I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors in Their Own Words. In partnership with the

Honor Project, we've brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs

these stories more than ever. Warriors, in their own words, is our attempt to present an

unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation.

Thank you for listening, and by doing so honoring those who have served.

Today, we'll hear from Sir Ludovic Kennedy, who served as an officer on the HMS Tartar,

a battleship in the Royal Navy.

The Tartar was one of the ships that chased and sank the Bismarck, Germany's most powerful

battleship in World War II.

Kennedy later wrote a book about this experience titled The Chase and Sinking of the Bismarck.

We depended entirely on our supplies, on our food, quite a lot of our food, ammunition, petrol, guns, that kind of thing, on a lot of it from America.

And that lifeline between us and America had to be kept open at all costs.

Now, in the First World War, the U-boats had nearly defeated us.

Until we got the convoy system, they'd nearly sunk so many ships that we couldn't have gone on.

And the same thing happened with the U-Bowat's in the Second War.

And that's what the Bismarck and the other ships that went into the Atlantic were trying to do,

cut that lifeline, which kept us going between America and Britain.

Up to this time, the U-Bowds were fairly effective, but they weren't as

effective as they became a year or two later. The sort of crucial time of the U-Bowards was

1943. In 1941, the idea was for the Bismarck and the Schaunhorst and the Nisenau all to meet together and go out into the Atlantic and destroy our convoys.

The Turpitz, which was the Bismarck's sister ship, unfortunately for the Germans, wasn't ready in time.

Hitler went and inspected the Bismarck and the Terpitz both together at Gottenhafen, Gerdansk,

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