World Notes HIGH SEAS

Adolf Hitler saw the great dreadnought as the key to ending Britain's naval supremacy. Even Winston Churchill conceded that the 823-ft., 42,000-ton German battleship was a "masterpiece of naval construction." Rather than emerging as the scourge of the Atlantic, however, the Bismarck fell victim to a superior British force in one of World War II's most spectacular naval engagements. Only nine days after leaving on her first combat mission, she was sunk on May 27, 1941, with all but about 115 of her 2,200-man crew aboard.

Last week the Bismarck's hulk was discovered some 600 miles west of the Brittany port of Brest by Robert Ballard, the undersea explorer who in 1986 located the wreck of the passenger liner Titanic. As in the search for the Titanic, Ballard, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, used the unmanned submersible Argo in his Bismarck quest. According to Ballard, the battleship, which lies 15,000 ft. below the surface, is intact, upright and "in an excellent state of preservation" -- a remarkable fact considering that more than 300 shells and torpedoes were fired into the Bismarck by its Royal Navy attackers. Ballard says he does not plan to salvage the Bismarck. Last week he refused to provide the exact coordinates of the wreck's location, declaring that he wishes the sunken vessel to remain inviolate.