May 31st, 2012
In this week’s Weekly Standard Newsletter I talk about how seemingly insignificant events can sometimes be determinitive:
The Battle of Denmark Strait pitted the British Royal Navy against the German Kriegsmarine. It was supposed to be an ambush set by Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. It ended in disaster.
The Brits found two German vessels, the battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the day before. In the area the Brits had twice the force—two heavy cruisers (the Norfolk and Suffolk) and two battleships (the Hood and Prince of Wales). The Germans were sailing with the Bismarck in the lead; the plan was for the British to split the opposing force and overpower them. It was a good plan.
Only several small, seemingly inconsequential events took place.
When the British first made contact the day earlier, on May 23, the Bismarck fired her main guns, once. When they did so, something went wrong and the action damaged the Bismarck‘s forward radar.
That night, the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen exchanged positions—they wanted the smaller ship’s functioning, forward-facing radar to be in the lead, making up for the Bismarck‘s blind spot. At the same time the Germans were executing this maneuver, a snow storm blew in. The snow caused the British radar to display all sorts of false readings. The result being that the Brits never realized that the German ships had exchanged places. As dawn drew near, the British proceeded under the belief that the Bismarck was in the lead and they positioned themselves accordingly. She was not.
Instead of being able to cross the “T,” with overwhelming force, the British were now in an unfavorable position. Their cruisers were too far away to get quickly engaged. Their battleships were caught with their guns trained on the smaller German ship and totally exposed to the Bismarck‘s big guns. Five minutes after the Bismarck opened fire, the Hood exploded. She would sink in minutes.
By the time the shooting was finished, the Germans would suffer only minimal damage while the British lost the Hood and had their other battleship, the Prince of Wales, crippled. All because of random radar damage and a snow squall.
The obvious lesson—for war, politics, and life—is that very small events can be decisive.
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Tangentially Relevant:
Fred Thompson, FTW, on twitter: “Movie “Battleship” projected to lose $200M. Not unexpected. It’s a Navy movie with aliens & battleships instead of Russians and me.”
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BTW^2 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. put together an outstanding multimedia showcase for his original articles:
http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/
(The strange defect however is its reliance upon some arcane software doohickey known as “RealPlayer”)
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Not to mention the staggering bad luck of the absolute perfect placement of Bismarck’s shot that blew up the Hood.
Nedward June 1, 2012 at 1:17 pm
JL– can’t locate my copy around the house but there is an early section in “Black Hawk Down” which has the radio op, after fast-roping from the helicopter, not realizing that the wire for his communication piece had worn through due to catching in his grip. Per the narrative of that initial phase this proves to be a seriously unfortunate glitch (among numerous other snafus).
BTW for trying to get one’s mind around the chaos of battle I highly recommend Bowden’s book, even if you’ve already seen the movie. At the very least it’s a vivid treatise on teamwork under pressure.