Maybe the Bismarck could have escaped to France if Lütjens had known that the British had lost contact for some time. Which is still of little use when a damaged rudder prevents the ship from moving properly. Seeing how much of a pummeling the Bismarck took without actually sinking, the armour seemed to do its job quite well. Protection of the rudder was most definately a weakness, as was the deck armour, though the latter was deemed not that big of an issue in Germany due to weather conditions on the Atlantic rarely allowing for truly long-range battles that would be most dangerous to that armour. It wasn't just an enlarged pre-WW1 design, it was a mix of old and new. Yes, there were parts of the design that harked back to the WW1-era, but other parts did not. The German naval architects didn't really have enough experience and knowledge to build a battleship with transom stern, four screws, all-or-nothing armour, triple/quad turrets etc. To be fair to the Germans, they did have a pretty good excuse for their ships having many WW1 era design features with some up to date tech bolted on top (and some of that tech was very good) - they missed out on ~15 years of warship development thanks to Versailles, and basically never had a chance to properly study the lessons that WW1 had taught about battleship design. Effectively the ship, while difficult to sink, was relatively (by the standards of battleships) easy to mission kill though disabling of key systems which were not properly protected (the steering as previously mentioned, the main battery fire direction, onboard communication etc.), and given the environment she was operating in, a mission kill was highly likely to result in a sinking. The Bismark suffered from too many of the latter. While there are indeed vulnerabilities in every ship, there's a significant difference between the kind of vulnerability exposed by a lucky hit, and the kind of vulnerability exposed under normal combat situations.
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