I’m following a thread of fellow naval enthusiasts about the still-excellent 1960 film Sink the Bismarck!, a classic study of British stiff upper-lipness and, at the same time, a taut thriller.

A dark moment in that film, and in history, came on May 24, 1941, when the battlecruiser Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales confronted Bismarck in the Denmark Strait during her escape into the North Atlantic. The battle began at about 5:52 a.m. Ten minutes later, a shell from Bismarck detonated a powder magazine inside Hood and the ship blew up. There were, in a crew of over 1400 men, only three survivors.

 

 

Prince of Wales hit Bismarck at three times, but when a German shell killed the entire bridge crew except for Captain J.C. Leach, she broke off action and the battle was over. Bismarck would eventually be hunted down and destroyed—or scuttled—three days later.

Prince of Wales would be the site for the August 1941 meeting of FDR and Churchill, when the two drafted the Atlantic Charter. Three days after Pearl Harbor, a Japanese air attack sank Prince of Wales off Malaya, and Captain Leach was among the casualties.

What I did not know is that the actor who played Captain Leach in the film was himself a young lieutenant, a gunnery officer, on Prince of Wales when she took on Bismarck. Esmond Knight, hit by shell fragments, was blinded and would remain that way for two years until a specialist restored sight in one eye. Knight would go on to a long and stellar stage career, acting with contemporaries like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, and would appear in dozens of films in both Britain and America.

He died in 1987. The last of the three survivors of Hood, a dear man named Ted Briggs, died in 2008.

So it goes.