Fellow Contributors,
After specific admonition from the website owner, I leave the matter of the Tendentious Table.
The reason for not hitting anymore after 6:00 is (IMHO) quite understandable: the avoiding maneuver around Hood remains surely affected gunnery as the ship heeled violently (even if her course apparently did not change much).
Can somebody with expertise in ship stability, ideally Bill, comment on the idea that ships heel violently without actually changing course "much".
Here is Busch's observation from Ersten Gefecht:
The opponent turns now somewhat towards us, since – as it became known shortly thereafter – he had to dodge the ruins of his flagship.
and from The Story of Prince Eugen
The range was constantly changing now as the British, obeying the last signal of their flagship to open the range, were caught while turning to port, and suddenly steered hard to starboard and towards the Germans to avoid the wreckage of their badly hit comrade.
Brooke:
Another salvo had just gone when I heard Guns warn his director layer 'Stand by to alter course to port'. This long-awaited move— presumably we were going back to the original heading so that 'Y' turret could bear for the first time—had begun to take place, in that we heeled to starboard and it became temporarily more difficult to hold the Bismarck steady in one's glasses, when the ship suddenly rolled upright again and then continued to heel over the opposite way; moreover, with the urgency and excessive vibration that comes only from violent rudder movement. We were going hard-a-starboard. Back towards the enemy again
Another tendentious statement:
Correct, but being under fire (while is a very dangerous situation) doesn't affect much own gunnery performances, except when a gunnery equipment is directly hit
This statement is at odds with the recorded reality of the Denmark Straits action. The whole reason for PoW's Y turret firing in local control at all, was because shell splashes from near misses had disabled the after DCT's glasses temporarily.
Brooke:
there was an almighty splosh as a number of 15-in shells (either four or eight) landed only few yards short, plumb in front of us. I was conscious of a slight but distinct jolt and then the entire scene was obliterated by a mountain of green and white water that rose up high and, helped by the wind behind it, cascaded down on the rear part of the ship. For a few seconds even the fury outside our small our world was drowned by the splatter of hundreds of tons of water tumbling all round, pouring down vertical surfaces, splashing and bouncing off others The three of us were drenched through our small open ports and our binoculars covered in water. As this happened the ship heeled violently towards the enemy and akin vibrate heavily to the wheel as she altered course to port. (A) We had our binoculars reversed and were feverishly wiping the lenses dry with our hankerchiefs when the cry we had secretly prayed for rang in our headsets: ' 'Aftcr director take over. After director take over'. Guns and his team were clearly obscured as the stern swung round towards the target. But we were temporarily blind too (though probably not for more than 15 seconds) (they were blind from wet optics, not smoke!) and Claude Aylwin in 'Y' turret, not receiving the expected control orders, assumed we were hors de combat and switched to local control.
Abandonment of central control obviously has a serious deleterious effect on gunnery performance unless one maintains, as some do, without any evidence, that the shots fired under local control while heeling violently and with serious trunnion tilt are the ones which are photographically recorded as landing close to PG, speculatively timed by some at about 06:09. Oh, and fired without a view of the target, or indeed of where those shells landed......in the vicinity of a ship which was not the target. This assertion contradicts both the photographer Langemann and Busch that these shots came from Hood and occurred ten minutes earlier.
a 15-inch salvo (or it may well have been a broadside, ie, all guns firing together) landed about 20 yards short of the quarterdeck.(E) It fell in the smooth 'slick' made by the skidding stern, exactly where that stern had been about three seconds before.
All the best
wadinga