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(Continued from page 1)
New light on the controversy came when Dr. Robert D. Ballard, a discoverer of the wreck of the Titanic, subsequently found the Bismarck's resting place in 1989. The sinking battleship, he discovered, had slid down an undersea mountain for nearly a mile.
Despite the war damage and rough landing, it was in remarkably good condition - even a faded Nazi swastika was clearly visible. As for the ship's conning tower, he wrote in "The Discovery of the Bismarck," published in 1990, "Its heavy armor still looked capable of warding off enemy fire."
Dr. Ballard used a tethered robot that could not see far sideways, limiting his views of the hull's sides. He nevertheless leaned toward the scuttling theory, saying he saw no signs of large air pockets, which would have been crushed by rising water pressure as the ship sank.
Such implosions shattered Titanic's stern. By contrast, the sunken Bismarck was largely intact. So it had apparently been completely flooded, suggesting, Dr. Ballard wrote, "how effective the scuttling was."
More than a decade later, in June 2001, people dived to the wreck for the first time, using two Russian minisubs, and the American explorers were able to study the Bismarck's sides closely. The explorers could examine the hull only where it rose above the muck at the bottom. But the visible areas revealed no significant damage from enemy fire.
"You see a large number of shell holes in the superstructure and deck, but not that many along the side, and none below the waterline," recalled William N. Lange, a Woods Hole expert on the voyage.
More important, no major breach was found in the 13-inch-thick armor belt that girded Bismarck above and below the waterline as a shield against torpedoes and shells. Torpedoes may have hit the armor belt and detonated, Dr. McLaren surmised, but may nevertheless have done no damage other than making insignificant dents.
In July 2001, the British arrived with an expedition of their own, financed by British television and supported by the Ministry of Defense and British veterans groups. Using a tethered robot, the expedition found provocative gashes below the armor belt where the lower hull met the seabed.
The Americans assumed that the Bismarck's rough landing on the mountainside had made these openings "mechanical damage," as Mr. Lange of Woods Hole put it. But Mr. Mearns, the British expedition leader and director of Blue Water Recoveries, an experienced deep-sea salvage company in West Sussex, England, saw them as evidence of enemy fire. "My feeling," he said in an interview, "is that those holes were probably lengthened by the slide, but initiated by torpedoes."
He ridiculed the idea that torpedoes bounced off the armor belt, but acknowledged that he found no signs of torpedo damage there.
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In his book, "Hood and Bismarck," published in January, Mr. Mearns and co-author, Rob White, concluded that scuttling "may have hastened the inevitable, but only by a matter of minutes."
Dr. Eric Grove, a naval expert at the University of Hull in Britain who went on the expedition, strongly agreed and dismissed the scuttling theory. "I don't believe a word of it," he said. "From what I saw, that ship was very heavily holed below the waterline."
Mr. Cameron's spring, 2002 expedition, with a team of American and Canadian experts, made unusually long dives. As with the earlier expedition, he used Russian Mir minisubs. Each of the twin submersibles can hold three people.
From them, Mr. Cameron's team deployed tiny robots to probe inside the wreck and closely examine its exterior. He said little publicly about his findings until now.
High on the hull, he said, his team found a few shell holes but none below the waterline or big enough to quickly sink the ship. He also found no torpedo damage on the armor belt, echoing previous findings.
Down low, however, the explorers discovered much.
First, Mr. Cameron's study of the wreck's lower reaches and nearby debris fields led his team to a new explanation for the hull gashes previously attributed to torpedo hits or mechanical damage.
The Bismarck, he said, suffered a "hydraulic outburst" when it hit the bottom. Girded by the armor belt, the ship was like a water balloon wrapped in duct tape and then dropped. The belt held, but inner forces caused the sides to bulge out and break in places especially at the bottom, as the ship slid down the mountain slope.
The surprise, Mr. Cameron said, came when his tiny robots were able to penetrate the gashes into the ship's interior. In two cases, he came upon torpedo holes at the ends of long gashes. But upon sending the tethered robots even deeper into the ship, Mr. Cameron discovered that the torpedo blasts had failed to shatter its armored inner walls. All that was destroyed, he said, was an outer "sacrificial zone" of water and fuel tanks that German engineers had created to absorb torpedo hits and keep interior spaces dry.
"The inner tank walls are untouched by any explosive force," Mr. Cameron said. "So the armor worked." The German sailors and officers at the heart of the wounded ship, he added, "were protected in the armored citadel." The torpedoes, he said, caused "no significant flooding."
After Mr. Cameron's voyage, Dr. McLaren of the Explorers Club and his colleagues again dived down to the Bismarck with the Mir submersibles.
"Every naval ship is prepared to scuttle," he said afterward in an interview. "If you're going to get boarded, you want to sink it as fast as you can, but leave sufficient time to get the hell out of there."
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