Chapter 6 Sea Fortress
65 degrees north latitude, 57 degrees west longitude, Davis Strait.
It was pale, and everywhere was the ice cut by icebreakers, and the bitter cold wind blew from the northeast, and large and small ice cubes floated to the southwest, colliding with each other.
The blizzard followed the east wind, rampant and wanton, eager to bury the sea area immediately, and the temperature of minus ten degrees Celsius made the newly cracked ice surface condense almost instantly.
Davis is the strait that connects Baffin Bay to the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond Davis is Baffin Bay, the "northern waterway".
Baffin Bay is a snowy country all year round, and from Davis to Ita, half of Baffin Bay is covered by a huge block of ice, where seals and walruses bask on this natural deck chair, and snow owls and sea eagles hover in the air, occasionally swooping down to take away some sawfish.
To the north of Ita is a different story, with warm currents that keep the waters from ice, and where Eskimo fishing boats come and go, and large numbers of dolphins and whales migrate south.
Half of it is ice, half of it is water.
……
The black ship slid silently across the ice, as if the indestructible ice cracked one by one on the bow of the big ship, like melting ice and snow by a fire, the four-axis propeller rotated at extreme speed under the impetus of nuclear power, the white waves surged, and the sea surface of the big ship pulled out a channel with no boundless edge.
No ship can sail on the Baffin Bay Ice Track, and the extreme cold has caused the sea surface to form ice tens of meters thick, and even the Russian Lenin, which dominates the world, can only be deterred when it arrives here, except for August and September, no ship dares to touch the Baffin Bay Ice Road in other months.
However, the big black ship sailed the ice as easily as if it were unstoppable, and the ice cracked at its massive bow as if it were sailing in the calm Pacific Ocean.
It was like a black dragon, swimming silently, everything that stood in its way was destroyed, everything it touched was wiped out, it moved aimlessly, everywhere it went, everywhere it went.
If an old German man who had lived through World War II saw this ship, he would have jumped up in shock and slapped his thigh, and he would have excitedly pointed to the big ship and said, "Look! Look! This is incredible! Didn't our super battleship sink? How could it come back?"
Their supership sank, but miraculously survived.
The international situation in the thirties of the twentieth century was very chaotic, and even the maritime situation began to become delicate, first with the expiration of the Washington Naval Treaty, and then with the refusal of Japan, Italy, France, and Germany to participate in the London Naval Treaty. The Soviet shipbuilding program was carried out vigorously, and other countries began to red-eyed, especially Germany, which had been defeated in the navy, and began to build without restrictions, and it was against this background that Bismarck began to build.
The battleship Bismarck, named after the Prussian iron-blooded prime minister Bismarck, embodies the crystallization of Germany's most advanced industrial and technological wisdom, and its armament is beyond the reach of contemporaries, Hitler called it "the pride of the German navy", and people in the world call it "an unsinkable steel fortress on the sea".
The Bismarck was the strongest German warship at the time, with four main turrets and light shells with high muzzle velocity, powerful and high-rate-of-fire, capable of destroying any ship at a distance of 15 miles, and was an icy slaughtering machine.
In 1941, the Bismarck sailed out of the Danish Channel and met two British warships, the "Hood" and the "Prince of Wales".
When the news reached Britain, the whole country was shocked, just as the Americans felt about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the British could not believe that the Hood, which had the glorious history of the Royal Navy, was sunk in just a few minutes. If the Bismarck could sink the Hood in six minutes, what else could not be done?
After careful consideration, Churchill decided to gather all the sea forces and carry out an encirclement and suppression of the Bismarck.
On May 26, 1941, the Bismarck encountered a storm at sea. The offensive of the British also began. The 15 "Swordfish" torpedo bombers that took off from the aircraft carrier "Ark Royal" launched a fierce attack on the "Bismarck" through the storm, and one torpedo hit the stern propeller, causing the "Bismarck" to lose control of its direction and could only spin in place, and the British fleet immediately surrounded it. On the 27th, the battleships "Rodney" and "George V" of the Royal Navy opened fire on the Bismarck, and for a moment the artillery fired a salvo, and soon three other British battleships joined the battle. Shells passed through the upper hull and crew of the "Bismarck".
The British bombardment lasted an hour and a half, and nearly 3,000 shells were thrown at the "Bismarck," but what is surprising was that the "Bismarck" really became an "unsinkable steel fortress on the sea" under such a blow, and it was always floating on the sea. In the end, the British could only send it completely into the abyss by launching torpedoes from cruisers.
From the 24th to the 27th, only three days, this column of battleships, known as the "pride of the German Navy", unfortunately immersed in the icy Atlantic, and a generation of aces was declared annihilated.
In 1988, an American expedition team began to search for the Bismarck sunk at the bottom of the sea under the sponsorship of a mysterious dealer.
In the following year, the expedition chartered the British search ship "Hercules Star" and conducted another search for more than 10 days, and finally found the wreckage of the battleship Bismarck lying quietly on the bottom of the ocean at a depth of nearly 5,000 meters. Unlike the Titanic, which was divided into two sections, the Bismarck's hull was preserved quite intact, almost as well as when it sank.
The wreck of the Bismarck was bought by a mysterious dealer who sponsored the expedition for a sky-high price, and it has not been heard of for nearly thirty miles since then, and now it is sailing intact in the place where it fought, with its head held high, as if mocking the planes and warships that once surrounded it, you are gone, and I am still the overlord of this sea.