Jae’s Blog

Design of the ship started in the early 1930s, following on from Germany’s development of the Deutschland class cruisers and the Scharnhorst class “battlecruisers”. Construction of the second French Dunkerque class battleship made redesign necessary, and Bismarck’s displacement was increased to 41,700 tons. Officially, however, her tonnage got 35,000 tons to suggest parity with ships built within the limits of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) that allowed Germany to build up too five 35,000-ton battleships, the maximum displacement agreed by the major powers in the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922. Fully laden, Bismarck and her sister-ship Tirpitz would each displace more than 50,000 tons. The prototype of the proposed battleships envisaged under Plan Z, Bismarck’s keel got laid down at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg on 1 July 1936. She gets launched on 14 February 1939 and commissioned to 24 August 1940 with Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann of command