German cruiser Prinz Eugen

Prinz Eugen was the third of five Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruisers, ordered in the naval rearmament that followed the Nazi Party's repudiation of the Versailles disarmament clauses. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 allowed Germany five 10,000-long-ton 'treaty cruisers'; the Admiral Hippers were nominally within that limit but significantly exceeded it — Prinz Eugen displaced over 16,000 long tons. The Kriegsmarine ordered her from the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel, where her keel was laid on 23 April 1936 under the contract name 'Kreuzer J'.

She was nearly named for Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, the Austrian admiral who won the Battle of Lissa, but the Kriegsmarine chose Prinz Eugen instead to avoid insulting Italy, the power Tegetthoff had defeated. At her launch on 22 August 1938, Adolf Hitler attended alongside the Hungarian regent Admiral Miklós Horthy — who had himself commanded the Austro-Hungarian battleship SMS Prinz Eugen in 1917–18 — and Horthy's wife Magdolna Purgly performed the christening. After launching, her straight bow was replaced with a clipper bow, lengthening the ship to 212.5 metres and keeping her foredeck drier in heavy weather.

Three sets of geared steam turbines, fed by twelve ultra-high-pressure oil-fired boilers, delivered 132,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 32 knots. Her main battery was eight 20.3 cm guns in four twin turrets, backed by twelve 10.5 cm anti-aircraft guns, lighter flak, and four triple 53.3 cm torpedo launchers. Three Arado Ar 196 seaplanes flew reconnaissance from a catapult. The armoured belt ran 70 to 80 mm thick, with a main armoured deck of 20 to 50 mm and turret faces of 105 mm. Damaged lightly by RAF bombs at Kiel in July 1940, she commissioned on 1 August.

In May 1941 Prinz Eugen, under Kapitän zur See Helmuth Brinkmann, joined the battleship Bismarck for Operation Rheinübung, a breakout into the Atlantic to raid Allied commerce. The pair sailed from Gotenhafen, were spotted and reported by the Swedish cruiser Gotland in the Kattegat, and paused at Bergen — where Prinz Eugen took on 764 tons of fuel while Bismarck inexplicably failed to refuel. Bletchley Park's code-breakers confirmed a raid was imminent. On 23 May, dashing through the Denmark Strait at 27 knots, the Germans were found and shadowed by the cruisers HMS Suffolk and HMS Norfolk, which relayed their position through the night.

At dawn on 24 May, Prinz Eugen's hydrophones picked up two fast turbine ships at twenty nautical miles: the battlecruiser HMS Hood and battleship HMS Prince of Wales under Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland. Hood opened fire at 05:52 — on Prinz Eugen, which the British had mistaken for Bismarck. Both German ships concentrated on Hood, and about a minute after opening fire Prinz Eugen hit her with a 20.3 cm high-explosive shell, detonating unrotated-projectile ammunition and starting a fire. Ordered to shift target, she then scored two hits on Prince of Wales.

At 06:00 Bismarck's fifth salvo reached Hood's rear ammunition magazine and detonated 112 tons of cordite. The explosion broke the ship's back; after only eight minutes of firing Hood was gone, taking all but three of her 1,419 men. The damaged Prince of Wales withdrew. Admiral Lütjens detached Prinz Eugen on the evening of 24 May to raid shipping alone while Bismarck, leaking oil from a bow hit, drew off the pursuit. Engine defects cut the cruise short: on 27 May, the day Bismarck was sunk, Prinz Eugen was ordered to France, and she slipped into Brest undiscovered on 1 June.

Brest lay within easy reach of English airfields, and the RAF dropped some 1,200 tons of bombs on the port between August and December 1941 — joking that Prinz Eugen, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were the 'Brest Bomb Target Flotilla'. On 1 July 1941 an armour-piercing bomb destroyed Prinz Eugen's control centre below the bridge, killing 60 men. Hitler, seeing Norway as the 'zone of destiny', ordered the three ships home through the Channel. In Operation Cerberus, on 11–13 February 1942, they ran it in daylight at 27 knots under a Luftwaffe fighter shield directed by Adolf Galland. Six attacking Swordfish were all shot down; Prinz Eugen fought off five British destroyers, hitting Worcester, and reached Brunsbüttel undamaged.

Norway proved a brief posting. Two days after arriving, on 23 February 1942, the British submarine Trident torpedoed her off the Trondheimsfjord. The hit wrecked her stern, killed fifty men and left her unmanoeuvrable; her entire stern was cut away and plated over, with two jury-rigged rudders worked by hand capstans, before she returned to Germany under her own power in May. After repairs and months training cadets in the Baltic, she was reactivated for combat on 1 October 1943 as the Red Army pushed west.

As flagship of Task Force Thiele she became a floating artillery battery for the retreating German Army. On 19–20 August 1944 she fired 265 main-battery shells into Tukums in the Gulf of Riga, a bombardment the article credits as instrumental in repulsing the Soviet attack. In October she fired over a thousand rounds supporting the defence of Memel — and, returning in fog on 15 October, rammed the light cruiser Leipzig amidships, nearly cutting her in half; the ships were wedged together for fourteen hours. In 1945 she bombarded Soviet forces in Samland and around Gotenhafen, Danzig and Hela, expending thousands of shells before ammunition ran out. She reached Copenhagen on 20 April and was surrendered on 8 May.

Prinz Eugen and the light cruiser Nürnberg were the only major German warships to survive the war in serviceable condition. In December 1945 she was awarded to the United States — not because the Americans wanted her, but to keep her from the Soviet Union. Her American commander, Captain Arthur H. Graubart, recalled the prize lots being drawn lottery-style from his own hat. Commissioned as USS Prinz Eugen, IX-300, she crossed to Boston in January 1946 with a composite crew of 574 Germans and 93 Americans. The US Navy studied her closely: her big GHG passive sonar array went to the submarine USS Flying Fish, and her fire-control system revived American interest in magnetic-amplifier technology.

Assigned as a target for Operation Crossroads, she rode out two atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll — the Able air burst on 1 July 1946 and the submerged Baker shot on 25 July — moored about 1,200 yards from each epicentre. The blasts bent her foremast and broke her main mast top but caused no significant structural damage; the fallout, however, contaminated her thoroughly. Towed to Kwajalein Atoll, she was decommissioned on 29 August 1946. A small leak went unrepaired because of the radiation danger, and on 22 December 1946 she capsized and sank, her main turrets falling out of their barbettes as she rolled.

Her stern and propeller assemblies still break the surface off Enubuj, near Bucholz Army Airfield. The US denied salvage rights to keep contaminated steel off the market, but in 1979 one screw propeller was retrieved for the Laboe Naval Memorial in Germany; her bell is held at the National Museum of the United States Navy. In 2018, fearing a typhoon could rupture the wreck's full bunkers, US Navy divers working from USNS Salvor pumped roughly 250,000 US gallons of fuel oil out of her tanks — 97 per cent of what remained aboard after seventy years underwater.