German cruiser Prinz Eugen

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Career	Image:Germany-Jack-1933.svg

Ordered:
Laid down:	23 April 1936
Launched:	22 August 1938
Commissioned:	1 August 1940
Fate:	Sunk after atomic bomb test.
General characteristics
Displacement:	15,000 tons
Dimensions:	650 ft (200 m) x 70 ft (21 m) x 26 ft (8 m)
Armament:	8 x 8 in (203 mm) 12 x 4.1 in (105 mm) 17 x 40mm 12 x 37 mm 28 x 20 mm
Aircraft:	3
Propulsion:	132,000 hp (98 MW), 32.5 knots (60 km/h)
Crew:	1600

The German cruiser Prinz Eugen (pron. 'Oy-gin') was an enlarged Admiral Hipper class heavy cruiser which served with the Kriegsmarine of Germany during World War II.

She was named after Prince Eugene of Savoy (Prinz Eugen in German).

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Description

Prinz Eugen was a Hipper class heavy cruiser: like her sister ships, Admiral Hipper and Blücher, she was built in the mid-1930s. Her keel was laid at the Krupp Germania shipyard in Kiel on April 23 1936, and she was launched on August 22 1938, and commissioned on August 1 1940. Considered a "lucky ship", (The Prinz Eugen) she survived to the end of the war.

== History ==On April 2nd the Prinz Eugen along with the Bismarcks first combat mission the ships were ordered on three months of commerce rating in the Atlantic, code name "Exercise Rhine". Unaware to Hitler. He did not think commerce rating were proper missions for battleships and he feared loss of their ships. Security was tight and the ships crew's didn't even know where they were heading. The ships were considerably outnumbered (The British outnumbered the German fleet ten to one)and on May 19th 2am Exercise Rhine was officially underway.The Bismarck and Prinz Eugen mission was to smother the British war supplies by sinking Commerce vessels bound for Britain. On May 22nd 1941 in Hitler's retreat in Bavaria, Hitler was first told of the mission. He wanted to call the ships back. He eventually gave in saying, "I have a bad feeling about this." After the Norwegian resistance and a Swedish cruiser discovered the two ships the British intelligence was aware of the mission. After a several exhausting cat and mouse chase games with air recon (A British Spitfire captured a photo of the Prinz Eugen& Bismarck on May 21st)and vessel visual sightings the British and Germans finally made contact. The British lost the advantage by firing at the Prinz Eugen first thinking it was the Bismarck and the legendary battle ensued Battle of the Denmark Strait against HoodA second 2,000 pound shell from the Bismarck hit the Hood's magazines at 100,000 foot pounds of energy and ripped the ship in half. The Bismarck sunk the HMS hood in less than ten minutes. 24 May 1941, Prinz Eugen fought magnificently with [[German battleship Bismarck|]] (hitting the British battlecruiser at least once and starting a huge fire) and HMS Prince of Wales, hitting that battleship three times. Later that day she parted from Bismarck and headed south to rendezvous with a refuelling ship and prepare for eventual commerce raiding in the Atlantic. After narrowly avoiding several British heavy units which were looking for Bismarck, she arrived at Brest, France, on 1 June 1941. The port was regularly bombed by the RAF, and on the night on July 1 Prinz Eugen was hit on the port side behind the bridge. The bomb detonated in the forward main armament direction centre killing 60 of the crew.

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 during 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 the stern. Prinz Eugen was not operational again until 1943 by which time Hitler had relegated all Kriegsmarine heavy units to training duties.

Later in the war, Prinz Eugen was used to attack advancing Russian units along the Baltic coast, and to transport German refugees back to Germany. 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, a target for any lurking Russian submarines, until they could be separated. At the end of the war, she was one of only two operational German cruisers left (the other was Nürnberg), and was surrendered at Copenhagen on 7 May 1945.

She was awarded to the United States and commissioned into the US Navy as IX-300 USS 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 December 1946 she capsized and sank in shallow water at Kwajalein Atoll, where she remains to this day. In 1979 one of her propellers was salvaged and is preserved at the German Naval Memorial at Kiel.

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