Prinz Eugen

Prinz Eugen was the third and finest of the German Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruisers, named for the great 18th-century soldier Prince Eugene of Savoy. Like the Italian Zaras, she was a 'treaty cruiser' in name only: nominally bound by the 10,000-ton limit, she in fact displaced close to 16,970 tons standard, and far more at full load.

Commissioned in August 1940, she carried eight 20.3 cm (203 mm) SK C/34 guns in four twin turrets and could make over 32 knots. Heavily built and handsome, she was also famously complex and fuel-hungry — but she would prove one of the luckiest warships of the entire war.

The Hipper class were large, powerful and technically advanced, but their three-shaft geared turbine plant of ~132,000 shp was elaborate, maintenance-intensive and thirsty, giving the ships a disappointing radius of action for commerce raiding. Protection was moderate for their size — a belt of around 70–80 mm — placing them between a true heavy cruiser and a light capital ship.

Prinz Eugen's strengths lay in her excellent optical fire control and her fast, accurate main battery, which she would demonstrate to devastating effect at the Denmark Strait. Her standard displacement of roughly 16,970 t, full-load figure near 18,750 t, and speed of 32 knots made her among the most formidable cruisers afloat — when fuel and machinery allowed her to put to sea at all.

In May 1941 Prinz Eugen sailed on Operation Rheinübung as consort to the battleship Bismarck. On the morning of 24 May, in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the two German ships engaged the British battlecruiser Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales.

Prinz Eugen, leading, opened fire with great accuracy and her 20.3 cm shells are believed to have started a fire on Hood's deck moments before Bismarck's salvo blew the battlecruiser apart, killing all but three of her 1,418 men. The cruiser also scored hits on Prince of Wales. Detached afterwards to raid alone, she suffered engine trouble and slipped into Brest, while Bismarck was hunted down and sunk — Prinz Eugen surviving the operation that destroyed her famous partner.

In February 1942 Prinz Eugen took part in the audacious Channel Dash (Operation Cerberus), steaming with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau up the English Channel in broad daylight from Brest to Germany. Days later, off Norway, she was torpedoed by the submarine HMS Trident, which blew off her stern; she limped home and was repaired.

Three days after the Channel Dash brought her safely from Brest to Germany, her luck briefly ran out. On 23 February 1942, off Norway, the British submarine HMS Trident put a torpedo into her stern. It blew off some ten metres of the ship and wrecked her steering gear, and she limped to Trondheim steering on her engines. That she survived at all says something about the design: Admiral Hipper-class cruisers were large for their type, and the size that made them expensive to build also gave them the internal volume to absorb damage that would have broken a smaller ship. A temporary stern was fitted in Norway and a permanent repair completed in Kiel, and by the end of the year she was operational again — the beginning of a pattern that would define her.

From mid-1944 Prinz Eugen became, in effect, the heavy artillery of the collapsing Eastern Front. Operating from Gotenhafen, she fired thousands of 20.3 cm rounds in support of the army: at Tukums in August 1944 her guns helped reopen the land corridor to Army Group North, and through the autumn and winter she pounded Soviet spearheads on the Sworbe peninsula and in Samland and East Prussia, shooting until her barrels wore out.

She also covered the seaborne exodus of Operation Hannibal — the evacuation of well over a million soldiers and refugees across the Baltic — estimates run as high as two million, the largest such operation in history. When the war ended she was in Copenhagen, intact, with ammunition nearly spent: the last operational heavy unit of the Kriegsmarine.

She ended the war intact — the only major German surface warship to do so — and was handed to the United States, which had rather less interest in a heavy cruiser than in what one would do when an atomic bomb went off next to it. In 1946 she was towed to Bikini Atoll for Operation Crossroads and anchored 1,200 yards from ground zero.

She survived both tests. The airburst, Able, did little visible damage; the underwater shot, Baker, opened leaks that could not be repaired — not because the damage was beyond repair, but because the radioactivity made working on the hull impossible. Towed to Kwajalein, she took on water slowly for months and finally capsized in December 1946. Her wreck lies there still, in shallow water, with her propellers above the surface: a ship that fought the Hood, ran the Channel, was torpedoed, survived the war and two nuclear weapons, and was finally beaten by an atoll and a leak nobody was allowed to fix.

Prinz Eugen was the most successful and longest-lived of Germany's major surface warships — not through great victories, but through sheer survival. She fired the opening shots of the war's most famous battleship duel, ran the gauntlet of the Channel, and fought to the last in the Baltic while every one of her larger consorts was sunk.

She outlived the Kriegsmarine itself. Surrendered intact in 1945 and handed to the United States, she was expended as a target in the 1946 atomic-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, surviving the blasts only to capsize at Kwajalein months later — where her wreck still lies. The 'lucky ship' of the German navy met her end not to an enemy shell, but to the nuclear age she had outlasted the war to see.

• Gerhard Koop & Klaus-Peter Schmolke, Heavy Cruisers of the Admiral Hipper Class (Naval Institute Press).
• Angus Konstam, German Heavy Cruisers 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• M. J. Whitley, German Cruisers of World War Two (Arms & Armour).