Been pretty dead around here so.....
I think most people are familiar with the battle and results of the HMS Hood and the German ship Bismark. But the other ships in the fight seem to have been forgotten entirely. They were: The HMS Prince of Wales, a battleship accompanying the Hood, and the Prinz Eugen, a heavy cruiser sailing with the Bismark.
The Prince of Wales survived the engagement with the Bismark only to be sunk by Japanese air attack the following year in the Pacific. The Prinz Eugen has a more unusual story: she was sunk by atomic weapons which is odd because no atomic weapons were ever used in Europe, and the Prinz Eugen was not in Japan in 1945.
In a convoluted series of events, the Prinz Eugen survived the war (one of only two large German warships to do so) as an operational and functioning warship and was turned over to the British at the end of the way. In turn, the British gave her to the US as a war prize sometime later. She was actually made part of the US navy for a time, being renamed the USS Prinz Eugen. Her advanced radar and fire direction control systems were studied in great detail and then the ship was assigned to Operation Crossroads, the first post- war atomic weapons testing done by the US. She was towed to the Bikini Atoll and exposed to the atomic tests named Able and Baker (obviously the first two tests). While she actually survived the atomic weapons, more or less intact, she was so radioactive that she was abandoned after being moved to the Kwajalein Atoll. After developing a small hull leak, the ship continued to deteriorate as repairing her was impossible, again due to the high radiation from the ship. Eventually, she capsized and sank, leaving a good portion of the hull above the water line.
But that was not the end of her story: in 1974 the hull began leaking oil and there was concern that a storm could cause the fuel tanks to empty creating a major oil spill. Holes were cut in her hull and almost one million liters of fuel were pumped out in an operation ending in 2018. Her hull was again sealed and she rests in the same spot she sunk in back in 1946, with part of her hull visible still.
Brian