Early war
Prinz Eugen suffered repeated damage before deployment. On 2 July 1940, the ship suffered
minor bomb damage from RAF bombers. A year later on 23 April 1941, the ship struck a magnetic mine.
Operational history
Unternehmen Rheinübung
On 24 May 1941, Prinz Eugen fought alongside the battleship Bismarck in the Battle of the Denmark Strait against the British battlecruiser HMS Hood, hitting her three times and starting a huge fire. Doubt had been cast on whether or not Prinz Eugen struck Hood, citing that Hood was not her target. However Prinz Eugen's Gunnery Officer, Paul Schmallenbach, rejects this, confirming Prinz Eugen's target was also Hood.[2] Prinz Eugen's war diary, as recorded by Captain Brinkmann, observed:
Both ships initially fire at Hood. The semaphore order from Fleet: "Engage opponent farthest to the left", was not instituted until after the 6th salvo, with a target shift to King George [the Germans mistakenly identified Prince of Wales as King George]. After the impact of 05:57 of the 2nd salvo from Prinz Eugen, a rapidly spreading fire at the level of the aft mast was observed.
Prinz Eugen also damaged the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales, hitting her four times. Hood was sunk during the engagement while Prince of Wales was damaged, but managed to hit Bismarck's forward fuel tank, and the German squadron was still shadowed by other British warships.
Later that day, owing to fuel loss, Bismarck was forced to abandon her commerce raiding mission so Prinz Eugen was detached to continue commerce raiding on her own while Bismarck made for France. Prinz Eugen escaped the British ships, and headed south to rendezvous with the tanker Spichern and prepare for eventual commerce raiding in the Atlantic. After encountering engine problems related to her condensers not working well in the warm waters, the ship made for a French port on 29 May. After narrowly avoiding several British heavy units which were looking for Bismarck, Prinz Eugen arrived at Brest, France on 1 June 1941. The port was regularly attacked by RAF Bomber Command, and on the night of 1 July, Prinz Eugen was hit by a single bomb on the port side behind the bridge. The bomb detonated in the forward main artillery command center, killing 60 of the crew.
Operation Cerberus: The Channel Dash
After the loss of Bismarck, Hitler banned further Atlantic surface raids. Fearing an Allied invasion of Norway, he wanted all capital ships back in home waters. Together with the battlecruisers (or battleships) Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen made the "Channel Dash" — Operation Cerberus — back to Germany on 11–12 February 1942.
Prinz Eugen left Germany for Norway in February 1942. On 23 February, she was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Trident, destroying her stern. After some preliminary patch-up repairs in Trondheim, the cruiser returned to Kiel on 16 May to receive a new stern. Prinz Eugen was not operational again until January 1943. Two attempts to relocate to Norway, where she could threaten Allied convoys, failed and she was assigned instead to training duties in home waters.
Baltic deployment
From August 1944 onward, Prinz Eugen was deployed to shell advancing Soviet troop concentrations along the Baltic coast and to transport German refugees to the west. On 15 October 1944, she collided with the light cruiser Leipzig in heavy fog in the Baltic Sea, nearly cutting the smaller ship in two. For 14 hours, the two ships drifted, locked together, until they could be separated. Prinz Eugen was repaired at Gotenhafen (Gdynia) and continued her tasks of shelling Soviet land forces for 26 days during the siege of Danzig, and evacuating German refugees. On 29 March 1945, she left Gotenhafen for the last time with a load of refugees, reaching Swinemünde on 8 April. The ship then departed for Copenhagen, arriving on 20 April 1945. Lack of fuel meant that she could not leave port again.
After the war
Surrender
At the end of the war, she was one of only two operational German cruisers left (the other was the light cruiser Nürnberg), and was surrendered to British forces in Copenhagen on 8 May 1945. On 26 May, Prinz Eugen left Copenhagen with Nürnberg, and sailed to Wilhelmshaven under escort by the British. Prinz Eugen arrived on 28 May, remaining in dry dock until December 1945. On 5 January 1946, the ship was handed over to the United States Navy.
USS Prinz Eugen
She was awarded to the United States and commissioned into the US Navy as the unclassified miscellaneous vessel USS Prinz Eugen (IX-300). Her very large GHG passive sonar array was removed and installed on the submarine USS Flying Fish for testing. There are some evidence that American interest in magnetic amplifiers increased again after findings in investigations of the fire control system of Prinz Eugen. After examination and tests, she was allocated to the target fleet for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. She survived the Able and Baker tests (July 1946), but was too radioactive to have leaks repaired. In September 1946, she was towed to Kwajalein Atoll and capsized on 22 December 1946 over Enubuj reef, where she remains to this day (8°45′9.49″N 167°40′59.60″E). In 1978, her port propeller was salvaged and is preserved at the German Naval Memorial at Laboe. Part of her wreck was still visible above the water by 2010.
Prior to the atomic tests, the ship's bell was removed by US sailors. The bell currently resides at the Navy Museum's new Cold War gallery located at the Washington DC Navy Yard.
Tradition
After the annexation of Austria in 1938, some former Austrian naval officers were reactivated and served with the Kriegsmarine. The naming of the ship was a tribute to the maritime tradition of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. On 21 November 1942, Prinz Eugen was presented the bell of the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought Tegetthoff (scrapped in Italy in 1924) by the Italian naval attaché assigned to Berlin. The four main gun turrets were named after the Austrian towns of Graz, Braunau, Innsbruck and Wien (Vienna). |
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Prinz Eugen Launch in 22 Aug 1938
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