"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win." thus made English football legend Gary Lineker his famous speech on the invincibility of the German national football team. After going through William Shirer's book on one of the greatest naval battles in history, the thought flashed upon my mind that war is a brutal game in which the battling nations fight with one another with maddening ferocity and at the end the British wins. Be it the destruction of the invincible Spanish armada or the victory against Napoleon's army or the bloody Indian mutiny or the Crimean war or the Falklands war, at the end the English flag always flies high in the battlefield. The Bismark episode offers no exception. By a very uncanny stroke of luck at the eleventh hour , a single Swordfish bi-plane enabled to damage and cripple the mightiest German battleship on 26th May , 1941 , while the entire British fleet almost had given up hope to find and sink Bismark and to avenge the disaster of HMS Hood , the mightiest British battleship at her hands.
One would be really astonished to learn that it had taken eight battleships and battle cruisers, two aircraft carriers, four heavy cruisers, seven light cruisers, twenty one destroyers and six submarines to help find the Bismark and sink her !!!! As fortune always favors the braves, so this huge enterprise and perseverance of the British fleet to achieve its goal did not go down as another fruitless endeavor. Instead the battle of Bismark has forever secured its place in the annals of naval warfare history as one of the most unique naval battles in which fortune left the hand of the Germans at the very last moment and put the victor's crown on the head of the English.
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