The 24th of May, 1941. Somewhere in the freezing gray waters of the Denmark Strait, a brand new British battleship turned her bows towards the most powerful warship Germany had ever built. Her name was HMS Prince of Wales, and she was not ready. Below her decks, civilian engineers in overalls crawled through her great steel turrets, spanners in hand.
These were not sailors. They were gun fitters from the firm that had built her mountings, and they were still trying to make her main armament work. The paint was barely dry. Some of her systems had never been properly tested. Within the hour, one of her guns would fail after a single shot, and others would jam in the heat of battle.
And yet this half-finished ship, crewed by men who had barely learned their stations, was about to fire the shots that doomed the Bismarck. Few realized how close to disaster she came, or how much depended on whether her unreliable guns would fire at all. This is the story of how Britain sent an unfinished battleship into the fight of her life and changed the war at sea because of it.
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New players who use my link in the description with the bonus code impactforce, written as one word, get 20 days of premium time, a free cruiser, a six-skill-point commander, and a stack of rewards to start strong. Click the link, and I shall see you on the water. Now, back to the Prince of Wales. To understand why Britain took such a gamble, you have to understand the threat.
By 1941, Germany had completed the Bismarck, a battleship of more than 50,000 tons at full load, armed with eight 15-in guns. Alongside her sister ship, the Tirpitz, she threatened to break out into the Atlantic and cut the convoy routes that kept Britain alive. The Royal Navy needed modern battleships to meet her, and it needed them at once.
The Prince of Wales was one of those ships. She was the second of five King George V class battleships, designed in the 1930s under a strict set of rules. The Second London Naval Treaty had capped the main guns of new battleships at 14 in. Britain, almost alone, honored that limit. Germany did not. So, when the Bismarck went to sea with 15-in guns, the newest British battleships carried a smaller caliber by deliberate national policy.
The Prince of Wales was laid down at Birkenhead and launched in the spring of 1939. While she was still fitting out, German bombs fell on the Merseyside dockyards, and one near miss flooded part of her hull. She was commissioned in January 1941 and declared ready for service only at the end of March. That left barely 7 weeks before she sailed against the enemy.
The deepest problem was her guns. Her new turrets were troublesome, and everyone knew it. During her workup at Scapa Flow, her main armament kept breaking down. Her captain, Captain John Leach, understood the risk completely, and he made a remarkable decision. He asked the gunfitters from Vickers-Armstrongs, the firm that built the mountings, to stay aboard and sail with the ship into battle. They agreed.
So, what exactly had Britain built? The King George V class carried 10 14-in guns in an arrangement seen on no other battleship in the world. Two of the turrets held four guns each. The third, raised above the forward turret, held only two. It was an odd, lopsided look, and there was a hard reason behind it. The original design called for three of the big four-gun turrets, giving 12 guns in all, but the 35,000 ton treaty limit could not contain 12 guns, the engines, and the armor the Admiralty demanded.
Something had to give. The designers cut the upper forward turret down from four guns to two, and they poured the saved weight into protection. And what protection it was. The main belt reached 14.7 in of armor over the magazines. The armored deck was up to 6 in thick. The belt ran deep below the waterline to defeat shells that fell short and dived under the surface.
These were among the most heavily armored warships afloat, second only to the giant Japanese battleships then being built in secret. The gun itself was a fine weapon. The 14-in Mark 7 fired a shell weighing 1,590 lb, carrying nearly 40 lb of high explosive in its bursting charge. It could throw that shell more than 38,000 yd.
Its barrels were built without wire winding, which made them lighter, straighter, and more accurate than older British designs. On paper, the Prince of Wales was formidable. The trouble lay in the turret machinery. The four-gun mountings had been rushed into production, and they suffered from a string of flaws. The clearances between the moving and fixed parts were too tight.
A maze of anti-flash safety interlocks made the whole system fragile. Worst of all, the ring that carried shells up from the magazine did not have enough room to flex as the ship’s hull worked and bent in heavy sea. When that ring jammed, the guns above it fell silent. This is where those civilian fitters earned their place in history.
The Admiralty’s own gunnery report on the action records that one of the Vickers erecting staff was present in each turret, and that their presence was, in the report’s words, of the greatest assistance. Three men in overalls deep inside the steel, ready to fight the machinery itself while the ship fought the enemy. The naval historians Gask and Dulin record that Leach had personally requested they remain aboard and that they played an important role in the battle that followed.
Now, before we see what happened when the ship met the enemy, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British naval engineering, take a second to subscribe. It genuinely helps the channel grow. Right. Let us get into the battle. Just before midnight on the 21st of May, the Prince of Wales slipped out to join the battlecruiser HMS Hood.
The two ships steamed under Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland, ordered to intercept the Bismarck and her companion, the cruiser Prinz Eugen, south of Iceland. Contact came at dawn on the 24th of May. A little before 6:00 in the morning, the Hood opened fire and the Prince of Wales followed half a minute later.
The range, some 25,000 yd. Spray from her own bows soaked the rangefinders in her forward turrets, forcing her gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Colin McMullen, to rely on the director high above the bridge. Almost at once, the curse of the turrets struck. According to the Admiralty gunnery report, the number one gun of the forward four-gun turret went out of action after the very first salvo.
A defect deep in the shell handling system had jammed it. Inside the turrets, the fitters and the ship’s own ordnance men fought back, beating seized rammers into life with heavy blows and working levers by hand at every stroke to keep the shells coming. Then came catastrophe, though not for the British battleship.
At 1 minute past 6:00, a German salvo found the Hood. A 15-in shell plunged through her thin deck armor and reached a magazine. The Hood erupted. A column of flame rose hundreds of feet. The ship broke in two and she sank in around 3 minutes. Of her crew of over 1,400, only three men survived.
Vice-Admiral Holland went down with his flagship. Now, the Prince of Wales stood alone against the Bismarck with her guns failing one by one. And here is the part the legend so often forgets. Even crippled, she was hitting. Of the 18 salvos she managed, the Prince of Wales scored three hits on the Bismarck. One of those hits changed the war.
A 14-in shell struck the Bismarck below her armor belt forward and tore open her fuel tanks. As the naval historians Garzke, Dulin, and Jurens describe it, the German ship was suddenly deprived of the use of more than 1,000 tons of fuel oil. With forward compartments flooded by a mixture of oil and seawater, the Bismarck began to trail a long betraying slick of oil across the ocean.
But the Prince of Wales paid for those hits. The Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen turned their fire on her and struck her seven times. One 15-in shell crashed through the bridge, passed clean across the compass platform, and went out the other side without exploding. Almost every man on that bridge was killed.
Captain Leach was one of only two who lived. Several other German shells that struck the ship also failed to detonate. A stroke of fortune that helped keep her afloat. With the Hood gone, his bridge a slaughterhouse, and his main armament reduced at one point to barely half its number, Leach made smoke and turned away.
Some accounts claim she was down to just two working guns, but the Admiralty report does not support so low a figure. He broke off to fight another day. It was the right call. How did the British 14-in truly compare to the German 15-in it faced that morning? Honestly, the German gun had real advantages. The Bismarck’s 15-in fired a heavier shell at a higher velocity, giving it a flatter trajectory and better penetration of vertical armor at fighting range.
German gunnery was famously precise, and the Bismarck proved it by destroying the Hood with effectively a single accurate salvo. The British gun answered with different strengths. Its shell carried a proportionally larger bursting charge, and its accuracy and barrel life were excellent. At long range, its steeper angle of descent helped it punch through enemy decks.
It was not the most powerful battleship gun of the war. In raw hitting power, the 14-in was the lightest armed of all the modern capital ships of its era, and the troublesome turrets were a genuine weakness. The comparison with the Americans tells the real story. The first United States fast battleships were themselves designed around 14-in guns in four-gun turrets, almost identical in concept to the British ships.
When Japan refused to accept the treaty limit, the Americans were free to switch to 9 16-in guns. Britain, having already cut her steel, kept her 14-in and honored the agreement. The Prince of Wales went to war under gunned, not because British engineers could not build bigger, but because Britain kept its word when others did not.
And as that battle proved, a 14-in shell in the right place was still enough to [ __ ] the pride of the German navy. The consequences of those hits rippled out across the entire Atlantic. Starved of fuel, leaking oil, and unable to refuel safely, the German commander, Admiral Lutjens, concluded that the raiding mission was finished.
He could no longer hunt convoys. He turned the Bismarck towards occupied France and the safety of a dockyard. His own flag captain, Ernst Lindemann, had wanted to chase down and finish the wounded Prince of Wales, but Lutjens refused. That turn towards France was fatal. The Royal Navy clung to the oil trail.
On the 26th of May, antiquated Fairey Swordfish biplanes from HMS Ark Royal flew into a gale and put a torpedo into the Bismarck’s stern, jamming her rudders hard over. Unable to steer, she could only circle, waiting for the British battle fleet. On the morning of the 27th of May, HMS King George V and HMS Rodney battered her into a blazing wreck.
Of more than 2,200 men aboard, only 116 were pulled alive from the sea. The Prince of Wales never sank the Bismarck. She did something arguably more important. With faulty guns and civilians at her machinery, she landed the wound that turned a deadly commerce raider into a hunted crippled ship running for home. Think back to that gray morning and the picture of a battleship sailing to meet the enemy with her builders still aboard, mending her even as she fought.
By every reasonable measure, the Prince of Wales should not have been there. Her guns were unreliable, her crew were green, her trials were incomplete. She was in the truest sense unfinished and it did not matter. The men in those turrets, sailors and fitters together, kept just enough of her guns in action long enough to land three shells that altered the course of the war at sea.
The Bismarck, the most powerful warship in the world, was doomed by a ship that was barely ready to fight. That is the lesson British engineering wrote in steel that morning. A weapon does not have to be perfect. It only has to work when it matters most. And if this story has stirred something in you, you can live it for yourself.
Head to World of Warships using my link in the description, claim the bonus code Impact Force, and take the Bismarck, the Prince of Wales, and the new Isoroku Kancolle into battle. I shall see you out on the water.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
