- The US Navy gathered more than 90 captured and surplus warships in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll. It wanted to know what an atomic bomb does to a fleet.
One of the targets was a German heavy cruiser that had already lived through more than most ships ever see. Prinz Eugen had fought alongside Bismarck, run the English Channel in daylight under the noses of the Royal Navy, lost her stern to a submarine torpedo, and ended the war intact while almost every other big German warship lay on the bottom.
She survived two atomic bombs. Then she sank from a leak.
The lucky ship
Prinz Eugen was launched at Kiel on August 22, 1938, and commissioned on August 1, 1940. She was an Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruiser, named for Prince Eugene of Savoy, the 18th-century general. Her sister Admiral Hipper would later fight at the Battle of the Barents Sea.
In May 1941 she sailed with Bismarck on Operation Rheinübung, the breakout into the Atlantic. On May 24, in the Denmark Strait, the two German ships met HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. Prinz Eugen scored on Hood early with a high-explosive 20.3 cm shell. She also hit Prince of Wales. Eight minutes into the fight, Hood blew up. Three of her crew of more than 1,400 survived.
The two German ships separated that evening. Bismarck was hunted down and sunk three days later. Prinz Eugen slipped away into the Atlantic and reached Brest.
In February 1942 she joined the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in Operation Cerberus, the Channel Dash. Three German capital ships ran from Brest through the Strait of Dover to Germany in broad daylight. Prinz Eugen came through undamaged, with one man killed by aircraft fire.
Her luck had limits. Days after arriving in Norway, the British submarine HMS Trident put a torpedo into her stern. Fifty men died. The whole stern had to be cut away and the ship steered home on two jury-rigged rudders.
She spent the rest of the war in the Baltic, training cadets and then firing her guns in support of the German army as it fell back from the Soviet advance. In October 1944 she rammed the light cruiser Leipzig in heavy fog.
By May 1945, Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, Hipper, and Blücher were all gone. Prinz Eugen was decommissioned at Copenhagen on May 7, 1945, and handed to the Royal Navy the next day. Over the whole war, she lost 115 men: 79 killed in action, 33 in accidents, and three from other causes. For a ship that had been in the thick of it since 1941, that is a short list.
A war prize nobody wanted
The Allies divided up the surviving German ships. Prinz Eugen was awarded to the United States on December 13, 1945. On January 5, 1946, she was commissioned as USS Prinz Eugen (IX-300).
She arrived at Boston on January 22 for examination. American engineers removed her GHG passive sonar array, one of the best in the world at the time, and fitted it to the submarine USS Flying Fish for trials. Her guns in A turret were taken out at Philadelphia. The Navy had no use for a German cruiser with German machinery, German spare parts, and German wiring diagrams. It did have a use for a target.
From there she headed for the Pacific and the Marshall Islands.
Two atomic bombs
Operation Crossroads had two shots, both of about 23 kilotons. Prinz Eugen was not the only famous name in the lagoon. The target fleet included the American battleship Arkansas, the carrier Saratoga, and the Japanese battleship Nagato, the flagship from which Admiral Yamamoto had directed the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Test Able, July 1, 1946. A B-29 dropped the bomb over the anchored fleet. It missed its aim point by about 710 yards, which is part of why damage was lighter than expected. Five ships sank. Prinz Eugen, moored roughly 1,200 yards from the blast, came out with a bent foremast and the top of her mainmast broken off.
Test Baker, July 25. This time the bomb hung 90 feet below a landing ship in the lagoon. The explosion threw two million tons of water and seabed sand into a column about 6,000 feet tall and 2,000 feet wide. Ten ships sank, among them the aircraft carrier Saratoga. Prinz Eugen, again about 1,200 yards away, was still floating when the spray came down.
That spray was the real problem. It coated the target fleet in radioactive fallout. Sailors tried to scrub the ships with brushes, water, soap, and lye. Nothing worked short of sandblasting to bare metal. The medical chief, Colonel Stafford Warren, worried most about plutonium, which Geiger counters could not detect, and stopped the cleanup. The Navy ended Operation Crossroads on August 10, 1946. A third planned shot was cancelled.
Prinz Eugen was now too contaminated for anyone to work on her for long. In September 1946 she was towed to Kwajalein Atoll. She was decommissioned on August 29, 1946, before the tow.
The leak
At Kwajalein a small leak went unrepaired. Boarding parties could not stay aboard long enough to find and fix it. The water came in slowly for months.
On December 21, 1946, she began to list badly. An attempt was made to beach her on the reef at Enubuj island. On December 22 she rolled over and sank in shallow water.
She survived two atomic bombs and sank because of a leak nobody could get close enough to fix.
Still there
The wreck lies upside down off Enubuj, about two miles northwest of the airfield on Kwajalein. She is 681 feet long. Her stern sits so high that two of her three propellers stick out of the water. You can see them on Google Maps.
The third propeller was recovered in August 1979 and now stands at the Laboe Naval Memorial near Kiel, the city where she was launched.
Divers who visit the wreck start at about 16 feet and follow the hull down a sand slope to around 118 feet. They report thick cables, open hatches, sea fans growing on the hull, and a compartment still holding torpedoes.
Of all the ships that fought at the Denmark Strait, she is the only one you can still see.
Sources
- German cruiser Prinz Eugen (Wikipedia)
- Operation Crossroads (Atomic Heritage Foundation)
- Kwajalein’s Shipwrecks (Divers Alert Network)
- Delgado, James P. Nuclear Dawn: The Atomic Bomb from the Manhattan Project to the Cold War. Osprey, 2009.
