Always Getting Second Billing:
The Cruiser 'Prinz Eugen'
By Doug McNair
May 2006

It’s ironic that the best-known warship in the history of the German navy is also one whose active-duty career was among the shortest in naval history. Indeed, Bismarck’s lasting notoriety is probably due more to the romanticization of her doomed mission by authors and movie-makers than anything else. As mentioned in previous articles on this website, Bismarck was not well suited to the commerce-raiding mission she ended up with.

In fact, Bismarck's very existence was of dubious value to the Nazi war effort, and was predicated on her being part of a much larger surface fleet that would be built and strengthened until the outbreak of war with Britain no earlier than 1943. The navy’s commander, Adm. Erich Raeder, pushed for a fleet built around surface warships. His eventual successor, Adm. Karl Dönitz, believed that the Kriegsmarine could not hope to build a surface fleet to challenge the Royal Navy before war broke out and instead lobbied hard for a German fleet composed mainly of U-Boats, armed merchant cruisers, and a few pocket battleships. But Hitler’s fascination with huge capital ships as symbols of German military might won out, and thus was born the Nazi fleet whose ultimate weapon lasted just over a week on the open seas.

But while Bismarck saw only one successful action before her sinking, her consort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, survived Operation Rheinübung and went on to a career that had plenty of drama in its own right. She survived so much hostile action that she became known as a “lucky ship,” a moniker that would prove an understatement when she ended up surviving the most powerful weapons World War II ever unleashed.

Cruiser Prinz Eugen.

Much better suited to commerce raiding than Bismarck, Prinz Eugen had a top speed of 32 knots, enough to make lightning raids on Allied convoys and outrun most ships which could threaten her. On her own she might have done well, but Hitler’s super-battleship needed an escort, and all the other capital ships scheduled to participate in Operation Rheinübung had been damaged or were going through refit. Waiting for the other ships to be made ready was out of the question; it was imperative to divert British attention and naval forces from the Mediterranean so supply convoys to Afrika Korps could get through more easily, and to clear the way for the Axis invasion of Crete. So, after spending some time in dry dock due to a mine hit, Prinz Eugen sailed with Bismarck and broke out into the Atlantic from Bergen on 21 May 1941.

Prinz Eugen fought ably beside Bismarck in her action against the battlecruiser HMS Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales on May 24th. Prinz Eugen was first to hit Hood, starting a large fire aboard her before Bismarck hit her magazine and blew her out of existence. The two ships then concentrated on Prince of Wales and forced her to withdraw. Prinz Eugen took no hits, but damage to Bismarck from two 14-inch shells slowed her and made her start leaking fuel. So, Rheinübung’s mission commander Admiral Lütjens decide to separate the two ships, letting Prinz Eugen go raiding on her own while Bismarck tried to evade her pursuers or make a run for German-held St. Nazaire on the French coast. Prinz Eugen escaped southward, and three days later Bismarck was on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Another view of Prinz Eugen.

Prinz Eugen made it to Brest on 1 June, having seen no other action along the way. For the rest of that year, she and the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau remained at Brest, serving as a “fleet in being” to tie down British forces that might cause trouble elsewhere. This inaction was far from ideal as far as Grand Admiral Raeder was concerned, but Hitler’s near-complete refusal to let surface ships sortie after the loss of Bismarck left him with few options. But in the end, Hitler’s obsessions would give Prinz Eugen her freedom just as they had imprisoned her at Brest. Hitler was convinced the Allies were going to invade Norway, and ordered Raeder to send Prinz Eugen, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau from Brest, up the English Channel, and back to Germany via the Baltic ports.

The “Channel Dash” was carried out in broad daylight, its audacity (or worse . . .) taking the British completely by surprise. Foggy weather helped get the ships past Dover before the first British forces arrived on the scene, and those attacks that did come were uncoordinated and weak. Mines did far more damage than British air and sea forces — Scharnhorst struck two mines and Gneisenau struck one before they reached their destination. But Prinz Eugen made it to Brunsbüttel unscathed on February 13, 1942, two days after leaving Brest.

Later that month, Prinz Eugen was torpedoed by a British sub while on her way to join other German capital ships massing for the defense of Norway. She lost her rudder, but made it to Trondheim and spent most of the rest of 1942 there and in Kiel for repairs. She remained in the Baltic for the rest of her active duty career, first serving as a training ship, then providing fire support for German troops fighting the advancing Soviets, and finally evacuating German civilians from eastern Baltic ports as their precious Lebensraum collapsed around them. At one point during these operations she accidentally rammed the German light cruiser Leipzig, cutting her nearly in half. Leipzig never regained operational capability, but Prinz Eugen shook it off and was back in action one month later.

Workers at Philadelphia Navy Yard remove Prinz Eugen’s armament prior to Operation Crossroads.

The last (and luckiest) chapter in Prinz Eugen’s story began when she surrendered to the Allies at Copenhagen on 7 May 1945. Put into service by the U.S. Navy (under the prosaic new name IX-45), she was taken to Boston in January 1946 and then to Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in May. The American crew could not keep her balky and complicated high-pressure steam lines operating, and she had to be towed most of the way.

On 1 July 1946, an atomic bomb was dropped just over 1,000 yards away from her. Salvage crews were sent in immediately to assess the effect of an A-bomb on a naval vessel. They found no significant damage to Prinz Eugen! Then on 25 July, another A-bomb was exploded underwater, 2,000 yards away from Prinz Eugen, and again there was no significant damage! This weird post-war triumph of German engineering could seemingly have gone on and on, but after surviving two close-range nuclear blasts Prinz Eugen was too radioactive to board and maintain. She was taken out of the testing program and sent to Kwajalein Atoll to rot, where she sprang leaks and finally capsized and sank at the end of 1946.

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