Revealing Hitler's Killer Warships (Full Episode) | Drain the Oceans | National Geographic

NARRATOR: A terrifying Nazi plan. An armada of super-ships sent out to conquer the world. TONY: When these ships were being built, they seemed revolutionary. They were capable of almost anything. NARRATOR: They are fast and lethal. JAMES: When it punched it punched hard. NARRATOR: But in a series of epic battles, Hitler's mighty killer warships are sent plunging to the bottom of the seas. FREDRIK: That's a big hole. NARRATOR: Imagine if we could empty the oceans, letting the water drain away to reveal the secrets of the sea floor? Now we can, using accurate data and astonishing technology, to bring light once again to a lost world. What can shattered remains in a Norwegian fjord tell us about the Nazi Navy's fatal weakness? ERIC: The Norwegians decided they ought to open fire, which they did, with very great effect. NARRATOR: Can a tangled wreck in South America reveal the truth behind a shocking sacrifice? JAMES: Hitler would have preferred a blazing battle out of a Wagner opera. NARRATOR: And can the remains of Hitler's largest ever battleship reveal evidence of a secret Allied wonder weapon? (theme music plays). In the 1930s, Britannia still rules the waves, with the world's largest and most powerful Navy. But as soon as Hitler seizes power in 1933, he sets out to challenge it. ERIC: Hitler had introduced this plan to build this huge fleet, ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, 160 destroyers, tens of cruisers. NARRATOR: When the War begins in 1939, much of this gigantic fleet is still on the drawing board, but Hitler does have something special. Powerful ocean raiders, capable of matching anything in the Royal Navy, immediately deployed, with deadly effect. In the South Atlantic, Nazi raider, Graf Spee, is hunting down merchant convoys carrying vital supplies to Europe. In just three months, she sinks nine ships. Allied warships race to hunt her down. Three British cruisers, Exeter, Ajax and Achilles, spot their enemy off the coast of Uruguay. The British open fire. It's the first major sea battle of World War II. For the Graf Spee, it's also her last. But at the battle site itself, there's no sign of her. (radio chatter) Jim Delgado, maritime archaeologist from SEARCH, Inc., is heading into the treacherous River Plate, searching for the wreck. The waters here are turbulent and murky, so Jim is using high-tech multi-beam sonar to scan the estuary. JAMES: We're in shallow water. ALFREDO: Very shallow waters between eight to ten meters. NARRATOR: With him is experienced Graf Spee researcher, Alfredo Etchegaray. If they find it, he'll recognize it. ALFREDO: The total length was about 188 meters. JAMES: Right. NARRATOR: The Graf Spee is a small battleship, for good reason. After World War I, German naval construction is tightly regulated. Her warships must be small in number and size. (speaking German) But Hitler works around the rules, creating a class of warship that's compact, but also very powerful, like the Graf Spee. JAMES: Graf Spee is designed to be a fast, hit and run raider. It's "Panzerschiff," it's a panther on the seas. NARRATOR: With her thin armor plating, the Graf Spee is light, fast and maneuverable, and armed to the teeth. Six 11 inch guns and eight torpedo tubes. JAMES: Wow! NARRATOR: There's a wreck. JAMES: OK, wow! So, it's still pretty intact. You've got your bow here, decking is missing there, but there's forward gun turret. ALFREDO: Yes. JAMES: Right here, yes? ALFREDO: That's right. NARRATOR: The sonar images match Alfredo's plans. It's definitely the Graf Spee. So, why is it lying on the ocean floor here, far from the scene of the battle? JAMES: There's something more that goes on here. NARRATOR: Diving the wreck is difficult. The waters here are dangerous, with almost zero visibility, but by using the scan data, we can make the South Atlantic disappear, to let light fall once again on one of Hitler's favorite warships, seeing the Graf Spee for the first time in 80 years. Much of her is intact. But the hull has suffered badly. And at the stern, the whole rear section is blown off, completely separated from the hull. Can the battle explain this damage? JAMES: Three small British vessels were outgunned and outmatched by Graf Spee. NARRATOR: The encounter is intense. The Graf Spee pounds the British cruisers, causing immense damage. But then the German Captain makes a tactical error. He moves in too close, allowing the British to surround their prey. ERIC: The three British cruisers peppered Graf Spee with eight inch and six inch shells. They scored some quite significant hits. They put a big hole through the bow. NARRATOR: But the shell damage alone could not have been enough to sink her, because the wreck is here, hundreds of miles from the battle site. Local archives show that on December 14th, the Graf Spee sails into the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo for essential repairs. Her Captain, Hans Langsdorff, thinks his ship will be safe in this neutral country. JAMES: When he came in here, he was low on ammunition, he had a ship that was shot full of holes, had some critical systems down. And he also had 1,000 crew, many of 'em young boys. NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the Royal Navy is gathering strength offshore. ERIC: And all the time they keep watch in international waters, waiting to see what he'll do. NARRATOR: Langsdorff requests 15 days to make Uruguay may be neutral, but the Allies are important trade partners, so the Government gives him just three days. The Captain has two choices, remain in Uruguay and have his ship impounded, or leave port and face the British fleet. JAMES: The difficult choice he now has to make is does he go back out and fight, or does he do something else? NARRATOR: With a battle-scarred ship and low on ammunition, Langsdorff leaves port with just a skeleton crew. It looks like a suicide mission, but the Captain has another plan. JAMES: He decides to do something else, and that's to scuttle his ship. NARRATOR: At 7:55 PM, on December 17th, massive charges on the ship explode, bombs carefully placed by the Graf Spee's own crew. One is so powerful, the stern is blown clean off. The Graf Spee starts to sink into the mud of the River Plate. The Führer is enraged. JAMES: What Hitler would have preferred was something out of a Wagner opera, with Langsdorff and his crew dying heroically in a blazing battle that saw Graf Spee explode and sink. is labeled a coward. In his hotel room, he commits suicide. Hitler has lost one of his deadliest battleships, but how does a wreck in Scandinavia reveal his determination to build still more of them? NARRATOR: Oslofjord, Norway. Nearly 500 feet of deep, dark water. The research vessel, Simrad Echo, is out hunting for a lost Nazi raider, a key part of Hitler's plans for an armada of super-warships. Maritime archaeologist, Fredrik Søreide, is fascinated by them. MAN: Oh, there it is! MAN: This is it, right there. MAN: Oh, yeah, it's coming. MAN: Yeah. MAN: OK. FREDRIK: So, we're doing a multi-beam scan of the sea floor and we have just come over the wreck of the Blücher, so it's a big structure. NARRATOR: Today, the Blücher lies over 300 feet down. The team deploys a remotely operated vehicle with video cameras. Fredrik knows the Blücher was lost in April 1940, so what was a huge Nazi warship doing in these neutral waters? To unravel the mystery means understanding Hitler's naval master plan in more detail. Six months into the conflict, the German Navy is still heavily outnumbered. The Nazis need to build, fast, but Germany is running out of raw materials. TONY: Hitler needs as much iron as he can get. NARRATOR: Starved of steel and the iron ore to make it, Hitler has only one option, to crush his northern neighbor, Norway. The port of Narvik is key. It's the route out for shipping iron ore to Germany from the mines in northern Scandinavia. Hitler also knows that Norway's long coastline gives easy access to the North Atlantic, where his raiders can strike at a moment's notice. TONY: The double whammy of needing this iron ore, plus the ability of Norway to protect his ships, many of which will have been built out of that iron ore, makes Norway vital. NARRATOR: The Nazis need to move fast, so they assemble the most powerful naval force they have, led by a brand-new fighting ship, the Blücher. Weighing in at over 14,000 tons, this warship breaks all the limits imposed on Germany after World War I. Fore and aft, pairs of innovative stacked guns for rapid firing, and a powerful anti-aircraft battery, all making the Blücher Hitler's Number One choice to lead this critical attack. It's secret mission, sail up Oslofjord, train it's terrifying guns on the Royal Palace, and force Norway to surrender without firing a shot. Hitler is not expecting a lot of resistance from this neutral country, but the Blücher never makes it to Oslo. Back on the Simrad Echo, Fredrik is trying to find out why. FREDRIK: So we think we're looking at one of the gun turrets that's fallen off, probably. NARRATOR: These cameras can only show a limited view of the wreck. NARRATOR: But using the high-resolution scan data, we can now do better, draining back the icy waters to see the Blücher clearly for the first time since she set out to bully a nation into surrender. A massive hull, over 670 feet long, face down in the mud. Amid ships, a gaping wound clearly visible in the hull. The Blücher lies tilted on her left side, part of the keel lying hidden from view beneath the mud, but penetrating under the mud itself, it's possible to reveal something never seen before. Two gigantic holes below the water line, both of them fatal. FREDRIK: There is no doubt that the ship would sink as a result of getting such a hard impact. NARRATOR: And the mystery deepens. The Allies have no surface warships near Oslo. And the Norwegians have no active submarines in the area. What could have caused the holes? Investigation reveals something extraordinary below the surface, a mysterious cave. In 1940, the Germans know nothing about it. ERIC: The Norwegians were, and still are, to some extent, very good at keeping secrets about their coast defenses. NARRATOR: Cut into the rock face, a hidden entrance. Historian, Tony Pollard, is investigating. It's a secret torpedo launch chamber. TONY: These are incredible! The shaft just sinks down and the torpedoes presumably load from the back. NARRATOR: A double cradle hangs over the shaft. Torpedoes are slid into the frame, winched down into the water and fired. TONY: There's no indication whatsoever to the enemy. There's no splash as this thing hits the water. It's, it's literally coming out of the solid rock. It's amazing! NARRATOR: So, what happens on the night the Blücher is sent to conquer Norway? Early morning, all seems quiet. Heavily armed, the Blücher brazenly leads a task force right into Oslofjord. They're not expecting any resistance. Certainly not from the 19th Century Oscarsborg Fortress. ERIC: The Germans, I think, thought that, "Well, we don't have to worry about this. They won't fire, and if they do, it won't be effective." But they were putting their head into a noose. NARRATOR: The Commander of the Garrison spots the Blücher and her task force approaching. As the German ships pass in front of the fortress, he opens fire. Multiple shell strikes on Blücher cause severe damage. Fires break out on board, her rudder is jammed, but the Blücher limps on, unaware of the impending danger. ERIC: Having a secret torpedo nest in the island could come as a very nasty shock. NARRATOR: Each weapon carries 220 pounds of high explosives. ERIC: Cause torpedoes hit below the waterline, where the water comes in quite rapidly, and it did. NARRATOR: It takes just two torpedoes to stop the mighty Blücher in her tracks. And she soon capsizes. Hitler calls on the Luftwaffe and his Army to finish the job, and eventually they do seize control of Norway, but his plan for a world class Navy has taken another blow. TONY: The loss of the Blücher is particularly important. She is another one of these celebrity ships, brand new, cutting edge, but she's gone. She's at the bottom of this fjord, and, again, Hitler looks at the Navy and thinks, "What the hell's happening here?" NARRATOR: But the Nazis aren't done yet. One of Hitler's killer warships is set to achieve Germany's greatest ever naval victory, in a battle of the giants. NARRATOR: 1941, nearly 18 months into the war. France has fallen and Britain relies on supplies from across the Atlantic, but merchant convoys are vulnerable to attack from U-boats and Nazi ocean raiders. Most infamous of all, the Bismarck. In May, she's hunting Allied convoys, when HMS Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, tracks her down. The stakes are high in this heavyweight showdown, and there can be only one winner. So, why are both of these powerful battleships now lying in deep waters, 1,100 miles apart? As battle begins, the Bismarck has a slight upper hand. She's brand new and state of the art. Her 15 inch can fire an impressive 24 miles, and her deck armor plating is thick, at nearly five inches offering excellent protection from incoming shells. JAMES: Creating Bismarck is all part of a larger plan, to build powerful, iconic ships that are going to strike terror enforcing Hitler's will on the rest of the globe. NARRATOR: On the British side, the famous HMS Hood. She's bigger than Bismarck, at 860 feet long, but her main 15 inch guns are less powerful, firing just 17 miles, and her deck armor is thinner, at three inches. She's also nearly 25 years old. DAVID: The Hood had a tremendous reputation, not just in the UK, but around the world. It was the most powerful, fastest, most feared, but also most loved warship for a 20-year period, until the launch of the Bismarck. NARRATOR: Bismarck leaves her secret hideout in Norway. She plots a route through the Denmark Strait, west of Iceland, aiming for the North Atlantic and the Allied convoys. But she'll never make it that far. British Intelligence discovers Bismarck is on the move. Hood is one of three ships sent to intercept. So what happens when these two giants come face to face? Wreck investigator, David Mearns, is tracking down the wreck of the Hood. He knows Hitler's top spec battleship has the bigger punch, but just how much damage can the Bismarck inflict? The team begins to scan the sea floor at the last known location of the Hood in the Denmark Strait, but she's proving tough to find. Suddenly, the scan reveals a mysterious crater almost 330 feet wide. DAVID: I think this is it. NARRATOR: Could it be a vital clue in the hunt for the Hood? The crater is nearly two miles down, too deep to dive, so David must use a Remotely Operated Vehicle. It sends back tantalizing images, shattered debris that suggests a catastrophic event. Next, the ROV finds a section of hull. It's so massive it can only be the Hood. And it's overturned. DAVID: I've looked at 45 ships in deep water, and never found one completely turned over. NARRATOR: Bismarck's deadly firepower has delivered a knockout blow. DAVID: In every single way, she is as badly destroyed as anybody could have imagined or described. NARRATOR: Using David's data, it's now possible to drain away billions of gallons of water from the Denmark Strait, and fully expose the wreck site for the first time. Spread across one and a half miles of the sea floor, the shattered remains of over 40,000 tons of scarred and twisted metal. To the north, the conning tower. To the east, part of the bow and stern. Almost half mile away to the south, the largest intact section, the midships. The scattered remains suggest a massive explosion. DAVID: I wasn't expecting to see Hood as damaged as she was. That's what was completely unexpected. It was shocking and it was very upsetting, actually. NARRATOR: Superimposing parts of the wreck on to the original plans of the Hood reveals a missing part of the ship between the stern and midships. The missing section of ship is where an ammunition store was located. It looks like this is the epicenter of the explosion. DAVID: What we know is that Bismarck's shell hit Hood in the aft part of the ship, near the main mast. There was this enormous explosion. They, they talked about it like a blow lamp, 600 feet high. ERIC: The shot that sank the Hood was, in many ways, a very lucky one for the Germans. If that shell had landed a little bit further aft, Hood may not have blown up. NARRATOR: It's now possible to piece together how the Bismarck sank the Hood in one of the shortest battles in naval history. Early morning, Hood spots the Bismarck. At a distance of over 14 miles, Hood fires her twin 15 inch guns. Bismarck takes a hit, damaging her fuel tanks. She returns fire. A shell hits Hood right above the ammunition stores. The great warship disappears beneath the waves in less than three minutes, with the loss of over 1,400 men. ERIC: HMS Hood, this great symbol of British Imperial power, British sea power, blowing up the way she did, with only three survivors, came as an enormous shock. NARRATOR: For the first time in centuries, Britannia cannot claim to rule the waves, and in the propaganda war, at least, German sea power is finally riding high. Bismarck appears invincible, but just three days after her great victory, she, too, lies at the bottom of the Atlantic. How did this brilliant killing machine meet her end? ERIC: It became very important for Churchill, the British Government and the Royal Navy, that the British re-assert their command of the sea by sinking Bismarck. NARRATOR: An armada of warships and squadrons of aircraft scour the ocean, hunting this killer down. A spotter plane picks up a trail of oil on the surface, leading straight to a wounded Bismarck. A staggering 2,800 shells rained down on Hitler's iconic battleship. Outnumbered, outgunned and out of luck, Bismarck goes down, and now lies 1,100 miles south of its opponent, at the bottom of the sea. TONY: She was powerful, she was beautiful. All eyes were on her, and, at the end of the day, that was what killed her. ERIC: Hitler was shocked by the loss of this symbol of the prestige of the Third Reich. It was yet another nail in the coffin, if you like, of the German Navy. NARRATOR: The Tirpitz is Hitler's last great battleship. What can the sunken remains of Allied aircraft tell us about the extraordinary cost of destroying her? NARRATOR: With the loss of the Bismarck in 1941, Hitler's faith in his Navy is at an all-time low. He has one last battleship, the mighty Tirpitz. Terrified of losing her, the Führer orders a series of major upgrades. The improved Tirpitz weighs in at nearly 53,000 tons, 2,000 more than her sister ship, the Bismarck. Her hull is strengthened, wrapped in 13 inch thick armor plating. Nearly five inches of steel protects the main deck. She bristles with eight, 15 inch main guns, and a staggering 72 anti-aircraft guns. She is an impenetrable floating fortress, perhaps the most perfect battleship ever put to sea. But despite her impressive armory, this Goliath spends most of her life hiding out in Norwegian fjords, becoming a major thorn in the side of Allied Forces. ERIC: Tirpitz became what naval strategists call a "fleet in being." It wasn't risked, but the risks it posed forced the British and the Americans, at times, to deploy considerable forces just in case it did do something. NARRATOR: But the Tirpitz does not survive the War. The story of her demise begins in this fjord near Trondheim. Fredrik Søriede, is on a mission to try and uncover the Tirpitz's shadowy past. He believes these deep waters may contain clues to help explain the lengths the Allies went to to destroy the Tirpitz. The team are using specialist ROVs and deep water cameras. FREDRIK: Oh, look at that! Can we try to move it a little bit closer, or? Yeah. NARRATOR: The ghostly outline of an aircraft appears. MAN: Cockpit. Yes. FREDRIK: Oh, yeah! That's the nose and then the cockpit. NARRATOR: But what is this plane, and what's it doing here? FREDRIK: Oh. NARRATOR: Fredrik tries to ID the aircraft. He needs to take a closer look inside. MAN: We're probably sitting in the pilot seat. FREDRIK: Look at that! MAN: We have the stick. FREDRIK: Oh, yeah. That's the stick. MAN: That's the stick. That's the stick, yeah. FREDRIK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the stick. MAN: Yeah, also. NARRATOR: From the layout of the cockpit and the position of the two propellers on each side of the aircraft, Fredrik believes this is a British Halifax bomber. More ROV dives discover the Halifax is not alone. The bed of the fjord is littered with the remains of downed aircraft. FREDRIK: We believe that there are 40, 50 plane wrecks resting on the bottom of this fjord. This area really saw a lot of action, so this is really a veritable plane graveyard. NARRATOR: There must have been something really special here for the Allies to suffer such huge losses, and Fredrik discovers there is. The Tirpitz was hiding here for one year, heavily defended with But there's another reason why so many bombing raids fail. Scientist, Claudia Hartyl is gathering evidence from the most unlikely of places, the pine clad slopes high above the fjord. Claudia takes core samples from deep inside the trees, revealing the growth rings. CLAUDIA: They record everything. They are time machines. They can tell you the past. NARRATOR: Each ring records one year of the tree's growth. Claudia carefully counts back, until she reaches the early 1940s, and notices something unusual. CLAUDIA: So, you can see here, wider rings, then you have a period of very narrow rings. You have a period of very low growth. NARRATOR: It's the same for all the trees in the area. During the War, something is stunting the tree's growth. CLAUDIA: This is tree damage caused by the artificial smoke to hide the Tirpitz. NARRATOR: The Germans had dozens of smoke generators around the fjord, pumping out dense acid clouds, poisoning the trees, but hiding their ship from Allied bombers overhead. ERIC: The Germans proved very adept at protecting Tirpitz with smoke screens. TONY: She's almost got a cloaking device, like something out of Star Trek , and she foils raid after raid. NARRATOR: But Hitler knows his last killer battleship is on borrowed time. Fearing the Allies might get lucky, in October 1944, he orders the Tirpitz to sail to a new location, Håkøya Island. It's to be her last voyage. FREDRIK: So, we are just outside of Tromsø, and this is the final resting place of the Tirpitz, just below this area. But, remember, this ship was enormous. NARRATOR: Fredrik puts down a remotely operated underwater camera. FREDRIK: The whole sea floor is basically littered with stuff. MAN: Yeah, it's a big area. NARRATOR: After 75 years, shells capable of traveling 20 miles remain intact. FREDRIK: They look like they (inaudible). MAN: Oh, yeah. And there's a book. MAN: There's a book. NARRATOR: Personal items, a book, with the pages still clearly readable. Very little of this enormous battleship remains. But now, using historical records, coastal scans and state of the art computer visualization, we can roll back the waters of Håkøya Island, as they were in 1944. The Tirpitz is lying upside down in shallow waters. Near the port bow, a gigantic hole. Towards the stern, evidence of two more impacts, all punched through the thick, five inch armor plating. And directly next to the ship, more evidence. An enormous crater, 100 feet wide, gauged into the seabed. What weapon could have caused such catastrophic damage? NARRATOR: October 1944, Håkøya Island, northern Norway. Hitler's last great battleship, the Tirpitz, is hiding out just off the shoreline. The Germans know the Tirpitz is on the Allies most wanted list. Underwater nets protect her from torpedo attacks. Sand and rubble are piled up around the hull to prevent the Tirpitz capsizing if hit. She survived over two years of aerial attacks, so what happens here, less than one month after arriving, that sends her to the bottom of the fjord? At the side of the wreck, a huge bomb crater. On the deck, holes punched straight through the extra thick steel, too big to be shell or torpedo damage. What could cause such devastating destruction? The evidence of its power still scars the landscape today, at Håkøya Island. Churchill is determined the Tirpitz must be destroyed, but to cut through her five inch thick steel deck, the Allies need a more powerful bomb than ever before. There's only one man to turn to, the brains behind the legendary bouncing bomb of the Dambusters raid, Barnes Wallis, and the weapon he develops is so huge the planes carrying it have to be specially adapted and stripped down. It's called the "Tallboy," towering at a mighty 21 feet, its unique aerodynamic shape allows it to free fall quickly and accurately through the air, breaking the sound barrier. At six tons it's designed to penetrate the ground to depths of 80 feet, and only then explode. TONY: And these are massive, almost earth-quaking explosive devices. NARRATOR: The mission to destroy the Tirpitz is highly dangerous. She's well-protected with anti-aircraft guns, so the bombers need to get in and out fast. There's only one squadron for the job, 617, the Dambusters themselves. ERIC: 617 Squadron had become the leading exponent of precision bombing. They were able to drop these Barnes Wallis designed weapons with great accuracy, and they were, therefore, a tremendous danger for an anchored warship, however well-protected. NARRATOR: At 18,000 feet dodging anti-aircraft fire, the bomb aimers of 617 Squadron finally get the Tirpitz in their sights. The Tallboys accelerate through five, six, 700 miles per hour. Several miss their targets, cratering the shoreline, but others are set firmly on a deadly course. Tallboys punch straight through the Tirpitz's steel decking. FREDRIK: So, these bombs turn out to be very powerful tools against the Tirpitz, and for the first time, they really managed to penetrate the steel. NARRATOR: Other Tallboys destroy the huge sandbank built to protect the Tirpitz from capsizing. Within minutes, the vessel lists and rolls over. The Tirpitz, like her sister ship, the Bismarck, is gone. ERIC: By the time Tirpitz was sunk, Hitler had completely lost faith in the German Navy. He'd actually ordered the German Navy to be scrapped. There were other things to worry about. NARRATOR: The death of the Tirpitz marks a revolution in naval warfare. The future belongs to submarines, striking from beneath the waves, and aircraft carriers that can launch attacks anywhere in the world. Hitler's dream is dead, and with it, the age of the battleship.