Prinz Eugen (Heavy cruiser)

Design

Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruisers broke all treaties that limited their designs- they have displacement of more than 16k tons. The ships’ sizes varied slightly- Prinz Eugen herself was 212.5m long while her first sister was just 205m. The armament was not much of an improvement compared to the Deutschland-class; however, they were more conventional for heavy cruisers.

History

Prinz Eugen had her commissioning delayed when she sustained light damage from RAF aircraft at Kiel in the night of 1st July 1940. The next year on 23rd April, she hit a magnetic mine dropped by RAF aircraft when passing through Fehmarn Belt en route to Kiel. Plans to sortie for her next mission were delayed.

At 02:00 am in the morning of 19th May 1941, Prinz Eugen followed battleship KMS Bismarck departing from Gotenhafen and sailed to the Danish Straits to sortie for Operation Rheinünbung. Escorted by a fleet of smaller ships and Luftwaffe air cover they sailed through the Danish Straits and into open ocean, before- without any escorts- sailing into the Denmark Straits.

In the Denmark Straits on 23rd May, the Germans were encountered by British cruisers HMS Norfolk and Suffolk which shadowed them before the British battlecruiser HMS Hood and battleship Prince of Wales arrived the following day. The German and British capital ships fought each other in the Battle of The Denmark Straits, while the British cruisers were out of range and Prinz Eugen tried to keep them on watch. With the help of Prinz Eugen’s firepower, Bismarck was able to sink the Hood, and later Prince of Wales fled the battle with heavy damage.

Later in the North Atlantic, as the British force of the previous battle maintained contact and the Royal Navy acted to hunt down the Bismarck, Prinz Eugen was detached at 18:14 to continue commerce raiding, and left the Bismarck to sail to France for repairs. As Bismarck provided battle cover from the British, Prinz Eugen was able to slip away undetected. On 1st June she was escorted to and docked at Brest.

At Brest, Prinz Eugen, along with battleships KMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were repeatedly attacked by British airstrikes. On 11th February 1942, they left Brest for the daring Operation Cerberus, or the famous Channel Dash with cover from Luftwaffe’s Operation Donnerkeil through the English Channel, and succeeded the operation while taking minimal damage and reached Wilhelmshaven at the morning of 13th February. The next months, Prinz Eugen, along with pocket battleship KMS Admiral Scheer and a squad of destroyers fought Norwegian operations.

In the next three years, Prinz Eugen served Baltic operations and in the last year of the war, she lead the Kriegsmarine’s last naval operations and sighted the sinking of pocket battleship Lützow (Deutschland) while at port on 15th April, and surrendered to the Royal Navy in the last days of the war.

The Royal Navy awarded Prinz Eugen to the US Navy as a war prize, and in mid-1946, USS Prinz Eugen survived Operation Crossroads, a pair of nuclear tests by the US at the Bikini Atoll.