More World War Two for the day: sinking the Bismarck

War History Online has an article about an outdated airplane that helped sink the Bismarck:

The German battleship Bismarck was the biggest vessel ever built in the first half of the twentieth century. A marvel of advanced engineering and technology, it was the most powerful ship in the world, yet a single shot by an antiquated biplane took it down.
At eight hundred feet in length, with a beam of a hundred feet, it displaced fifty thousand tons of water. It was also deadly, with eight fifteen-inch guns in four twin turrets, twelve six-inch guns, sixteen four-inch guns, sixteen inch-and-a-half guns, and twelve anti-aircraft guns, as well as four Arado Ar 196 reconnaissance floatplanes.
Its function was to destroy Allied convoys in the Atlantic, the lifeblood of Britain. On 18 May 1941, it set off under Admiral Günther Lütjens and Commander Ernst Lindemann, accompanied by the light cruiser, Prinz Eugen. Three days later, they were spotted near Bergen, Norway.
The British sent out the HMS Hood. Launched in 1918, it had been upgraded in 1939, but not enough. More had to be done, but the war’s outbreak forced the Hood to patrol Iceland and the Faroe Islands to keep the Germans at bay. When first commissioned, it was the biggest and fastest warship in the world, securing Britain’s grip over her colonies. The Hood, therefore, represented the height of British technology, naval power, and imperial might, making it a beloved icon. With it went the HMS Prince of Wales, which was more up-to-date. Unfortunately, its technology was so cutting-edge that much of it was untested. It had ten fourteen-inch guns, but eight were housed in malfunctioning turrets. The Royal Navy knew this, but the Bismarck’s sighting had forced their hand.
The Hood and the Bismarck were almost evenly matched. Both had eight fifteen-inch guns that could shoot shells over fifteen miles. But the Hood could only fire two shells a minute, compared to the Bismarck’s three. The latter was also more heavily armored, while the Hood was less so, because it was designed for speed.
The British tried to reach the Denmark Strait before the Germans so they could “cross the T”. This move requires positioning the length of one’s ship across the front of an enemy ship, since ships have more guns along their sides than they do at the front. The one who crosses the T can then fire more salvos than the one who gets crossed.
But the Hood and the Prince of Wales got there too late, before dawn on 24 May, so it was the Germans who crossed the British T off the western coast of Iceland. The Hood was sunk at a little past 0600 and the Prince of Wales had to retreat after suffering extensive damage.
Before it did, however, it managed three solid hits, puncturing the Bismarck’s fuel tanks and flooding its forward lower decks with seawater. The Bismarck headed toward Nazi-occupied France for repairs and, since the Prinz Eugen could do nothing more, it headed toward the Atlantic. Despite the damage, the Bismarck was still heavily armed and the captain felt confident about reaching France by dawn on 27 May.
Twenty-one British destroyers, thirteen cruisers, six battleships, and two aircraft carriers gave chase, but the German ship had vanished. On 26 May at 1030, the Bismarck was sighted, a mere seven hundred miles off the French coast. In another five hundred miles the sea and air would be filled with German ships and planes, so a British fleet closed in from the north, while another came from the south.
At 1900, fifteen Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers (photo) took off from the HMS Ark Royal and split into three groups to attack. Lieutenant-Commander John “Jock” Moffat flew one of them. As he broke through the cloud cover, he was awed at the sight of the German behemoth.
The Swordfish plummeted at over a hundred miles per hour. The Bismarck desperately filled the air with flak, so the pilots dove even lower, hugging the water and hoping the Bismarck’s guns couldn’t aim that low. In a worst-case scenario, they might survive a sea crash.
At two thousand yards, Moffat prepared to launch his only torpedo, when he heard a voice, “Not yet, Jock! Not yet!” Moffat looked around. It was his observer, Flight-Lieutenant JD “Dusty” Miller, was standing on the right wing with his butt in the air, his head somewhere below the plane’s belly.
Moffat understood. The sea was rough. If his torpedo hit the crest of a wave, it could veer off course. Miller wanted to make sure it fell into a trough so their only weapon had a chance. But the longer they took, the greater their chances of getting hit.
“Let her go, Jock!” Moffat released his torpedo.
“We’ve got a runner!” Miller screamed.
The Bismarck turned sharply to port, a mistake. The torpedo hit her left rear, tearing a hole through the hull and causing rivets to pop off the bulkhead. The ship’s twin rudders, angled for the turn, jammed. Power died, forcing engineers to restart. Mechanics tried to fix the rudders, but too much water was rushing in.
With its rudders stuck at twelve degrees to port, the Bismarck turned around and headed back toward the British fleet. Within minutes, it was turning in circles. Lütjens informed Berlin and vowed to die fighting.
The British showed no mercy. They surrounded the Bismarck, forcing it to fire in all directions. Unable to maneuver, it became a sitting duck and ran out of ammunition at 0930 the next day. Despite the lack of return fire, the Royal Navy kept up their barrage till the Bismarck sank at 1039.
They tried to rescue survivors, but a U-boat scare forced them to retreat with only a hundred survivors out of two thousand; the rest were left to their fate. Germany only found out about the sinking from a News Network broadcast at around noon. By the time they reached the scene, only five more men were alive to be retrieved. But not Lütjens. He kept his word, as did Lindemann, both going down with their ship.
Thanks to an outdated biplane, the Bismarck’s only combat mission lasted a mere two hundred hours. From that moment on, naval warfare changed forever. The plane was now as important as the ship in naval warfare.

Rico says it's never come full circle; in modern navies (since Pearl Harbor, anyway), it's missiles that take out ships, not planes... (But it made for a pretty good movie.)