The German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen fought as part of the German Kriegsmarine during World War II. She was named after Prince Eugene of Savoy (Prinz Eugen in German).

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.

Prinz Eugen fought with Bismarck against HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales, 24 May 1941, after which she parted from Bismarck and headed south to sit the chase out with a refuelling ship. After 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 Bismark Hitler banned further Atlantic surface raids and feared an invasion of Norway. With the battlecruisers (or light 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 the 23rd she was intercepted by the submarine HMS Trident which torpedoed her, 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 rammed the light cruiser Leipzig amidships 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.

External links

• Prinz Eugen - An Illustrated Technical History (http://www.prinzeugen.com/PGIND.htm)
• Details of Prinz Eugen (http://www.kbismarck.com/peugen.html)
• Prinz Eugen technical data (http://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/ships/heavycruiser/prinzeugen/index.html) – From German naval history website german-navy.de (http://www.german-navy.de)

de:Prinz Eugen (Schiff)