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- <text id=89TT1652>
- <title>
- June 26, 1989: World Notes:High Seas
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- June 26, 1989 Kevin Costner:The New American Hero
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 46
- World Notes
- HIGH SEAS
- A Marker on a Chilly Grave
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Adolf Hitler saw the great dreadnought as the key to ending
- Britain's naval supremacy. Even Winston Churchill conceded that the
- 823-ft., 42,000-ton German battleship was a "masterpiece of naval
- construction." Rather than emerging as the scourge of the Atlantic,
- however, the Bismarck fell victim to a superior British force in
- one of World War II's most spectacular naval engagements. Only nine
- days after leaving on her first combat mission, she was sunk on May
- 27, 1941, with all but about 115 of her 2,200-man crew aboard.
- </p>
- <p> Last week the Bismarck's hulk was discovered some 600 miles
- west of the Brittany port of Brest by Robert Ballard, the undersea
- explorer who in 1986 located the wreck of the passenger liner
- Titanic. As in the search for the Titanic, Ballard, a scientist at
- the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, used the
- unmanned submersible Argo in his Bismarck quest. According to
- Ballard, the battleship, which lies 15,000 ft. below the surface,
- is intact, upright and "in an excellent state of preservation" --
- a remarkable fact considering that more than 300 shells and
- torpedoes were fired into the Bismarck by its Royal Navy attackers.
- Ballard says he does not plan to salvage the Bismarck. Last week
- he refused to provide the exact coordinates of the wreck's
- location, declaring that he wishes the sunken vessel to remain
- inviolate.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-