On the morning of May 27, 1941, the British Royal Navy finally hunted down the great German battleship Bismarck. They had been on this hunt for months, and the Bismarck had just escaped the Battle of the Denmark Strait, during which it destroyed the famous battlecruiser HMS Hood. Winston Churchill ordered every British ship in the area to abandon whatever other duties they had and make sure this voyage of the German vessel was its last. A small squadron of RAF Fairy Swordfish biplanes fulfilled those orders when they hit the Bismarck with torpedos and damaged her rudder, leaving her floating helpless in the Atlantic as the Royal Navy closed in. The German crew scuttled the ship as the British came to finish it off, and that was end of the great battleship of the Battle of the Atlantic.
There is a class of historian, both armchair and tenure-track, who dismiss the Bismarck saga as good fodder for books and movies but strategically unimportant in the grand scheme of the Second World War. An entertaining sideshow, and little more. The battleship as a class of vessel was, after all, rendered obsolete during the war by the rise of the aircraft carrier, since the latter could destroy the former with ease from the air and from great distance. Early in the conflict, navies would waste a great deal of effort to protect their battleships, ringing them with other vessels and conducting wide detours to avoid potential combat. A great sunk cost mistake, similar to way in which the British in the First World West sent tens of thousands of Australians to die on Gallipoli so their expensive battleships wouldn’t risk running into sea mines in the Dardenelles.
By the end of the Second World War, the battleship would be useful only as an artillery platform, and would sit offshore to pulverize land which was already under the cover of air superiority. It would never be a vital centerpiece of naval combat again.
And so these historians — similar to the “sabermetrics” gurus of sports today — will lay out their numbers and tables and show you how the hunt for the Bismarck didn’t really matter. How the course of the war was more determined by inflow/outflow spreadsheets at major ports and the positioning of factories near ready supplies of aluminum. They'll explain how the dedication of masses of resources and attention toward the destruction of strategically irrelevant enemy ships was if anything foolish — aberrant in the way all emotional responses are aberrant signals that cloud those pretty data sets.
And yet those responses do matter, and any clear-thinking person knows they do. Psychic responses and the actions that flow from them do not exist in a vacuum, and their flows into and out from each other can both make the larger waves of history more predictable and the smaller churns more chaotic, at least from our limited vantage. The historical ”sabertricians” will have you believe that the dips and rise in morale seen in the story of the Bismarck do not matter because the battleship didn’t matter from a wider vantage, but of course those men and those nations were influenced by triumph and defeat, the way in which of course a basketball player whose confidence is high from a shooting streak is more likely to play better down the stretch, or a golfer could of course go in the tank after a string of bad puts (the “Hot Hand Fallacy,” don’t you know, silly superstition).
The grand waves flow from the small. The British sailer, high on victory, goes on to perform his future duties with more zeal, while the German, stung by defeat, is more likely to hesitate when the next battle hangs in the balance. The same goes for their wider societies — wartime propaganda rests on the idea that all this matter a great deal.
All probabilities and tendencies, subject to the strange churn of human emotion. Hard to see and harder to quantify, but at play in all things that look large from far away.
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