Sinking of the Bismark

[She-Wolf]

Hello all, just wanted to share with you, and ask what you think.
We were channel-hopping on the tv last night and came across a documentary on the sinking of the Bismark, so watched that. It was interesting, in an awful sort of way but I felt really upset at the end of it and it left me with two questions. The first question I think I have found the answer to on Wiki.

The question was 'why did the British ships keep attacking the Bismark even when it was clear that she could not fire back and was defeated?' It seemed unnecessary and I would have thought it would have been a greater feather in the cap of the Royal Navy if they could have brought the ship back to the UK, were that possible.

The answer seems to be that until Bismark lowered her flag, or it was clearly seen that her crew were abandoning her, hostilities had to continue - one of the protocols of war I suppose.

The second question was to do with why the two British ships tasked with rescuing the German sailors from the sea suddenly stopped and steamed away leaving a couple of hundred men ( one source puts it nearer to 800 men) to die in the freezing water (only four survived and were rescued by their own side some time later it seems). I understand that the British ships thought they had seen a U-boat and decided it was prudent to retire for the safety of their own men - but did they really think a U-boat would attack the ships that were saving German lives? And why would the U-boat - if it was really there, show itself if it had intended to attack? Perhaps the master of the U-boat was actually intending to join in the rescue as well. However, as the abandoned men did not get immediately picked up by any U-boat once the ships had left, I suspect there was no U-boat until the one that came by later when only four men were still alive.
I found it deeply upsetting, and I guess the British sailors would have felt really bad about it.
One of the German survivors rescued by HMS Dorsetshire said that they were kindly treated by the English sailors; 'like brothers' or some similar description I think he said - as indeed they were in their shared experiences of being a sailor in wartime.