down with a force near 480 times the pressure at the surface.

[00:12:21]Put a number on it, and it stops meaning anything. So, [music] put it another way instead.

[00:12:28]The pressure down there is enough to crush a modern submarine hull inward like a hand closing on an empty can.

[00:12:36]A diver in any suit ever built would be flattened before he was halfway down.

[00:12:41]The water is only a few degrees above freezing, black as ink, still, and utterly without light. No sun has ever reached this place, and no sun ever will. Nothing about it is survivable for a human being, not for a minute, not for a second.

[00:13:00]For decades, that was the end of the matter. The argument could not be settled because the courtroom could not be entered.

[00:13:07]>> [music] >> And then, slowly, the machines caught up. A generation of engineers built vehicles that could do what no diver ever could, descend into that crushing dark, hover in it for hours, and look.

[00:13:21]Not manned submarines at first, but towed sleds and remote eyes, cameras and sonar mounted on frames of steel and syntactic foam, tethered to a ship far above by a cable that carried both power and pictures. Machines that did not need to breathe, that felt nothing of the cold or the weight, that could sit in 480 atmospheres of pressure and quietly send images back up the line to a room full of people watching screens. And in the summer of 1989, one team decided to go looking for the answer that had been waiting on the seabed for almost 50 years. The man leading that search had already made his name in the deep. A few years earlier his team had found the Titanic, and the tool that made it possible was a towed sled they called Argo, a rectangular frame bristling with cameras, sonar transducers, [music] and banks of lights. Dragged slowly through the black water at the end of a long armored cable, Argo did not dive so much as fly, suspended a few dozen meters above the bottom while the ship on the surface crept [music] forward and the sled swept the seabed with its eyes. It was, in every practical sense, a machine sent to do the looking a human never could. It fed a continuous stream of grainy monochrome images up the cable to a darkened control van packed with monitors where the crew took shifts staring into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to break the endless sameness of the mud.

[00:14:59]And the mud was almost all there was.

[00:15:02]That is the part the finished footage never captures, [music] how much nothing there is between the ship and the finding. The Admiralty records from the final battle gave only an approximate position, a rough guess scrawled down in the chaos of gunfire and smoke and men fighting for their lives. From that starting point, the team knew the wreck could be lying anywhere inside a box of ocean roughly 150 square miles across, 150 square miles of featureless seabed, most of it flat gray silt to be searched a single narrow strip at a time. They called the method mowing the lawn, dragging the sled back and forth in long parallel lines, overlapping each pass slightly so nothing slipped through the gap, turning the ship at the end of each run and starting the next lane.

[00:15:56]>> [music] >> It is monotonous, exhausting, unglamorous work, and it eats days. So, the days passed. The crew watched the monitors in the dim red light of the van, and hour after hour the screen showed [music] the same thing, soft rolling silt, the occasional pale flicker of a deep-sea fish drifting through the light cone, a sea cucumber, a ripple in the sediment, >> [music] >> and then more mud. People spoke in low voices or not at all. Coffee went cold.

[00:16:30]Someone would take over a shift, rub their eyes, and settle in to watch the featureless bottom scroll past [music] at the pace of a slow walk. It is the kind of searching that wears people down, not with fear, but with tedium, the constant low hum of a question with no answer, the growing worry that the position in the old records is simply wrong and the ship is lying somewhere else entirely, out beyond the edge of the search box, unreachable and unfound.

[00:17:01][music] And then, on the 8th of June, 1989, the mud gave way to something else. On the monitor, a shape resolved out of the dark, not the soft curve of a dune, not the flicker of an animal, but hard geometry.

[00:17:19]Straight lines, steel.

[00:17:22]Enormous, torn, twisted plates of it scattered across the seabed [music] in a way that only violence and a fall from the surface could produce.

[00:17:32]The van went quiet in a different way now. The silence of people leaning toward the screens. This was not a rock.

[00:17:39][music] This was not natural. The scale of the debris alone told them it had come from something [music] huge. The fragments were the size of rooms, the size of houses. Plating heavy enough that only a great warship could have carried it. The hunt was over. After days of nothing, after decades of the question sitting unanswered on the bottom of the Atlantic, the machines had found the Bismarck.

[00:18:05]But finding the debris field is not the same as understanding it. And what the cameras showed as they followed the trail was already strange. The scattered wreckage led somewhere, and the somewhere was a slope. The flank of an extinct undersea volcano rising off the abyssal plain. The debris climbed that slope like a scar. Pieces of the ship strewn along a track more than a mile long. And at the [music] end of the track, sitting on the incline, was the hull itself. Not shattered. Not a broken heap [music] of steel folded in on itself the way a ship torn apart on the surface might be expected to lie.

[00:18:45][music] The Bismarck sat upright.

[00:18:48]That is the first thing that defied expectation.

[00:18:51]And it defied [music] it completely.

[00:18:54]820 ft of battleship resting on her keel on the volcanic slope >> [music] >> as though she had been set down there deliberately. Her main hull largely in one piece. The cameras traced her length, and the scale of her was staggering even in the narrow beam of the lights. the deck stretching away into the dark. The great barbettes where the main turrets had once sat, the flank of her rising like a cliff face. She had struck the bottom, the evidence suggested, and then slid more than a mile down the slope, gouging her track into the sediment, >> [music] >> carrying her debris with her before finally coming to rest upright on the incline. A ship that size sitting the right way up nearly 3 miles down was not what anyone had pictured when they imagined the grave of the Bismarck.

[00:19:46]And then the cameras reached the stern and found it was not there. The entire after section of the ship, the part that carried the rudders and the propellers, had been ripped [music] clean away.

[00:19:58]A raw, gaping wound at the tail of an otherwise remarkably whole hull.

[00:20:04]It was a shocking thing to see, this violent absence at the end of a ship that had otherwise held together. The stern was simply gone, torn off somewhere between the surface and the seabed. And the break in the steel was jagged and total. It was the single most dramatic piece of damage on the whole wreck.

[00:20:23]And yet, oddly, it did not fit.

[00:20:28]It did not match the story of a ship pounded to pieces by shell fire and dragged under by torpedoes.

[00:20:35]It was one massive localized wound on a hull that everywhere else the cameras looked seemed far more intact than either side of the old argument would have led anyone to expect. The superstructure above was a different matter, shredded, torn, hammered into ruin by the weight of British shells.

[00:20:56]But the hull below, the great steel body of the ship, told a quieter and more complicated story. And reading it would take more than a towed sled and a single grainy pass in the dark. It would take going back years later with better machines and a willingness to crawl over every plate of her.

[00:21:17]That return came in 2002 when a filmmaker who had built a career out of reaching places the ocean did not want him to reach arrived over the site with equipment that dwarfed anything the Discovery expedition had carried. He brought two Russian-built submersibles capable of taking pilots [music] down into the crush and with them a pair of small agile robots the crews nicknamed bots. Tethered machines slender enough to thread through openings in the hole and go where the larger vehicles never could. The goal this time was not to find the Bismarck. She had already been found. The goal was to read her plate by plate, wound by wound, [music] and to settle, if it could be settled, the question that had outlived nearly everyone who had been there. The bots went inside. They slipped through torn hatchways and drifted down flooded corridors where the light had not reached in 60 years [music] and the cameras carried back images that changed the entire register of the expedition.

[00:22:22]These were not just compartments.

[00:22:24]Personal effects still lay where they had come to rest. The scattered ordinary things of men who had lived in these spaces, worked in them, slept in them, and died in them. A boot, a dish, the small furniture of a life at sea.

[00:22:41]And with those images the wreck stopped being a puzzle in steel and became what it had always been beneath the argument, a tomb holding more than 2,000 men resting undisturbed on the flank of an undersea mountain in the cold and the dark. The people surveying her understood that. They looked, they measured, they filmed, [music] and they took nothing. That discipline, that refusal to loot a grave, is part of why the footage exists at all in the form it does.

[00:23:13]Then came the forensic work, and this is where the hole began to speak. In her final battle, two British battleships had poured over 700 large-caliber shells at the Bismarck, an almost unimaginable weight of fire hammering into her for the better part of an hour and a half.

[00:23:32]And when the survey team went looking for where those shells had punched through her main armor belt, the rough 13-in band of steel that protected her vital spaces below the waterline, they found only two places [music] where a shell had fully penetrated it. Two. The superstructure above had been annihilated, the guns silenced, the ship turned into a burning [music] wreck on the surface, but the armored heart of her had very nearly held. It was, in its grim way, a testament to how she had been built. Shellfire had wrecked her as a fighting machine. It had not, on the evidence of the belt, broken open the body of the ship and let the sea pour in.

[00:24:16]That left the tears. Along the hull, below the armor belt, the cameras found long peeling gashes in the steel. And at first glance, they looked like exactly what one side of the argument had always claimed, torpedo damage, the smoking gun, proof that British weapons had opened her up and sent [music] her down.

[00:24:39]But the survey team studied the way the metal had failed, the direction it had folded, the pattern of it, and reached [music] a different conclusion.

[00:24:48]Those tears were consistent not with torpedoes striking a floating ship, but with the violence of impact and the long grinding slide down the volcanic slope after she hit bottom. The mountain had torn her, not the enemy.

[00:25:03]>> [music] >> The smoking gun turned out to be a wound she had suffered in death, not in battle.

[00:25:10]And then there was the last piece, the one that spoke most directly of all.

[00:25:15]Deep inside the ship, the decks beneath the main armored deck were not merely damaged. They were compressed, crushed downward by something like 10 to 13 ft, as though a great weight had bent them in from above. And crucially, they were crushed from the inside out. That is not what happens when the sea breaks in through the hole.

[00:25:37]That is what happens when a ship fills with water internally and sinks while the pressure of the depths squeezes her, the ocean crushing structure that was already flooding. A ship filling like a bathtub and buckling under her own drowned weight.

[00:25:54]The Bismarck had not been ripped open and swamped. She had flooded from within, gone down largely intact, and been crushed and torn by the abyss she fell [music] into. So, consider the nine days that led her here. She had come out into the Atlantic in the spring of 1941, [music] and in a matter of minutes destroyed HMS Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, with a salvo that found her magazines. 1,418 men aboard the Hood and three who lived.

[00:26:27]The shock of that loss set an entire navy in motion, and the order that came down was as plain as an order can be.

[00:26:36]Sink the Bismarck. [music] The hunt swept across the ocean, lost her, found her again, and in the end it was a single torpedo [music] from a flimsy biplane that decided everything, jamming her rudder hard over so that the mightiest warship afloat could do nothing [music] but steam in a great helpless circle, waiting for the fleet to close in. By the next morning, >> [music] >> she was a burning ruin under a rain of shells, her guns silenced, [music] her upper works torn apart, and still she would not go down.

[00:27:11]Her survivors always said the same [music] thing. They said the crew finished her themselves. That with the ship doomed and the enemy unable to sink her outright, engineers went below and opened the watertight [music] doors, set demolition charges, and turned the sea loose inside their own hull, rather than let her be taken. For half a century, that account sat opposite the Royal [music] Navy's insistence that British steel had done the job. Two national memories that could not both be true, and the wreck, when it was finally read, suggested that in a strange way both of them were. Britain had beaten her senseless.

[00:27:52]Britain had wrecked her, silenced her, doomed her past any hope of escape. But the pattern in the steel, the intact [music] belt, the tears from the slide, the decks crushed inward by internal [music] flooding, is most consistent with a ship that went under from the inside on the last day at the hands of the men who could not save her.

[00:28:15]The debate is not fully closed, [music] and honest researchers still differ on how much weight to give each cause, but the hull is the last [music] witness, and its testimony leans toward this. The enemy condemned her, and her own crew carried out the sentence.

[00:28:32]She sits there still, upright on her mountain, surveyed and left alone, a grave for 2,000 men in water no human will ever walk. So, here is the question I'll leave with you.

[00:28:46]Given what the hull revealed, the belt that held the crush from within, do you believe the shells finished her or the sea valves? And which wreck should the cameras be sent [music] to next? Tell me below.