VALPILOTBOAT

The best cruiser of WW2 might be the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. She sailed with Bismarck, escaped when Bismarck didn't, survived the entire war, and then survived two atomic bombs. Prinz Eugen joined the German navy in 1940. A heavy cruiser with eight 8-inch guns, fast, well built, and armed with torpedoes. On paper, a solid ship. Nothing legendary. Her legend started in May 1941. She sailed into the North Atlantic alongside the new battleship Bismarck on a mission to raid Allied convoys. On May 24, in the Denmark Strait, the British battlecruiser Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales caught them. Prinz Eugen was leading the German formation, and her silhouette was so similar to Bismarck's that the British at first opened fire on the wrong ship. Prinz Eugen's own guns hit Hood early, starting a fire on deck. Minutes later, a shell from Bismarck tore into Hood and she exploded. Over 1,400 men died. Only three survived. Then the two German ships split up. Bismarck was hunted down and sunk three days later. Prinz Eugen slipped away into the Atlantic and made it safely to occupied France. In February 1942, she pulled off something even more humiliating for Britain. She and the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were stuck in Brest, under constant British bombing. So the Germans sent them home the boldest way possible: straight up the English Channel, in broad daylight, right past the coast of England. The British were caught completely off guard. By the time they reacted, attacks by planes, destroyers, and torpedo boats all failed. All three German ships made it through. British newspapers were furious that an enemy fleet had sailed past their doorstep. Days later, a British submarine torpedoed Prinz Eugen off Norway and blew off part of her stern. She survived and was repaired. She spent the last part of the war in the Baltic, bombarding Soviet troops to help German forces and civilians escape. In October 1944, in fog, she accidentally rammed another German cruiser and nearly cut it in half. She survived that too. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, Prinz Eugen was afloat and intact in Copenhagen. Nearly every other big German warship was sunk, scuttled, or wrecked. The Allies divided the surviving German ships between them. The US got Prinz Eugen. She was commissioned into the US Navy and sailed across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal with an American crew. Her final mission: be a target. In July 1946, she was anchored at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific for Operation Crossroads, America's first postwar atomic bomb tests. Dozens of ships were parked in the lagoon to see what a nuclear blast would do to a fleet. The first bomb exploded in the air. Prinz Eugen survived. The second bomb exploded underwater. Prinz Eugen survived that too. But she was too radioactive to be cleaned. She was towed to Kwajalein, where a slow leak went unrepaired. In December 1946, she rolled over and sank in shallow water. She's still there. Her hull lies upside down, with her stern and propellers rising out of the water near the beach. One of her propellers was removed decades later and brought back to Germany, where it stands today at a naval memorial near Kiel. She outlived Hood. She outlived Bismarck. She outlived the war. She even outlived two atomic bombs. Nothing ever managed to sink her. She just finally rolled over.