Battle of the Denmark Strait by James Pate Williams, Jr., BA, BS, MSwE, PhD
We are rapidly converging on the 79th Anniversary of the Battle of Denmark Strait which was a battle between the Royal Navy’s HMS Hood, a battlecruiser, and HMS Prince of Wales, a newly built battleship, and the Nazi Kriegsmarine’s Bismarck, a battleship, and Prinz Eugen, a heavy cruiser. The battle took place on Saturday, May 24, 1941 at approximately 5:52 AM to 6:02 AM local time. The Prince of Wales fired the first salvo at a range of 26,500 yards which is about 15.06 miles towards the lead Nazi ship which was the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. The Nazis held their fire until 5:55 AM. At 6:00 AM a 15 inch = 38 cm = 380 mm armor piercing shell from the Bismarck probably blew the HMS Hood to smithereens by hitting one of her magazines. Unfortunately, 1415 members of the HMS Hood’s crew died in the explosion. There were only three survivors from the doomed battlecruiser and pride of the Royal Navy. The HMS Prince of Wales was also badly damaged and forced to withdraw from the scene of the battle making smoke. The Battle of the Denmark Strait was a tactical victory for the Nazis. However, on the morning of Tuesday, May 27, 1941 the Royal Navy exacted its revenge for the loss of mighty HMS Hood by forcing the sinking of the Bismarck. The Prinz Eugen survived the Battle of the Denmark Strait and World War II. The HMS Prince of Wales was sunk in the Pacific Theater of the War by Japanese aircraft on Wednesday, December 10, 1941.
My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.
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Numerical Explorations 